Pele's Hair

Abstract

I HAVE read with great interest Mr. Moseley's description of Pele's Hair in NATURE (vol. xv., p. 547), since it furnishes information which I was most anxious to obtain. It seemed to me extremely probable that the analogy between Pele's Hair and the artificial furnace products would not be confined to the long fibres, and I did my best to ascertain whether irregular glassy spherules occurred along with the natural products. I was unable to obtain specimens for examination, but paid a visit to my friend Mr. J. G. Sawkins, F.G.S., who had explored the crater and collected the hair, in order to ask him whether he had ever noticed the pear-shaped spherules. He told me that he had never seen anything but the glassy fibres. I must say that I felt very much inclined to believe that the specimens usually collected are the material which has been blown some distance by the wind, consisting of the fibres from which most of the spherules have been broken. Mr. Moseley's letter in NATURE, and another which he has kindly addressed to me, make me believe that the analogy between the artificial and natural products is more complete than I was able to ascertain before Mr. Moseley's observations were published. In conclusion I would say that these facts in no way invalidate my arguments in respect to meteorites. They merely show that in certain cases the glassy volcanic spray, like melted furnace-slag, can to some extent collect into more or less imperfect spherules, so far analogous to those in meteorites as to indicate how those remarkable bodies were formed, but these spherules are accompanied by many fibres, which I have never yet seen in meteorites. This difference appears manifestly to depend on the difference in the temperature of the space into which the glassy spray was thrown. If the temperature of the air in the crater of Kilauea were equal to that of the melting point of the lava, we should almost certainly find, as in meteorites, many spherules and no hairs.