Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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(* In Germany Sandstones
Which Belong Unquestionably To Red Sandstone Contain Also (Near
Weiderstadt, In Thuringia) Nodules, And Rounded Fragments.
I shall not
cite the pudding-stone subordinate to the red sandstone of the
Pyrenees because the age of that sandstone destitute of coal may be
disputed.
Layers of very large rounded nodules of quartz are inclosed
in the coal sandstone of Thuringia, and in Upper Silesia.) We there
find fragments of wood, in great part monocotyledonous, and masses of
brown iron-ore. Some strata, as in the Mesa de Paja, present grains of
very fine quartz; I saw no fragments of porphyry or limestone. Those
immense beds of sandstone that cover the Llanos of the Lower Orinoco
and the Amazon well deserve the attention of travellers. In appearance
they approximate to the pudding-stones of the molassus stratum, in
which calcareous vestiges are also often wanting, as at Schottwyl and
Diesbach in Switzerland; but they appeared to me by their position to
have more relation to red sandstone. Nowhere can they be confounded
with the grauwackes (fragmentary transition-rocks) which MM.
Boussingault and Rivero found along the Cordilleras of New Grenada,
bordering the steppes on the west. Does the want of fragments of
granite, gneiss and porphyry, and the frequency of petrified wood,* (*
The people of the country attribute those woods to the Alcornoco,
Bowdichia virgilioides (See Nova Gen. et Spec. Plant. volume 3 page
377), and to the Chaparro bovo, Rhopala complicata. It is believed in
Venezuela as in Egypt that petrified wood is formed in our times.
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