p 233
In like manner, the putrid fever, which raged seven years previously in the
mountain town of Ibarra, north of Quito, was ascribed to the ejection of
fish from the volcano of Imbaburu.*
[footnote] *[It would appear, as there is no doubt that these fishes
proceed from the mountain itself, that there must be large lakes in the
interior, which in ordinary season are out of the immediate influence of the
volcanic action. See Daubeney, op. cit., p. 488, 497.] -- Tr.
Water and mud, which flow not from the crater itself, but from the hollows
in the trachytic mass of the mountain, can not, strictly speaking, be
classed among volcanic phenomena. They are only indirectly connected with
the volcanic activity of the mountain, resembling, in that respect, the
singular meteorological process which I have designated in my earlier
writings by the term of 'volcanic storm'. The hot stream which rises from
the crater during the eruption and spreads itself in the atmosphere,
condenses into a cloud, and surrounds the column of fire and cinders which
rises to an altitude of many thousand feet. The sudden condensation of the
vapors, and, as Gay-Lussac has shown, the formation of a cloud of enormous
extent, increase the electric tension.
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