Mt. Rainier in Washington is plainly visible from Puget Sound. It is a most magnificent mountain. The summit has a bowl-shaped crater, of an almost perfectly circular form. The inside of the crater, when last ascended, was filled to within thirty or thirty-five feet of its rim with ice and snow. There was, however, evidences of heat, since numerous jets of steam were seen issuing from its interior rim. Mt. Baker, Washington, is the northernmost of the volcanoes of the Cascade Mountains, south of the boundary line between the United States and Canada. But little is known of this mountain. The summit appears as a conical peak from Puget Sound, so that its form would seem to show that it is of volcanic origin. According to Gibbs, officers of the Hudson Bay Company, as well as the Indians, declared that Mt. Baker was in eruption in 1843, when it broke out at the same time as Mt. St. Helen's, covering the country with ashes. There are but few volcanoes in the Rocky Mountains which extend from north to south through the United States at a considerable distance to the east of the Sierra Nevadas and Cascade Ranges. The Spanish Peaks, situated in the southeastern part of Colorado about sixty miles south of Pueblo, are the remains of ancient volcanoes. Two of the most prominent of these peaks rise from 12,720 to 13,620 feet above the sea. We shall make no effort to attempt to describe the volcanic mountains that may exist in those portions of the Rocky Mountain Ranges or the Cascade Range lying in Canada. Comparatively little is known of them, but inasmuch as volcanic activity has been manifested in Alaska, it would seem highly improbable, as Russell remarks, that volcanoes should suddenly cease at the northern boundaries of the United States and then begin again at the most southern part of Alaska. It will be sufficient to say that Mt. Edgecome, situated on an island in the neighborhood of Sitka, is of volcanic origin, and that the Aleutian Islands, beginning at Alaska on the east at the head of Cook's Inlet, extend westward through the Peninsula of Alaska to the Peninsula of Kamtschatka for a distance of nearly 1,600 miles. This belt, which is called by Russell "the Aleutian Volcanic Belt," contains numerous volcanoes that are known to have been active in historical times. Mt. Wrangell, on the Copper River, 200 miles northeast of the head of Cook's Inlet, is a lofty volcanic mountain that is said to have been in eruption in 1819, and at the time of last report was still throwing out columns of steam. While much remains to be ascertained about the volcanoes of the Aleutian Islands, it would appear that there are active volcanoes on twenty-five of these islands, on which some forty-eight craters have been found. Eruptions are common in the district. CHAPTER XI THE CATASTROPHE OF MARTINIQUE AND THE VOLCANIC ISLANDS OF THE LESSER ANTILLES