a few of the incidents of the great catastrophe. Who
can conceive, much less tell of, those terrible details of sudden death
and disaster to thousands of human beings, resulting from an eruption
which destroyed towns like Telok Betong, Anjer, Tyringin, etcetera,
besides numerous villages and hamlets on the shores of Java and Sumatra,
and caused the destruction of more than 36,000 souls?

But it is to results of a very different kind, and on a much more
extended scale, that we must turn if we would properly estimate the
magnitude, the wide-spreading and far-reaching influences, and the
extraordinary character, of the Krakatoa outburst of 1883.

In the first place, it is a fact, testified to by some of the best-known
men of science, that the shock of the explosion extended _appreciably_
right round the world, and seventeen miles, (some say even higher!) up
into the heavens.

Mr Verbeek, in his treatise on this subject, estimates that a cubic
mile of Krakatoa was propelled in the form of the finest dust into the
higher regions of the atmosphere--probably about thirty miles! The dust
thus sent into the sky was of "ultra-microscopic fineness," and it
travelled round and round the world in a westerly direction, producing
those extraordinary sunsets and gorgeous effects and afterglows which
became visible in the British Isles in the month of November following
the eruption; and the mighty waves which caused such destruction in the
vicinity of Sunda Straits travelled--not once, but at least--six times
round the globe, as was proved by trustworthy and independent
observations of tide-gauges and barometers made and recorded at the same
time in nearly all lands--including our own.

Other volcanoes, it is said by those who have a right to speak in regard
to such matters, have ejected more "stuff," but not one has equalled
Krakatoa in the intensity of its explosions, the appalling results of
the sea-waves, the wonderful effects in the sky, and the almost
miraculous nature of the sounds.

Seated on a log under a palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning
of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy
when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands. He was
a somewhat delicate son of the sea. Want of self-restraint was his
complaint--leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which
terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in
general. He was smoking-