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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Considering Rocks According To The Succession Of Eras, We Find That
Primitive Formations Exhibit Very Few Caverns.
The great cavities
which are observed in the oldest granite, and which are called
fours (ovens) in Switzerland and in the south of France, when they
are lined with rock crystals, arise most frequently from the union
of several contemporaneous veins of quartz,* (* Gleichzeitige
Trummer.
To these stone veins which appear to be of the same age as
the rock, belong the veins of talc and asbestos in serpentine, and
those of quartz traversing schist (Thonschiefer). Jameson on
Contemporaneous Veins, in the Mem. of the Wernerian Soc.) of
feldspar, or of fine-grained granite. The gneiss presents, though
more seldom, the same phenomenon; and near Wunsiedel,* (* In
Franconia, south-east of Luchsburg.) at the Fichtelgebirge, I had
an opportunity of examining crystal fours of two or three feet
diameter, in a part of the rock not traversed by veins. We are
ignorant of the extent of the cavities which subterranean fires and
volcanic agitations may have produced in the bowels of the earth in
those primitive rocks, which, containing considerable quantities of
amphibole, mica, garnet, magnetic iron-stone, and red schorl
(titanite), appear to be anterior to granite. We find some
fragments of these rocks among the matters ejected by volcanoes.
The cavities can be considered only as partial and local phenomena;
and their existence is scarcely any contradiction to the notions we
have acquired from the experiments of Maskelyne and Cavendish on
the mean density of the earth.
In the primitive mountains open to our researches, real grottoes,
those which have some extent, belong only to calcareous formations,
such as the carbonate or sulphate of lime. The solubility of these
substances appears to have favoured the action of the subterranean
waters for ages. The primitive limestone presents spacious caverns
as well as transition limestone,* and that which is exclusively
called secondary. (* In the primitive limestone are found the
Kuetzel-loch, near Kaufungen in Silesia, and probably several
caverns in the islands of the Archipelago. In the transition
limestone we remark the caverns of Elbingerode, of Rubeland, and of
Scharzfeld, in the Hartz; those of the Salzfluhe in the Grisons;
and, according to Mr. Greenough, that of Torbay in Devonshire.) If
these caverns be less frequent in the first, it is because this
stone forms in general only layers subordinate to the mica-slate,*
(* Sometimes to gneiss, as at the Simplon, between Dovredo and
Crevola.) and not a particular system of mountains, into which the
waters may filter, and circulate to great distances. The erosions
occasioned by this element depend not only on its quantity, but
also on the length of time during which it remains, the velocity it
acquires by its fall, and the degree of solubility of the rock. I
have observed in general, that the waters act more easily on the
carbonates and the sulphates of lime of secondary mountains than on
the transition limestones, which have a considerable mixture of
silex and carbon.
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