“And it bubbles, and seethes, and hisses, and roars, As when fire is with water commixed and comblending, And a hell-molten surf thunders wild on its shores, While a red-tumbling flood from its caverns outpours, Hurling hills from their place, and the mountains downrending, So the chaos eternal Born of fury infernal, Boils and belches and rumbles, unreined and unending.” It is an axiom that there are three misstatements in the popular description of a crab: “A fish, of a red color, that runs backward.” _Ques._ What is a volcano? _Ans._ A volcano is a burning mountain, from the summit of which issue smoke and flames. (_Old Geography._) The writer remembers the surprise he felt when a lad of nine, full of childish confidence in the infallibility of text-book misinformation, on reading in Prescott’s “Conquest in Mexico” that Cortez obtained sulphur to replenish his stock of powder by lowering one of his soldiers into the crater of Popocatepetl. He wondered how so reputable a historian as Prescott had been induced to credit such an extravagant “yarn” on the part of the Spanish chronicler. To his youthful fancy, fired by the teachings of primary geographies, a volcano was a sort of chimney to a titanic iron furnace in full blast; indeed, he would have supposed it safer to descend into an iron furnace than into the crater. He speculated long on the matter, and wondered if fire-proof dresses were known in those days. No small part of the non-traveling public has similar misconceptions of the character of volcanoes; and to obtain the truth it is not so necessary to learn as to unlearn. The description quoted from the old text-book is false in every particular. The mountain can not be said to be burning any more than melted lead. Nor does anything that answers to either smoke or flame issue from it. Be it known to all, that the greatest portion of the surface of an active crater is usually covered with a solid crust, in which there may be a small fiery lake, or inner secondary cone or crater. Into many craters it is possible therefore to descend: and into one volcano of the Mediterranean Sea an enterprising Scotch firm have long had quite remunerative chemical works. The name is taken from one of the Lipari Islands--a small group near Sicily--which was known to the ancients as Vulcano. When the Romans imported the Grecian god, Hephaistos, to be their chief blacksmith, they assigned him Vulcano as his forge, and rechristened the lame old fellow with the adjective appellation of Vulcanus.