But some of the most remarkable examples are to be met with in the Spice Islands, or Moluccas. The pointed and conical mountains, which characterize this group of islands, exhibit great fertility. Nothing can surpass the richness of vegetation with which their sides are covered, nor the balmy healthfulness of the breezes that encircle round them, to temper the heats of the sultry zone. But the nature of these mountains is closely connected with volcanic action; so that, in fearful apprehension, we might look at each one of these beautiful peaks, as if it were destined one day to be torn from its station and thrown into the sea. “I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and roll thee down from the rocks, and will make thee a burnt mountain,” was one of the Divine denunciations against Babylon, Jer. li. 25. Judgment has not thus fallen on Ternate, one of the most lovely of the cluster just adverted to; but the top of the highest rock has been torn off, and hurled from a height of five or six thousand feet, into the sea. A huge gap was left behind, which seemed to a traveller when standing on the edge, like a deep valley, or ravine, betwixt two mountains. As the portion rent away in this tremendous struggle was split into fragments of various sizes, there is, besides, a vast pile at the water’s edge, a road, or causeway, strewed with half-vitrified pieces of rock and cinders, from the margin of the rift to the declivity of the mountain; so that the island, so lovely under other aspects, presents on this side a fearful scene of desolation. What a striking comment on the words, “I will make thee a burnt mountain;”--I will tear off thy summit, shiver it into ten thousand pieces, and therewith overwhelm and destroy the natural verdure of thy sides, which once looked so goodly and so fair! Some time in March, 1839, another eruption took place at Ternate; so that, long before these ejected matters could yield to the decomposing action of the atmosphere, and afford a soil for vegetable growth, another layer, of equally forlorn and broken kind, was scattered over them. In connexion with these astounding phenomena, it may be remarked that an apparatus has recently been contrived called the fire-annihilator, the origin of which is not a little curious. It is said that the inventor observed that the smoke hovering over a burning mountain diminished its fury, and that, on analysing it and combining similar elements, he discovered the means of extinguishing fires, and thus of arresting at the outset what might otherwise prove a tremendous calamity.