- 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
volcanic action. Timor itself consists of ancient stratified
rocks, but is said to have one volcano near its centre.
Going northward, Amboyna, a part of Bouru, and the west end of
Ceram, the north part of Gilolo, and all the small islands around
it, the northern extremity of Celebes, and the islands of Sian
and Sang-air, are wholly volcanic. The Philippine Archipelago
contains many active and extinct volcanoes, and has probably been
reduced to its present fragmentary condition by subsidences
attending on volcanic action.
All along this great line of volcanoes are to be found more or
less palpable signs of upheaval and depression of land. The range
of islands south of Sumatra, a part of the south coast of Java
and of the islands east of it, the west and east end of Timor,
portions of all the Moluccas, the Ke and Aru Islands, Waigiou,
and the whole south and east of Gilolo, consist in a great
measure of upraised coral-rock, exactly corresponding to that now
forming in the adjacent seas.
