The lava-stream caves of AEtna are not only interesting because of their peculiarities of form, which we shall not undertake to describe, but also for the reason that they help us to account for a very peculiar feature in the history of the great cone. On the slopes of the volcano, below the upper cindery portion, there are several hundred lesser cones, varying from a few score to seven hundred feet in height. Each of these has its appropriate crater, and has evidently been the seat of one or more eruptions. As the greater part of these cones are ancient, many of them being almost effaced by the rain or buried beneath the ejections which have surrounded their bases since the time they were formed, we are led to believe that many thousands of them have been formed during the history of the volcano. The history of these subsidiary cones appears to be connected with the lava caves noted above. These caverns, owing to the irregularities of their form, contain water. They are, in fact, natural cisterns, where the abundant rainfall of the mountain finds here and there storage. When, during the throes of an eruption, dikes such as we know often to penetrate the mountain, are riven outward from the crater through the mass of the cone, and filled with lava, the heated rock must often come in contact with these masses of buried water. The result of this would inevitably be the local generation of steam at a high temperature, which would force its way out in a brief but vigorous eruption, such as has been observed to take place when these peripheral volcanoes are formed. Sometimes it has happened that after the explosion the lava has found its way in a stream from the fissure thus opened. That this explanation is sufficient is in a measure shown by observations on certain effects of lava flows from Vesuvius. The writer was informed by a very judicious observer, a resident of Naples, who had interested himself in the phenomena of that volcano, that the lava streams when they penetrated a cistern, such as they often encounter in passing over villages or farmsteads, vaporized the water, and gave rise, through the action of the steam, to small temporary cones, which, though generally washed away by the further flow of the liquid rock, are essentially like those which we find on AEtna. Such subsidiary, or, as they are sometimes called, parasitic cones, are known about other volcanoes, but nowhere are they so characteristic as on the flanks of that wonderful volcano.