Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 395 of 407 - First - Home
Our Guides, Less Anxious Than Ourselves To Measure The Bulk Of
Trees, Continually Pressed Us To Proceed Onward And Seek The 'gold
Mine.' This Part Of The Ravine Is Little Frequented, And Is Not
Uninteresting.
We made the following observations on the geological
constitution of the soil.
At the entrance of the Quebrada Seca we
remarked great masses of primitive saccharoidal limestone,
tolerably fine grained, of a bluish tint, and traversed by veins of
calcareous spar of dazzling whiteness. These calcareous masses must
not be confounded with the very recent depositions of tufa, or
carbonate of lime, which fill the plains of the Tuy; they form beds
of mica-slate, passing into talc-slate.* (* Talkschiefer of Werner,
without garnets or serpentine; not eurite or weisstein. It is in
the mountains of Buenavista that the gneiss manifests a tendency to
pass into eurite.) The primitive limestone often simply covers this
latter rock in concordant stratification. Very near the Hato the
talcose slate becomes entirely white, and contains small layers of
soft and unctuous graphic ampelite.* (* Zeichenschiefer.) Some
pieces, destitute of veins of quartz, are real granular plumbago,
which might be of use in the arts. The aspect of the rock is very
singular in those places where thin plates of black ampelite
alternate with thin, sinuous, and satiny plates of a talcose slate
as white as snow. It would seem as if the carbon and iron, which in
other places colour the primitive rocks, are here concentrated in
the subordinate strata.
Turning westward we reached at length the ravine of gold (Quebrada
del Oro). On examining the slope of a hill, we could hardly
recognize the vestige of a vein of quartz. The falling of the earth
caused by the rains had changed the surface of the ground, and
rendered it impossible to make any observation. Great trees were
growing in the places where the gold-washers had worked twenty
years before. It is probable that the mica-slate contains here, as
near Goldcronach in Franconia, and in Salzburgh, auriferous veins;
but how is it possible to judge whether they be worth the expense
of being wrought, or whether the ore is only in nodules, and in the
less abundance in proportion as it is rich? We made a long
herborization in a thick forest, extending beyond the Hato, and
abounding in cedrelas, browneas, and fig-trees with nymphaea
leaves. The trunks of these last are covered with very odoriferous
plants of vanilla, which in general flower only in the month of
April. We were here again struck with those ligneous excrescences,
which in the form of ridges, or ribs, augment to the height of
twenty feet above the ground, the thickness of the trunk of the
fig-trees of America. I found trees twenty-two feet and a half in
diameter near the roots. These ligneous ridges sometimes separate
from the trunk at a height of eight feet, and are transformed into
cylindrical roots two feet thick. The tree looks as if it were
supported by buttresses.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 395 of 407
Words from 205022 to 205529
of 211363