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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They Act In
The Economy Of Nature As Vast Reservoirs Of Water And Of Elastic
Fluids.
The gypseous caverns glitter with crystallized selenites.
Vitreous
crystallized plates of brown and yellow stand out on a striated
ground composed of layers of alabaster and fetid limestone. The
calcareous grottoes have a more uniform tint. They are more
beautiful, and richer in stalactites, in proportion as they are
narrower, and the circulation of air is less free. By being
spacious, and accessible to air, the cavern of Caripe is almost
destitute of those incrustations, the imitative forms of which are
in other countries objects of popular curiosity. I also sought in
vain for subterranean plants, those cryptogamia of the family of
the Usneaceae, which we sometimes find fixed on the stalactites,
like ivy on walls, when we penetrate for the first time into a
lateral grotto.* (* Lichen tophicola was discovered when the
beautiful cavern of Rosenmuller in Franconia was first opened. The
cavity containing the lichen was found closed on all sides by
enormous masses of stalactite.)
The caverns in mountains of gypsum often contain mephitic
emanations and deleterious gases. It is not the sulphate of lime
that acts on the atmospheric air, but the clay slightly mixed with
carbon, and the fetid limestone, so often mingled with the gypsum.
We cannot yet decide, whether the swinestone acts as a
hydrosulphuret, or by means of a bituminous principle.* (* That
description of fetid limestone called by the German mineralogists
stinkstein is always of a blackish brown colour.
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