Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/341

 must be immense. During an eruption of Mount Cosiguiana, a volcano in the Gulf of Fonseca, on the shores of the Pacific, ashes fell as far as Truxillo, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; also on board a ship at the time some 1200 miles westward of the volcano; and four days after the eruption, at Kingston, in Jamaica, 700 miles eastward from it, having travelled there by an upper current of west wind, at the rate of 170 miles a day. For about thirty miles to the south of this volcano, ashes covered the ground three yards and a half deep; and thousands of cattle, wild animals, and birds, perished under them.

One of the most curious productions of a volcano is mud. The aqueous vapour emitted by the crater being condensed by the cold atmosphere, heavy rains are produced, which, falling upon the volcanic dust on the sides of the mountain, form a current of mud, generally called aqueous lava, which is more dreaded by those dwelling in the vicinity of a volcano than a stream of melted lava. But, after all, as this muddy stream is not actually ejected from the crater, but simply formed on the surface of volcanoes by the action of water upon the erupted matter, the term "mud volcano" is not exactly applicable in such cases.

However, in some volcanic districts mud is occasionally found to ooze from the ground, and there are also, in different parts of the globe, real mud volcanoes, as for instance, the mud volcano of