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 367 of 777 - First - Home
Recently, In The Unfortunate Expedition Of Captain
Tuckey, The English Naturalists Were Struck With The Same Appearance
In The Yellalas (Rapids And Shoals) That Obstruct The River Congo Or
Zaire.
Dr. Koenig has placed in the British Museum, beside the
syenites of the Congo, the granites of Atures, taken from a series of
rocks which were presented by M. Bonpland and myself to the
illustrious president of the Royal Society of London.
"These
fragments," says Mr. Koenig, "alike resemble meteoric stones; in both
rocks, those of the Orinoco and of Africa, the black crust is
composed, according to the analysis of Mr. Children, of the oxide of
iron and manganese." Some experiments made at Mexico, conjointly with
Senor del Rio, led me to think that the rocks of Atures, which blacken
the paper in which they are wrapped,* contain, besides oxide of
manganese, carbon, and supercarburetted iron. (* I remarked the same
phenomenon from spongy grains of platina one or two lines in length,
collected at the stream-works of Taddo, in the province of Choco.
Having been wrapped up in white paper during a journey of several
months, they left a black stain, like that of plumbago or
supercarburetted iron.) At the Orinoco, granitic masses of forty or
fifty feet thick are uniformly coated with these oxides; and, however
thin these crusts may appear, they must nevertheless contain pretty
considerable quantities of iron and manganese, since they occupy a
space of above a league square.
It must be observed that all these phenomena of coloration have
hitherto appeared in the torrid zone only, in rivers that have
periodical overflowings, of which the habitual temperature is from
twenty-four to twenty-eight centesimal degrees, and which flow, not
over gritstone or calcareous rocks, but over granite, gneiss, and
hornblende rocks.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 367 of 777
Words from 99230 to 99528
of 211397