Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 126 of 777 - First - Home
(Vom Granite des
Riesengebirges, 1813.) and the diabases and amygdaloids in the
transition mountains, shall have been carefully studied;
When the
texture of the masses shall have been subjected to a kind of
mechanical analysis, and the hornblendes better distinguished from the
pyroxenes,* (* The grunsteins or diabases of the Fichtelgebirge, in
Franconia, which belong to the transition-slate, sometimes contain
pyroxenes.) and the grunsteins from the dolerites; a great number of
phenomena which now appear isolated and obscure, will be ranged under
general laws. The phonolite and other rocks of igneous origin at
Parapara are so much the more interesting, as they indicate ancient
eruptions in a granite zone; as they belong to the shore of the basin
of the steppes, as the basalts of Harutsh belong to the shore of the
desert of Sahara; and lastly, as they are the only rocks of the kind
we observed in the mountains of the Capitania-General of Caracas,
which are also destitute of trachytes or trap-porphyry, basalts, and
volcanic productions.* (* From the Rio Negro to the coasts of Cumana
and Caracas, to the east of the mountains of Merida, which we did not
visit.)
The southern declivity of the western chain is tolerably steep; the
steppes, according to my barometrical measurements, being a thousand
feet lower than the bottom of the basin of Aragua. From the extensive
table-land of the Villa de Cura we descended towards the banks of the
Rio Tucutunemo, which has hollowed for itself, in a serpentine rock, a
longitudinal valley running from east to west, at nearly the same
level as La Victoria.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 126 of 777
Words from 33973 to 34244
of 211397
