A VOLCANO is a mountain commonly lofty and broad at the base, with an opening at the top called the crater, from which issue smoke, fire, and sulphur, and great quantities of melted lava. Before an eruption, the smoke increases, rises to a great height, and appears broken with forked lightning. The mountain throws out immense quantities of ashes for thirty or forty miles around, and large numbers of red hot stones. The sky becomes dark and lurid, thunder roaring, and lightning flashing, the trembling and subterranean growling of the earth, give warning that a crisis is near, when the lava boiling over the top, or bursting

through the sides, rolls down, overwhelming everything.

In 1774, the flames of Cotopaxi, a mountain in South America, near eighteen thousand feet high, rose three thousand feet above the crater, and the roaring was heard six hundred miles. Volcanoes appear in lines half around the

earth.

There are about three hundred on the continents and islands.

The tremendous effects of volcanic action may be judged by the account of an eruption. of Cosiguina in Guatimala, near the Pacific ocean, in 1835. Ashes fell on the Island of Jamaica, distant six hundred miles eastward, and on the deck of a ship twelve hundred miles westward.

Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, in Italy, and Mount Etna, in the Island of Sicily, are best known; and the history of their terrific eruptions at different periods is recorded.

The agencies of internal fires have been great on the earth, and every country, when carefully examined, bears marks of the facts. The first cut gives an idea of a volcano, reaching down to the melted mass below all solid rock. The second cut is the representation of an extinct volcano in France, and such are found in different parts of the earth.