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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume V, Issue 195, 19 August 1870, Page 2

Tongariro. — We clip the following from the Melbourne Daily Telegraph : — *• Tongariro, the one active volcano we have in the Australias, in now in eruption belching forth its volumes of smoke, ejecting its streams of lava, and startling by its explosive peals, town and hamlets at distances where the roar of the artillery of a hundred Waterloos would be unheard. So far do " world's earthquakes," to take the Poet Laureate's description, fall below the faint throes of the imprisoned forces of nature. Were such an eruption to occur in Italy or Sicily, a thousand accounts would be poured on the Press. Of Tongariro we shall hear nothing. The natives shun the moutain in fear- the foot of white man has only once trod its summit; and now. with the King tribes, who decline to receive Europeans, occupying the regions to the north, and Te Kooti in arms to the south, the approach of any party of scientific observers is impossible. But what a negative Tongariro gives to the current theory philosophy, that the 1 access of sea wate. io the molten interior of the earth produces these outbursts, not of steam, but of liquid rock and sulphureous fumes. Tongariro is placed by nature as far from the seaboard as is possible in ocean-encompassed New Zealand . To fulfil the theory of science, it should be placed anywhere but the place it occupies. Thus the lofty inland mount, crowned with fire, standing like a giant on the plain, side by side with Rua Paha, a brother bound in eternal ice, far removed from sea and water, is a rebuke to those who worship and fall down before the decrees of science. Wherever infallibility may be, it is not in the dictum of the men who laugh at inspiration. Tested hy an occurrence like this eruption, the vaunted knowledge of the 19th century, which accounts for the heaven and the j earth, and all that in them is, is — nothing-