of country with lava, many substances might be
found amongst them, not much changed from
their original state—that is, the state in which they
were before their last disturbance—not meaning
that of their primitive state, as parts of the original
crust of the globe, when they were granite,
syenite, or crystallized compounds, but when
they were in beds of basalt, or any beds into
which granite, &c., could have been changed by
heat under pressure, and without contact with the
atmosphere. I picked up myself, in a gulley of
one of these hills, specimens which I have now
lost, bnt which I well remember struck me at the
time as very like jasper and chert.
“ 1 on will see, from the drawings, how completely
basaltic the whole line of the coast is under
the 1 okul. It is absurd to suppose that ivhen the
lavas of the mountain reached the sea they cooled
themselves into miles of such a regular columnar
form. That lava in cooling has a tendency to become
columnar is certainly a fact. We find it in
colnnins often in Iceland in its very streams, but
they are strange, irregular masses.
In another letter he says :—
The observations I and my companions made
on the basaltic lavas are very imperfect, and they
have been only slightly noticed by other travellers.
I doubt whether the most curious are
accessible by land, unless by a seagull-catcher, and
a very calm day is wanting for a good examination
by sea. We had a calm day for it, and rowed into
the caves, one of which is as grand as, and much
more curious than, Fingal’s Cave, from the twisting
of the columns, and a hole in the roof through
which you can see the mountain above it,'—a conical
outrigger of the great Yokul. The existence of a
regular stratum of columnar basalt at the base of
volcanoes, is a phenomenon which wants explanation.
You want the volcano at the Giant’s Causeway,
and the Hebrides, the Feroe Islands and
D u n b a r; but you have basalts and the volcano
together at Hitna, the Drizzi near Catania being
the most perfect columns I ever saw—not having
seen the Giants’ Causeway, which I suppose are
the most perfect. I apprehend the basalts over
which you have seen volcanoes to have been a
formation below the sea before the volcanoes broke
forth, and to have been heaved up without any
great disturbance of their parts.”
The following is an extract from Mr. Wright’s
Jo u rn a l:—
Ju ly Util, 1789.
“ We anchored in Stappen Bay at 6 p. m. This
is hy no means a safe place, if any wind bnt our
present one was to blow. Mr. Stanley therefore
desired that those Avho wished to ascend the hill
should set out with him this very night. I embraced