in enormous quantity, floated in the air for months,
giving a dusky hue to the skies of Europe, which led the common people
and many of the learned to fear that the wrath of God was upon them,
and that the day of judgment was at hand. Even the poet Cowper, a man
of high culture and education, shared in this unreasonable view.

The lava flow in this eruption filled one of the considerable valleys
of the island, drying up the river, and inundating the plains on
either side. Estimates which have been made as to the volume of this
flow appear to indicate that it may have amounted to more than the
bulk of the Mont Blanc.

This great eruption, by the direct effect of the calamity, and by the
famine due to the ravaging of the fields and the frightening of the
fish from the shores which it induced, destroyed nearly one fifth of
the Icelandic people. It is, in fact, to be remembered as one of the
three or four most calamitous eruptions of which we have any account,
and, from the point of view of lava flow, the greatest in history.

Just a hundred years after the great Skaptar eruption, which darkened
the skies of Europe, the island of Krakatoa, an isle formed by a small
volcano in the straits of Java, was the seat of a vapour explosion
which from its intensity is not only unparalleled, but almost
unapproached in all accounts of such disturbances. Krakatoa had long
been recognised as a volcanic isle; it is doubtful, however, if it had
ever been seen in eruption during the three centuries or more since
European ships began to sail by it until the month of May of the year
above mentioned. Then an outbreak of what may be called ordinary
violence took place, which after a few days so far ceased that
observers landed and took account of the changes which the convulsion
had brought about. For about three months there were no further signs
of activity, but on the 29th of August a succession of vast explosions
took place, which blew away a great part of the island, forming in its
place a submarine crater two or three miles in diameter, creating
world-wide disturbances of sea and air. The sounds of the outbreak
were heard at a distance of sixteen hundred miles away. The waves of
the air attendant on the explosion ran round the earth at least once,
as was distinctly indicated by the self-recording barometers; it is
possible, indeed, that, crossing each other in their east and west
courses, these atmospheric tides twice girdled the sphere