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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At Piedras Azules These
Slates, Mingled With Hornblende, Cover In Concordant Stratification A
Blackish-Blue Slate, Very Fissile, And Traversed By Small Veins Of
Quartz.
The green slates include some strata of grunstein, and even
contain balls of that substance.
I nowhere saw the green slates
alternate with the black slates of the ravine of Piedras Azules: at
the line of junction these two slates appear rather to pass one into
the other, the green slates becoming of a pearl-grey in proportion as
they lose their hornblende.
Farther south, towards Parapara and Ortiz, the slates disappear. They
are concealed under a trap-formation more varied in its aspect. The
soil becomes more fertile; the rocky masses alternate with strata of
clay, which appear to be produced by the decomposition of the
grunsteins, the amygdaloids, and the phonolites.
The grunstein, which farther north was less granulous, and passed into
serpentine, here assumes a very different character. It contains balls
of mandelstein, or amygdaloid, eight or ten inches in diameter. These
balls, sometimes a little flattened, are divided into concentric
layers: this is the effect of decomposition. Their nucleus is almost
as hard as basalt, and they are intermingled with little cavities,
owing to bubbles of gas, filled with green earth, and crystals of
pyroxene and mesotype. Their basis is greyish blue, rather soft, and
showing small white spots which, by the regular form they present, I
should conceive to be decomposed feldspar. M. von Buch examined with a
powerful lens the species we brought. He discovered that each crystal
of pyroxene, enveloped in the earthy mass, is separated from it by
fissures parallel to the sides of the crystal. These fissures seem to
be the effect of a contraction which the mass or basis of the
mandelstein has undergone. I sometimes saw these balls of mandelstein
arranged in strata, and separated from each other by beds of grunstein
of ten or fourteen inches thick; sometimes (and this situation is most
common) the balls of mandelstein, two or three feet in diameter, are
found in heaps, and form little mounts with rounded summits, like
spheroidal basalt. The clay which separates these amygdaloid
concretions arises from the decomposition of their crust. They acquire
by the contact of the air a very thin coating of yellow ochre.
South-west of the village of Parapara rises the little Cerro de
Flores, which is discerned from afar in the steppes. Almost at its
foot, and in the midst of the mandelstein tract we have just been
describing, a porphyritic phonolite, a mass of compact feldspar of a
greenish grey, or mountain-green, containing long crystals of vitreous
feldspar, appears exposed. It is the real porphyrschiefer of Werner;
and it would be difficult to distinguish, in a collection of stones,
the phonolite of Parapara from that of Bilin, in Bohemia. It does not,
however, here form rocks in grotesque shapes, but little hills covered
with tabular blocks, large plates extremely sonorous, translucid on
the edges, and wounding the hands when broken.
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