The Malay Archipelago - Alfred Russell Wallace

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: They are about forty-five in number, and many of them exhibit most beautiful examples of the volcanic cone on a large scale, single or double, with entire or truncated summits, and averaging 10,000 feet high. It is now well ascertained that almost all volcano.es have been slowly built up by the accumulation of matter --mud, ashes, and lava--ejected by themselves. The openings or craters, however, frequently shift their position; so that a country may be covered with a more or less irregular series of hills in chains and masses, only here and there rising into lofty cones, and yet the whole may be produced by true volcanic action. In this manner the greater part of Java has been formed. There has been some elevation, especially on the south coast, where extensive cliffs of coral limestone are found; and there may be a substratum of older stratified rocks; but still essentially Java is volcanic; and that noble and fertile island--the very garden of the East, and perhaps upon the whole the richest, the best cultivated, and the best governed tropical island in the world -- owes its very existence to the same intense volcanic activity which still occasionally devastates its surface. The great island of Sumatra exhibits in proportion to its extent a much smaller number of volcanoes, and a considerable portion of it has probably a non-volcanic origin. To the eastward, the long string of islands from Java, passing by the north of Timor and away to Banda, are probably all due to volcanic action. Timor itself consists of ancient stratified rocks, but is said to have one volcano near its centre. Going northward, Amboyna, a part of Bouru, and the west end of Ceram, the north part of Gilolo, and all the small islands around it, the northern extremity of Celebes, and the islands of Sia...