in Iceland, in 1783, when two enormous lava streams, one 15 miles wide and over 100 ft. deep and the other scarcely inferior, flowed, the first, 50 miles and the other 40, till they reached the sea, pouring a flood of white hot lava into the ocean, destroying everything in their paths and killing in the waters of the ocean the fish, the mainstay of the inhabitants, who were reduced by the disaster, directly or indirectly, to less than five-sixths of their former strength; and third to that of Galungung, in 1822, which devastated such an immense area in Java; but all the eruptions known besides were as mere child’s play to the terrible one of Krakatoa in 1883.

If the reader will examine the map of the East Indies he will find represented in the straits of Sunda, which lie between Sumatra and Java, the little island of Krakatoa.  In maps made before 1883 he will hunt in vain for the name, for like Bull Run before 1861, it was then unknown to fame, though navigators who passed through the straits knew it as a beautiful tropical isle, with an extinct volcanic cone in the center.  In the beginning of 1883, however, the little well behaved island showed symptoms of wrath that boded no good to the larger islands in the vicinity.  Noted for the fine fruits with which it abounded, it was a famous picnic ground for towns and cities even 100 miles away, and when the subterranean rumblings and mutterings of wrath became conspicuous the people of the capital of Java, Batavia, put a steamboat into requisition and visited the island in large numbers.  For a time the island was constantly in a slight tremor, and the subterranean roar was like the continued but distant mutterings of thunder, but the crisis was reached August 23, at 10 o’clock A.M.  It was a beautiful Sunday morning and the waters of the straits of Sunda were like that sea of glass, as clear as crystal, of which John in his apocalyptic vision speaks.  The beauty that morning was enhanced by the extraordinary transparency of the tropical air, for distant mountain ranges seemed so near that it seemed possible to strike them with a stone cast from the hand.  Only the mysterious rumblings and mutterings of the pent up forces beneath the island disturbed the breathless calm and silence that lay on nature—­the calm before the terrible storm—­the mightiest, the most awful on record!  It burst forth!  Sudden night snatched away day from the eyes of the terrified beholders on the mainland, but the vivid play of lightnings around the ascending column of dust penetrated even the deep obscurity to a distance of 80 miles.  This awful darkness stretched within a circle whose diameter was 400 miles, while more or less darkness reigned within a circle with a diameter three times as great.  Within this latter area dust fell like snow from the sky, breaking off limbs of trees by its weight miles distant, while in Batavia, 100 miles away from the scene of the disaster, it fell to the depth of several inches.  The explosions