Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Contains In
Subordinate Strata, Masses Of Hardened Clay Of A Blackish Blue, And
Carburetted.
These masses are fissile, very heavy, and loaded with
iron; their streak is whitish, and they produce no effervescence with
acids.
They assume at their surface, by their decomposition in the
air, a yellow colour. We seem to recognize in these argillaceous
strata a tendency either to the transition-slates, or to the
kieselschiefer (schistose jasper), which everywhere characterise the
black transition-limestones. When in fragments, they might be taken at
first sight for basalt or hornblende.* (* I had an opportunity of
examining again, with the greatest care, the rocks of San Juan, of
Chacao, of Parapara, and of Calabozo, during my stay at Mexico, where,
conjointly with M. del Rio, one of the most distinguished pupils of
the school of Freyberg, I formed a geognostical collection for the
Colegio de Mineria of New Spain.) Another white limestone, compact,
and containing some fragments of shells, backs the Morros de San Juan.
I could not see the line of junction of these two limestones, or that
of the calcareous formation and the diabasis.
The transverse valley which descends from Piedras Negras and the
village of San Juan, towards Parapara and the Llanos, is filled with
trap-rocks, displaying close affinity with the formation of green
slates, which they cover. Sometimes we seem to see serpentine,
sometimes grunstein, and sometimes dolerite and basalt. The
arrangement of these problematical masses is not less extraordinary.
Between San Juan, Malpaso, and Piedras Azules, they form strata
parallel to each other; and dipping regularly northward at an angle of
40 or 50 degrees, they cover even the green slates in concordant
stratification. Lower down, towards Parapara and Ortiz, where the
amygdaloids and phonolites are connected with the grunstein,
everything assumes a basaltic aspect. Balls of grunstein heaped one
upon another, form those rounded cones, which are found so frequently
in the Mittelgebirge in Bohemia, near Bilin, the country of
phonolites. The following is the result of my partial observations.
The grunstein, which at first alternated with strata of serpentine, or
was connected with that rock by insensible transitions, is seen alone,
sometimes in strata considerably inclined, and sometimes in balls with
concentric strata, imbedded in strata of the same substance. It lies,
near Malpaso, on green slates, steatitic, mingled with hornblende,
destitute of mica and grains of quartz, dipping, like the grunsteins,
45 degrees toward the north, and directed, like them, 75 degrees
north-west.
A great sterility prevails where these green slates predominate, no
doubt on account of the magnesia they contain, which (as is proved by
the magnesian-limestone of England*) is very hurtful to vegetation. (*
Magnesian limestone is of a straw-yellow colour, and contains
madrepores: it lies beneath red marl, or muriatiferous red sandstone.)
The dip of the green slates continues the same; but by degrees the
direction of their strata becomes parallel to the general direction of
the primitive rocks of the chain of the coast.
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