Pélé's Hair (Volcanic Glass-fibre).

Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 27, 1894, Page 664

5. “Pélé's Hair (Volcanic Glass-fibre),” by Sir J. Hector. The sample exhibited by Sir J. Hector was forwarded by the Customs Department, and was taken from a box that was cast up on the north-west side of Portland Island. The box was found by Mr. C. H. O. Robson, the lighthouse-keeper, on the 9th September. It was strongly made of 2in. pitch-pine boards, without any marks. It contained a mass of the fibrous variety of volcanic glass known as Pélé's hair, packed in charcoal, in which were a charred cotton-reel and fragments of bamboo. Pélé is the Hawaiian name for the goddess that presides over Kilauea, the great volcano of the Sandwich Islands. The hair is formed by the action of the wind on the jets of very fluid lava or volcanic glass, which it blows to leeward in delicate films, each weighted by a little spherical globule of the glass. The films accumulate to leeward of the pool in great masses, like mown grass, and lie all pointing in the same direction.