The island of Java contains more volcanoes, active and extinct,
than any other known district of equal extent. They are about
forty-five in number, and many of them exhibit most beautiful
examples of the volcanic cone on a large scale, single or double,
with entire or truncated summits, and averaging 10,000 feet high.

It is now well ascertained that almost all volcanoes have been
slowly built up by the accumulation of matter--mud, ashes, and
lava--ejected by themselves. The openings or craters, however,
frequently shift their position, so that a country may be covered
with a more or less irregular series of hills in chains and
masses, only here and there rising into lofty cones, and yet the
whole may be produced by true volcanic action. In this manner the
greater part of Java has been formed. There has been some
elevation, especially on the south coast, where extensive cliffs
of coral limestone are found; and there may be a substratum of
older stratified rocks; but still essentially Java is volcanic,
and that noble and fertile island--the very garden of the East,
and perhaps upon the whole the richest, the best cultivated, and
the best governed tropical island in the world--owes its very
existence to the same intense volcanic activity which still
occasionally devastates its surface.

The great island of Sumatra exhibits, in proportion to its
extent, a much smaller number of volcanoes, and a considerable
portion of it has probably a non-volcanic origin.

To the eastward, the long string of islands from Java, passing by
the north of Timor and away to Panda, are probably all due to