allow that the observers should be put
out by a perceptible disturbance, or their observations falsified by
one too slight to be realised by their senses. If Nature were
impertinent enough to interfere with the arrangements of science,
science must put down the mutiny of Nature. As seas had been bridged
and continents cut through, so a volcano might and must be suppressed
or extinguished. A tunnel thirty miles in length was cut from a great
lake nearly a thousand feet higher than the base of the volcano; and
through this for a quarter of a year, say some six Terrestrial months,
water was steadily poured into the subterrene cavities wherein the
eruptive forces were generated--the plutonic laboratory of the
rebellious agency. Of course previous to the adoption of this measure,
the crust in the neighbourhood had been carefully explored and tested
by various wonderfully elaborate and perfect boring instruments, and a
map or rather model of the strata for a mile below the surface, and
for a distance around the volcano which I dare not state on the faith
of my recollection alone, had been constructed on a scale, as we
should say, of twelve inches to the mile. Except for minor purposes,
for convenience of pocket carriage and the like, Martialists disdain
so poor a representation as a flat map can give of a broken surface.
On the small scale, they employ globes of spherical sections to
represent extensive portions of their world; on the large scale (from
two to twenty-four inches per mile), models of wonderfully accurate
construction. Consequently, children understand and enjoy the
geographical lesson which in European schools costs so many tears to
so little purpose. A girl of six years knows more perfectly the whole
area of the Martial globe than a German Professor that of the ancient
Peloponnesus. Eive, the dunce of our housed hold, won a Terrestrial
picture-book on which she had set her fancy by tracing on a forty-inch
globe, the first time she saw it, every detail of my journey from
Ecasfe as she had heard me relate it; and Eunane, who had never left
her Nursery, could describe beforehand any route I wished to take
between the northern and southern ice-belts. Under the guidance
afforded by the elaborate model abovementioned, all the hollows
wherein the materials of eruption were stored, and wherein the
chemical forces of Nature had been at work for ages, were thoroughly
flooded. Of course convulsion after convulsion of the