Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is
Generally Of A Smoke-Grey Colour, Earthy, And Friable; But It
Encloses More Solid Masses Of A Blackish Brown, Of A Schistose, And
Sometimes Conchoidal Fracture.
These fragments, from six to eight
inches long, have an angular form.
When they are very small, they
give the clay a porphyroidal appearance. We find disseminated in
it, as we have already observed, either in nests or in small veins,
selenite, and sometimes, though seldom, fibrous gypsum. It is
remarkable enough, that this stratum of clay, as well as the banks
of pure sal-gem and the salzthon in Europe, scarcely ever contains
shells, while the rocks adjacent exhibit them in great abundance.
Although the muriate of soda is not found visible to the eye in the
clay of Araya, we cannot doubt of its existence. It shows itself in
large crystals, if we sprinkle the mass with rain-water and expose
it to the sun. The lagoon to the east of the castle of Santiago
exhibits all the phenomena which have been observed in the salt
lakes of Siberia, described by Lepechin, Gmelin, and Pallas. This
lagoon receives, however, only the rain-waters, which filter
through the banks of clay, and unite at the lowest point of the
peninsula. While the lagoon served as a salt-work to the Spaniards
and the Dutch, it did not communicate with the sea; at present this
communication has been interrupted anew, by faggots placed at the
place where the waters of the ocean made an irruption in 1726.
After great droughts, crystallized and very pure muriate of soda,
in masses of three or four cubic feet, is still drawn from time to
time from the bottom of the lagoon. The salt waters of the lake,
exposed to the heat of the sun, evaporate at their surface; crusts
of salt, formed in a saturated solution, fall to the bottom; and by
the attraction between crystals of a similar nature and form, the
crystallized masses daily augment. It is generally observed that
the water is brackish wherever lagoons are formed in clayey ground.
It is true, that for the new salt-work near the battery of Araya,
the seawater is received into pits, as in the salt marshes of the
south of France; but in the island of Margareta, near Pampatar,
salt is manufactured by employing only fresh water, with which the
muriatiferous clay has first been lixiviated.
We must not confound the salt disseminated in these clayey soils
with that contained in the sands of the seashore, on the coasts of
Normandy. These phenomena, considered in a geognostical point of
view, have scarcely any properties in common. I have seen
muriatiferous clay at the level of the ocean at Punta Araya, and at
two thousand toises' height in the Cordilleras of New Grenada. If
in the former of these places it lies on very recent shelly
breccia, it forms, on the contrary, in Austria near Ischel, a
considerable stratum in the Alpine limestone, which, though equally
posterior to the existence of organic life on the globe, is
nevertheless of high antiquity, as is proved by the great number of
rocks with which it is covered.
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