Since antiquity, volcanoes have been associated with fire, heat, and sulphur, or linked to fiery places — the burning hearth, the blacksmith’s forge, or the underworld. Travellers returned from distant shores with tales of burning mountains, and the epithet stuck. In his dictionary of 1799, Samuel Johnson defined a volcano as ‘a burning mountain that emits flames, stones, &c’, and fire as ‘that which has the power of burning, flame, light, lustre’.
Similar analogies with fire pervade the technical language of volcanology. Rocks associated with volcanoes are
The nineteenth century marked an important transition in the understanding of the nature of combustion and fire, and of volcanoes and the interior of the earth.
John Martin, Eruption of Vesuvius from the sea, engraved by W. B. Cooke.
This article explores written and visual representations of volcanoes and volcanic activity in the long nineteenth century, with the particular perspective of writers from the non-volcanic regions of northern Europe. I show how the language of fire was used in both first-hand and fictionalized accounts of people’s interactions with volcanoes and experiences of volcanic phenomena, and how the routine and often implicit linkage of ‘fire’ with ‘combustion’, as an explanation for the deep forces at play within and beneath volcanoes, slowly changed as the formal scientific study of volcanoes developed. We will see how Vesuvius was used as a model volcano in science and literature and how, later, following devastating eruptions in Indonesia and the Caribbean, volcanoes took on a new dimension as contemporary agents of death and destruction.
There are no geologically young or active volcanoes within the British Isles, and the volcanic fields in France, Germany, and Spain have lain dormant for thousands of years.
View of the comparative heights of volcanic mountains, detail from Charles Daubeny,
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of what was known of volcanoes and their eruptions, at least in European circles, was derived from observations made on Vesuvius. By dint of its frequent eruptions and accessibility, Vesuvius was the example by which the world’s volcanoes were interpreted, its conical shape exemplifying the ‘most ordinary form of volcanoes’.
Answers to some of these questions soon came from observations and experiments, and from the emerging fields of geology and chemistry. Writing in 1794, the Scottish geologist James Hutton commented that ‘although the use of fire is brought to such perfection in the various arts of life, philosophers […] have committed a mistake […] in ascribing the appearances of burning to a cause or principle directly opposite to what is true’.
The existence of subterraneous heat is […] proved by phenomena [such as] hot-springs, volcanoes, and earthquakes. These [observations] leave no doubt of the existence of heat […] in the bowels of the earth; […] [but] at what depth […], to what extent, and with what intensity, does it act?
Earlier theories that the heat and flames in volcanoes were caused by combustion of coal, bitumen, or sulphur were hard to reconcile with the rocky nature of cooled lava.
New evidence for the intensity of the deep heat source emerged from experiments using furnaces to heat rocks.
The distinctions between light, heat, and fire were emphasized in contemporary textbooks. In
I must request you not to use the word fire when you refer to Dr Hutton’s theory: heat is a more correct expression. […] Fire in the usual sense of that word, supposes fuel in the act of burning; but we have no reason for believing that there is a fire of this description in the centre of the earth.
The origin of heat was still so obscure ‘that philosophers have not yet been able to ascertain the source of that produced by our parlour-fire’, so how much more challenging must it be to explain what it is that ‘melts the hardest rocks in the bosom of the earth?’ (Hack, pp. 113–14).
Experimental chemistry soon provided another explanation for volcanic heat. In 1808 Humphry Davy discovered sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. These highly reactive silvery metals were always found combined with oxygen at the earth’s surface. Davy reasoned that if pure forms of these metals existed deep inside the earth, contact with air or water would cause reactions that would ‘produce the effect of subterranean fire, and a product of earthy and stony matter analogous to lavas’.
Jane Marcet shared these discoveries and their wider implications with her readers. Potassium ‘has so powerful an attraction for oxygen that it will absorb it [from] any body whatever that contains it’; indeed, it bursts into flame when thrown into water. If the interior of the planet ‘is composed of a metallic mass, the surface of which only has been mineralised by the atmosphere’, this provides an explanation for volcanic activity ‘for if the bowels of the earth are the grand recesses of these new inflammable bodies, whenever water penetrates into them, combustions and explosions must take place’ (Marcet, pp. 334, 342–43).
Davy had to wait some years to test his ideas on a live volcano. In May 1814 he first climbed Vesuvius with his young assistant Michael Faraday, and by the following year had made sufficient observations of the Italian volcanoes to be convinced ‘in my guess as to the origin of Volcanoes from the action of Water on the metallic bases of the earth’.
The event which I have so much longed to witness has occurred and Vesuvius has been for some days in a state of eruption. I have already made many [experiments] on the lava at the moment that it issues from the volcanoe [
In vain, Davy looked for evidence that the lavas might be reacting when they came into contact with air, but he found none. Eventually, he concluded that while the oxidation of metals could provide a chemical cause for volcanic fires, the evidence from mines and hot springs made it ‘probable that the interior of the globe possesses a very high temperature’, and the hypothesis that the centre of the globe was hot and fluid offered a simpler solution to the phenomena of volcanic fires.
Alexander von Humboldt first reflected on the emerging theories of volcanoes in 1823. He had visited volcanoes in Europe and Latin America, and was interested in the large-scale workings of the earth. Humboldt was familiar with Davy’s chemical theory, but was more impressed by observations that deep mines were warmer than the air outside, inferring that there must be a subterranean heat source. Humboldt saw volcanic phenomena as ‘the result of a communication […] between the interior and exterior of the globe’, similar to Plato’s view of ‘volcanic fiery currents as streams flowing from the pyriphlegethon’.
The vision of volcanoes arising from the movement of heat from earth’s interior gradually became the consensus view, primarily due to the lack of evidence for the alternative.
In Continental Europe, eruptions of Vesuvius formed a vivid backdrop for travellers, writers, and artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Britain, tales of modern and ancient eruptions of both Vesuvius and Etna were well known and celebrated in firework displays and theatrical extravaganzas.
Vesuvius was an accessible mountaintop, offering a commanding view of the Bay of Naples and an opportunity to peer into the abyss.
After reawakening in 1631, Vesuvius erupted ‘obligingly frequently’,
Vesuvius in eruption, October 1822. George Poulett Scrope,
Few accounts, though, captured the effects of the most violent eruptions. One rare example that did was that of Mariana Starke. She visited Torre del Greco, at the foot of Vesuvius, in 1797. The town had been destroyed in the eruption of 1794, and her account was based on published eyewitness reports. Leading up to the eruption ‘Vesuvius had for some time ceased to vomit fire and smoke as usual; a circumstance that generally presages mischief’ (
into the shape of an immense pine […] till at length it began to incline downwards, when, from the quantity of dense matter which composed the column […] [it] fell to the ground. Torrents of flaming lava of an awefully portentous magnitude now poured down the mountain. (
In common with many accounts of Vesuvius’s explosive eruptions, Starke’s description references Pliny the Younger’s accounts of the pine tree-shaped eruption cloud in
Some of the most evocative descriptions of an eruption of lava are found in Germaine de Staël’s
The lava itself has that dingy appearance which the poets assign to the rivers of the infernal regions; it rolls on slowly like a stream of sand, blackish by day and red by night. As it approaches you hear a kind of crackling sound, which occasions the greatest fear as it is indistinct. […] Its resplendency is so intense, that for the first time the earth illuminates the sky, and gives it the appearance of continued lightning; the sky, in its turn reflects this lustre upon the water, and thus nature seems to be set in flames by this three-fold image of fire.
Later writers struggled to add much that was new to the descriptions of the visual and sensory impacts of a visit to Vesuvius. Nonetheless many accounts capture a picture of the state of the volcano at the time of the visit, and a sense of the author’s own perceptions and expectations of the wonder or horror that awaited them.
Vesuvius made a great impression on Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1818 he took the usual route to the summit — by carriage and then mule to the Old Hermitage; thence on foot. His reference point for the wonder of Vesuvius was the Alps. After the glaciers, the ‘vast stream of hardened lava […] once a sea of liquid fire’ was all in all the ‘most impressive exhibition of the energies of nature I ever saw’. By night
the effect of the fire became more beautiful. We were […] surrounded by streams and cataracts of the red and radiant fire; and in the midst, from the column of bituminous smoke shot up into the air, fell the vast masses of rock, white with the light of their intense heat, leaving behind them […] vapour trains of splendour.
Vesuvius’s frequent conflagrations often brought mention in the press, particularly in the illustrated newspapers that flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Letters capture the waxing and waning of the unsteady but continuing activity of Vesuvius through the mid-1800s. John Ruskin visited in the winter of 1841 when the volcano was ‘practically in repose’, but the lava of 1839 was still ‘red hot to the eye in daytime’, and able both to set wood on fire and roast eggs.
One response of visitors to Vesuvius during periods of calm was to suppose that earlier reports had been exaggerated. Henry Armfield, vice principal of the Theological College in Salisbury, noted in 1868 that ‘the old pictures in the scrapbooks that show Vesuvius represented by a triangle of black with an equal triangle of red nearly balanced on top of it, apex to apex, are […] creations of the purest fiction’.
Naples, illustrating the violent Vesuvius eruption of April 1906. Contemporary coloured postcard, Fabio Bicchierai.
In England, people could also enjoy the celebrated views of Vesuvius. In Leicester Square, Robert Burford created a rotunda, within which he painted a panorama of the moonlit Bay of Naples with an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, forming an immersive spectacle. The
While Vesuvius was important, it was not the only volcanic destination for travellers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, postal steamers helped to open routes for intrepid travellers eager to visit the volcanoes of Hawaii, including Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes on earth. Kilauea was familiar from the accounts of earlier expeditions,
Constance Gordon Cumming, painting of the ‘overflow of the new lake of fire in the crater of Kilauea’, based on sketches made in the field. Constance Gordon Cumming,
By the end of the nineteenth century, smouldering volcanoes around the world were magnets for tourists and travellers and the backdrop for tales of adventure, from the volcanic islands of the Lesser Antilles to the great volcanoes of the Andes, or the remote volcanoes of Asia.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Vesuvius was an outdoor laboratory for natural scientists. Visits to the erupting volcano and its extraordinarily varied mineral occurrences provided formative experiences for many, and fed such a quantity of books and papers that by 1903 the bibliography filled a report ‘of 340 quarto pages’.
Vesuvius’s value as a centre for the emerging study of volcanoes grew after 1841, with the founding of the world’s first volcano observatory by King Ferdinand. The second director of the observatory was Luigi Palmieri, a physicist with interests in atmospheric electricity and earthquakes. He took charge just in time for the
all the country around […] had assembled to look at the river of fire, and perhaps as much at the living stream of human beings flowing in from Naples. [The lava] was pent within the deep banks of a wide bed, and was flowing down, not like a fluid […] but like a mountain of coke, or at times like highly gaseous coal. It split, and crackled, and sparkled, and smoked and flamed up and ever moved on in one vast compact body. Pieces detaching themselves rolled down, leaving behind a glare so fierce that I could have imagined myself at the mouth of an iron furnace; and as every mass fell down with the noise of thunder […] the trees flamed up, and the crowds uttered shouts of admiration and regret.
Other onlookers likened the dazzling cascade of lava to a ‘glowing, flaming Niagara’.
The British geologist John Phillips had a long-standing interest in volcanoes, and made a first visit to Naples in 1868, aiming to write an ‘authentic history’ of Vesuvius, illuminated with his own sketches.
in the majority of cases it can be clearly seen that the light emanates from incandescent, but not flaming bodies. It is the light of the glowing lava […] which makes the great column of seeming flame rushing up from Vesuvius. (p. 153)
John Phillips, Eruption of Vesuvius at night, March 1868. John Phillips,
A decade later, John Judd, professor of geology in the Royal School of Mines, and author of the textbook
Now that Vesuvius lies dormant, as it has since 1944, it is perhaps difficult to fully appreciate the significance that this single mountain holds for the natural history and science of volcanoes. But in the nineteenth century Vesuvius was the most accessible erupting volcano in the world, and became a crucible for the emerging science of volcanology. The ‘imprisoned energy of Fire’ inspired many; and even though the flames proved to be largely illusory, the quest to understand the origins of volcanic heat, and of the forces that drive eruptions, greatly enriched our knowledge of volcanoes.
In the early nineteenth century volcanoes were usually represented in writing and images as examples of the sublime forces of nature. Large eruptions of both Vesuvius (in 1631, 1779, and 1794) and Etna (1669) had been dramatic, though not on the scale of eruption that had buried Pompeii under metres of ash in
News stories of deadly eruptions arrived in Britain in letters many weeks after the event, often warranting just a few lines in foreign news. The violent eruption of St Vincent in April 1812 made
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
Bulwer-Lytton’s interpretations of the sequence of events were based on sound reasoning. The contemporary interpretation was that the cemented deposits at Pompeii had been laid down by mudflows, and Bulwer-Lytton invoked fire or hot lava to explain the charring of the papyrus scrolls recovered from Herculaneum.
Two extraordinary eruptions that became known to European readers of the early nineteenth century were at Tambora, Indonesia in April 1815 and Asama, Japan in 1783. The great eruption of Tambora, one of the largest of the last five hundred years, caused widespread damage and tens of thousands of deaths — facts that were only established many years later. Stamford Raffles, then governor of Java, dispatched a team to distribute emergency supplies and to find out what had happened.
The dramatic tale of the devastating eruption of Asama volcano in 1783 first became known outside Japan in 1822 with the posthumous publication of Isaac Titsingh’s
The earthquake and eruption of Asamayama, August 1783, engraved by Joseph Constantine Stadler, a German artist based in London. [Isaac] Titsingh,
A defining moment of nineteenth-century volcanology was August 1883, which saw the culmination of the eruption of Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits. The volcano came to life in May 1883, after a long repose, and reached a dramatic conclusion in late August in an explosive eruption that destroyed much of the island of Krakatoa, and killed tens of thousands of people along the coasts of Java and Sumatra. Early phases of the eruption were captured in a photograph, later redrawn and coloured, and published in the Royal Society report of the event (
View of Krakatoa during the early stages of the eruption, 27 May 1883, drawn from a photograph. Chromolithograph by Parker and Coward.
One survivor whose story became well known was Johanna Beyerinck, a Dutch colonist. She lived on the coast of Sumatra, thirty kilometres from Krakatoa, and was badly burned during the eruption. Having escaped the tsunami that accompanied the opening stages of the eruption, she took shelter in a hut on a nearby hill. It was subsequently engulfed by hot currents of ash that had travelled across the sea from the collapsing volcano:
What I saw then! Thousands of tongues of fire lit up the surroundings. On tops of the trees I saw flames. I heard a crack, and saw a sheet of fire right next to me. The sea was not to be seen. Everything was covered in ash. I could not see my hand before me.
A few hours later, there was another eruption, and another ash cloud:
Suddenly it was pitch dark. The last thing I saw was the ash being pushed up through the cracks in the floor boards, like a fountain. I felt a heavy pressure, throwing me to the ground. Then it seemed as if the air was being sucked away and I could not breathe. (Simkin and Fiske, p. 84)
Out to sea, Captain Watson, on the British merchant ship
We heard above us and about the island a strange sound, as a mighty crackling fire, or the discharge of heavy artillery at one or two second intervals. At five, the roaring noise continued, darkness spread over the sky and a hail of pumice stone fell on us, or which many pieces were of considerable size and quite warm.
That night was one of blackness — from the continuing fall of ash — broken by incessant flashes of lightning, both in the sky, and around the island. (Simkin and Fiske, pp. 102–03)
Through the night he saw ‘chains of fire’ rising and falling in the distance, forming a ‘continual roll of balls of white fire’, phenomena caused by the movement of the electrically charged ash particles. The air was ‘hot and choking, sulphurous, with a smell as of burning cinders […]. The mast-heads and yard arms were studded with corposants and a peculiar pink flame came from fleecy clouds’ around.
News of the horror of the destruction of Krakatoa was soon followed by a sequence of remarkable sunsets, witnessed around the world. On Chelsea embankment, William Ascroft captured the lurid glow that was seen at dusk through the autumn of 1883 (
Sequence of crayon sketches of the afterglow visible from Chelsea embankment on 26 November 1883, following the eruption of Krakatoa. Through the autumn and winter of 1883–1884 William Ascroft painted over 500 images; many, like these, in quick succession.
The eruption of Krakatoa presented a contemporary vision of both the destructive nature and global reach of explosive volcanic eruptions and became a byword for disaster. However, apart from the words of the survivors and some dramatic photographs of the destruction on Java and Sumatra caused by the tsunamis, there is no visual record of the eruption itself. Just a few years later, the catalogue of volcanic disasters grew with the near simultaneous eruptions of two Caribbean volcanoes: the Soufrière of St Vincent and Mont Pelée, Martinique. These eruptions immediately attracted attention, and left a rich legacy of eyewitness accounts and imagery (Pyle, pp. 174–85).
On St Vincent, the Soufrière volcano burst back to life on 6 May 1902, after ninety years of quiet. The eruption escalated rapidly, reaching a climax the next afternoon with the descent of the ‘great black cloud […] charged with immense quantities of red-hot dust. […] It resembled a curtain hanging in folds, black, dense, solid, and well-defined.’ Eyewitnesses, caught up as this cloud ran across the sea, survived by plunging underwater: ‘It came over the water with a strong ripple and a hissing sound, due to the hot sand falling into the sea and making it steam. In a moment it was pitch dark and intensely hot and stifling.’
The breath of fire swept down upon the city and water front with all of the force that could have been given to it by […] a cannon. […] Cinders were shot into our face with stinging effect. The air was filled with flame. Involuntarily we raised our hands to protect our faces. I noticed the same gesture when I saw the bodies of the victims on shore.
These calamitous eruptions provoked a rapid humanitarian response. Relief ships were sent from as far away as New York, and emergency funds were remitted from around the world: from colonial governments, from the Lord Mayors of London and Liverpool, and from appeals and collections organized by newspapers, churches, and groups of concerned citizens.
Mont Pelée, Martinique: the ‘black cloud’ of 16 December 1902 as it reached the sea, photographed by Alfred Lacroix. Angelo Heilprin,
These observations opened new avenues in the understanding of volcanic eruption processes, with the recognition of new styles of volcanic deposit: the landscape-altering blankets of scoria, ash, or pumice, emplaced as ‘flow[s] of incandescent sand’.
During the long nineteenth century, volcanoes and their activity became familiar to new audiences in the non-volcanic lands of northern Europe. From depictions of the wonder of volcanoes in children’s books, to lurid accounts of the latest conflagrations of Vesuvius and Etna in the daily and weekly newspapers, descriptions of volcanoes used the familiar analogy of fire to bring these stories to life. Writers on natural philosophy and geology who were pondering the nature and origins of volcanoes used the same fiery analogies in their descriptions of volcanic phenomena, but came to develop new ideas on the deep causes of volcanic fire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that the earth’s interior was hot, and that the fire associated with volcanoes was both radiant — incandescent — and electrical. Nonetheless, the convenience of the analogy of fire as a description of volcanic phenomena meant that the use of terms synonymous with fire persisted in both popular and technical writings on volcanoes. The need to add colour to the greyscale visual representations of volcanoes in mass circulation newspapers, magazines, and books also ensured that, whenever the chance arose, these too would be tinted with oranges and reds. But the spectres of Krakatoa — the eruption that destroyed an island and then painted the world’s skies red — and, later, of Pelée — the eruption that destroyed a city in an instant — reminded the world of the violence of volcanic eruptions. In contrast to the tame fury of Vesuvius’s dazzling lava flows, these glowing avalanches of ash could wreak havoc in moments. The recognition of
Samuel Johnson,
See also Martin Rudwick,
Lord Byron,
See, for example, Charles Daubeny,
P. Brydone,
Humphry Davy to Michael Faraday, 10 December 1819, in
Alexander von Humboldt,
James Hutton,
James Hutton,
John Playfair,
W. E. Knowles Middleton, ‘The 1669 Eruption of Mount Etna: Francesco d’Arezzo on the Vitreous Nature of Lava’,
W. Milner,
Early experimentalists included Déodat de Dolomieu in France, Horace-Benedict de Saussure in Switzerland, and Lazzaro Spallanzani in Italy. See Young, pp. 46–49, 264–65; Sigurdsson, pp. 152–56.
James Hall, ‘Experiments on Whinstone and Lava’,
Jane Marcet,
Humphry Davy, ‘Electro-chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia’,
David Knight, ‘Chemists Get Down to Earth’, in
J. A. Paris,
Humphry Davy to Rev. E. D. Clarke, 15 June 1815, <
‘The Gas Blow Pipe, or Art of Fusion’,
Humphry Davy, ‘On the Phaenomena of Volcanoes’,
Humboldt,
Another proponent of the ‘hot fluid nucleus’ and the movements of hot rock and gas as a cause for volcanoes was George Poulett Scrope,
See, for example, Sigurdsson, pp. 221–29.
Some examples: Giovanni Battista Torré’s firework representations of Vesuvius and Etna in the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens; Charles Dibdin’s smoking volcanoes at Sadler’s Wells. See Simon Werrett,
William Hamilton,
Painters of Vesuvius included Pierre-Jacques Volaire, Jacob Philipp Hackert, Joseph Franque, Joseph Wright of Derby, Xavier della Gatta, and Giovanni Battista Lusieri. See James Hamilton,
Accessible in contrast with the Alps, for example. See Cian Duffy,
The Countess of Blessington,
Mariana Starke,
Jane Waldie,
Roy Porter,
Theodore Hook, ‘Notes on Naples’,
H. W. B., ‘Leaves from the Journal of Traveller’,
‘Mount Vesuvius’,
Catherine Wilmot,
An example of a romantic tale is Alcmaeon, ‘Il Vesuviano: A Neapolitan Tale’,
Pliny the Younger,
Erik Simpson, ‘On Corinne, or Italy’,
Mad. de Stael Holstein,
Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 22 December 1818, in
The
Lord Byron,
John Ruskin,
Charles Dickens to Thomas Mitton, 17 February 1845, in
Henry Armfield,
‘Christmas Entertainments’,
Maria Graham,
C. S. Stewart,
Isabella Bird,
C. F. Gordon Cumming,
Some examples: Edward Whymper,
Judd,
Tempest Anderson,
Leopold Pilla, ‘On the Production of Flames in Volcanoes, and the Consequences that May Be Drawn Therefrom’,
‘Foreign Correspondence’,
‘Vesuvius’,
John Phillips,
Obituary,
Martha Somerville,
Pyle, 77–79. The photograph of this eruption featured in textbooks by Judd (1881), Bonney (1899), and Edward Hull,
Luigi Palmieri,
Phillips, p. x. Books or monographs on the nineteenth-century activity of Vesuvius include those by Teodoro Monticelli (1822), John Auldjo (1832), Arcangelo Scacchi (1844), Giovanni Guarini (1855), Charles Sainte-Claire Deville (1855), Charles Justus Roth (1857), James Lobley (1868), John Phillips (1869), Luigi Palmieri (1873), and Henry Johnston-Lavis (1891).
For example, Karl Briullov,
Meilee D. Bridges, ‘“Thou Thing of Years Departed”: (En)gendering Posthumous Sublimity in Felicia Hemans’s “The Image in Lava”’,
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
Davy had earlier carried out some experiments on these scrolls, but thought they had not been burned: Humphry Davy, ‘Some Observations and Experiments on the Papyri Found in the Ruins of Herculaneum’,
Haraldur Sigurdsson, Stanford Cashdollar, and Stephen R. J. Sparks, ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79: Reconstruction from Historical and Volcanological Evidence’,
For fuller accounts, see Clive Oppenheimer,
Sophia Raffles,
Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel,
M. Titsingh,
See, for example, Tom Simkin and Richard S. Fiske,
J. W. Judd, ‘On the Volcanic Phenomena of the Eruption’, in
For example, Robert Ballantyne,
Gerard Hopkins, ‘The Remarkable Sunsets’,
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘St Telemachus’, in
Tempest Anderson and John S. Flett, ‘Report on the Eruptions of the Soufrière, in St Vincent, in 1902, and on a Visit to Montagne Pelée, in Martinique. Part I’,
Charles Morris,
Angelo Heilprin,
Alfred Lacroix,
Heilprin, p. 121; Anderson and Flett, p. 452. See also, Marjorie Hooker, ‘The Origin of the Volcanological Concept
Robert Griggs,
‘Pyr’, from the Greek, and ‘ignis’, from the Latin, are words for fire. See Jim Cole and others, ‘Pyroclastic Nomenclature in New Zealand’,