with a white siliceous stone of a close compact texture,
resembling pure white marble, which continues
down to their junction with the Huit-aa.
We had shot some plovers and curlews on our
way to this place, which we ordered to be boiled
in the basin of the Great Geyser, and they were
sufficiently cooked in the space of twenty minutes,
the temperature of the water continuing to vary
from 180° to 190° of Fahrenheit. The steam
arising from this as well as all the Geysers is sensibly,
but not very strongly, impregnated with the
smell of sulphur; and our guides told us the birds
would taste of it so strongly as not to be eatable:
but whether our appetites were sharp, or our senses
dull, we did not by any means find this to be the
case, nor could we perceive the slightest taste of
sulphur. At this time, however, I filled a bottle
with the beautiful clear water of the Geyser, which
at the moment certainly had a strong smell of sulphur
; but though firmly corked on the spot, it
had lost it altogether on my arrival in England,
nor was there the least deposite either of that or of
any other substance whatever, when submitted to
chemical tests *.
These circumstances regarding the water of the
Geyser are remarkable enough, hut not to be compared
with other strange properties of this and the
neighbouring springs, which w'ould indeed be most
wonderful, if they were only true. Thus Horrebow
* See Mr. Faraday’s Letter, p. 209.]
relates, that if some of the water of these fountains
be put into a bottle, a sympathetic motion
is immediately observable when the water of the
fountain begins to he disturbed, and it will then
boil up two or three times simultaneously with
the boiling of the water in the pipe ; but that if the
bottle be corked up the moment it is filled, no
sooner does an eruption take place than the bottle
bursts in pieces. This is something very much
akin to the sympathetic feeling discovered a few
years ago to exist in the present race of the golden
pippin apple-trees, all of which thought it right to
die when the parent trees, from which they had
been engrafted, yielded up their vegetative poweis
and became leafless trunks,—to the great discomfiture
of physiologists, and the amusement of practical
horticulturists ; but the notion took, and was
the standard theory for a time, till it was ascertained
th a t golden pippins still flourished, and that
the old ones died without the young ones caring
about the matter.
At a little distance from the Great Geyser we
observed two pools of the most beautifully clear
water I ever beheld, the surfaces scarcely disturbed
with anything like ebullition, and a thin aërial
vapour, hardly perceptible, rising just above the
water, and then dissolving into thm air. On
plunging a thermometer into one of these pools the
mercury immediately rose to 200 : they are at
least forty feet deep, for I am certain we could see
down to that depth, and for aught I know to the
Iii