This great eruption occurred in 1883. More than sixty thousand persons were killed. The captain of a tramp steamer, who happened to be passing in the vicinity of Krakatoa at a distance of some miles, a short time before the explosion occurred, saw a very strange disturbance in the sea in the direction of the old mountain. Taking his glass he saw a perfect Niagara of water pouring into an enormous fissure that had opened in the earth. He was struck with consternation and rightly imagining that something very serious was likely soon to happen, he put on all steam to escape, and luckily he had reached a point which enabled him to survive the effects of the awful blast when it came. The vast mass of water which had tumbled into the bowels of the earth was immediately trapped by the closing of the great fissure down which it had poured. The water was quickly converted by the intense heat into a veritable high explosive, with the result that the massive mountain was literally blown bodily skyward, and fell in huge fragments into the surrounding sea. The shock was so great that it was felt clear through the earth, and an immense tidal wave was set going which encircled the earth. The opposing portions of the great wave, meeting in the lower Atlantic, flowed up even to the coast of France. An atmospheric wave passed around the earth three times. It is estimated that the amount of volcanic mud that was discharged from the mountain during the eruption was more than the muddy Mississippi discharges into the Gulf of Mexico in two hundred years. There was so much impalpably fine volcanic dust blown into the upper atmosphere that it did not entirely settle out of the air for more than two years, which period was noted for its beautiful glowing sunsets, due to the illumination of the fine dust suspended in the upper air. As the ax is to the woodsman, so are high explosives to the engineer. With dynamite he hews down the hills, fills the valleys and tunnels the mountain-range to make a straight and even way for the locomotive. He cuts canals through the width of the land, uniting rivers and seas. Always in the van of civilization, there is heard the churn of the rock-drill and the echoing crash and roar of the dynamite blast. Also it is the huge high explosive shell that makes way for the march of modern armies, and high explosive mines and torpedoes are the terror of the underseas. All forms of dynamite are high explosives, and all high explosives may fairly be called dynamite. Smokeless gunpowder is actually but a modified form of high explosive. It is dynamite that has been chained and tamed by the chemist's cunning, so that it will burn without detonation, and thus permit the utilization of its awful energy to hurl shot and shell from war's great guns. Thus it is that dynamite in its varied forms deserves the high place with steam and electricity as one of the great triumvirs that have been the architects of the modern world.