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 Only By
Decomposition That It Becomes White, After Having Acted On The
Surrounding Air.
The stinkstein which is of secondary formation,
must not be confounded with a very white primitive granular
limestone of the island of Thasos, which emits, when scraped, a
smell of sulphuretted hydrogen.
This marble is coarser grained than
Carrara (Marmor lunense). It was frequently employed by the Grecian
sculptors, and I often picked up fragments of it at the Villa
Adriani, near Rome.) Its property of absorbing oxygen gas is known
to all the miners of Thuringia. It is the same as the action of the
carburetted clay of the gypseous grottoes, and of the great
chambers (sinkwerke) dug in mines of fossil salt which are worked
by the introduction of fresh water. The caverns of calcareous
mountains are not exposed to those decompositions of the
atmospheric air, unless they contain bones of quadrupeds, or the
mould mixed with animal gluten and phosphate of lime, from which
arise inflammable and fetid gases.
Though we made many enquiries among the inhabitants of Caripe,
Cumanacoa, and Cariaco, we did not learn that they had ever
discovered in the cavern of Guacharo either the remains of
carnivorous animals, or those bony breccias of herbivorous animals,
which are found in the caverns of Germany and Hungary, and in the
clefts of the calcareous rocks of Gibraltar. The fossil bones of
the megatherium, of the elephant, and of the mastodon, which
travellers have brought from South America, have all been found in
the light soil of the valleys and table-lands.
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