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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The Sands Which In The Baltic Provinces And In All
The North Of Germany, Cover Coarse Limestone And Chalk, Seem To
Justify These Systematic Ideas, Which Have Been Extended To The Sahara
And The Steppes Of Asia.
But the observations which we have been able
to collect sufficiently prove that both in the Old and the New World,
both plains, steppes, and deserts contain numerous formations of
different eras, and that these formations often appear without being
covered by alluvial deposits.
Jura limestone, gem-salt (plains of the
Meta and Patagonia) and coal-sandstone are found in the Llanos of
South America; quadersandstein,* (* The forms of these rocks in walls
and pyramids, or divided in rhomboid blocks, seems no doubt to
indicate quadersandstein; but the sandstone of the eastern declivity
of the Rocky Mountains in which the learned traveller Mr. James found
salt-springs (licks), strata of gypsum and no coal, appear rather to
belong to variegated sandstone (buntersandstein).) a saliferous soil,
beds of coal,* (* This coal immediately covers, as in Belgium, the
grauwacke, or transition-sandstone.) and limestone with trilobites,*
(* In the plains of the Upper Missouri the limestone is immediately
covered by a secondary limestone with turritulites, believed to be
Jurassic, while a limestone with grypheae, rich in lead-ore and which
I should have believed to be still more ancient than oolitic
limestone, and analogous to lias, is described by Mr. James as lying
above the most recent formation of sandstone. Has this superposition
been well ascertained?) fill the vast plains of Louisiana and Canada.
In examining the specimens collected by the indefatigable Caillaud in
the Lybian desert and the Oasis of Siwa, we recognize sandstone
similar to that of Thebes; fragments of petrified dicotyledonous wood
(from thirty to forty feet long), with rudiments of branches and
medullary concentric layers, coming perhaps from tertiary sandstone
with lignites;* (* Formation of molassus.); chalk with spatangi and
anachytes, Jura limestone with nummulites partly agatized; another
fine-grained limestone* employed in the construction of the temple of
Jupiter Ammon (Omm-Beydah) (* M. von Buch very reasonably inquires
whether this statuary limestone, which resembles Parian marble, and
limestone become granular by contact with the systematic granite of
Predazzo, is a modification of the limestone with nummulites, of Siwa.
The primitive rocks from which the fine-grained marble was believed to
be extracted, if there be no deception in its granular appearance, are
far distant from the Oasis of Siwa.); and gem-salt with sulphur and
bitumen.
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