at rest, and it was not until they had come up to them and handled them that they could detect their mistake." Mr. Dibble adds: "A blast of sulphurous gas, a shower of heated embers, or a volume of heated steam would sufficiently account for this sudden death. Some of the narrators who saw the corpses, affirm that though in no place deeply burnt, yet they were thoroughly scorched." As you will see in Chapter XI, this sudden and awful death due to highly heated air and dust particles, caused even a greater loss of life in the catastrophic eruption of Pelée, in Martinique on May 8, 1902. By reason of its situation at a lower level on the slopes of Mt. Loa, Kilauea was at one time thought to be one of the craters lower down on the slopes of Loa. This was the opinion of Professor Dana when he examined the district in 1840. Since this time the region has been more carefully studied, and Mt. Loa and Kilauea, are now generally regarded as separate and independent volcanoes, neither of which acts as a safety valve for the other. We shall not attempt in this chapter to say anything concerning the sources or places from where these great supplies of lava have been drawn. This will be left to some subsequent chapter, after we have described still other volcanoes. The outlines of mountains like Mt. Loa or Kilauea differ greatly from mountains like Vesuvius; their slopes, like the slopes of all other Hawaii volcanoes, have an inclination which does not exceed 10°. The lava streams, therefore, as they flow down the mountains, move more slowly than they would were the slopes more precipitous, as in mountains like Vesuvius. There have been many eruptions of Kilauea. That which occurred in the year 1840, was of great magnitude (see map, Fig. 6), and began in a fissure southwest of the crater. The principal eruption, however, broke out about twelve miles from the sea coast, and about twenty-five miles east of Kilauea. Here an enormous mass of lava forming a stream nearly three miles wide reached the ocean at Nanawale.