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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I Do Not Say That They Are Anterior To That
Formation, For Since The Publication Of M. Von Buch's Observations On
The Tyrol, We Must No Longer Consider What Is Below, In Space, As
Necessarily Anterior, Relatively To The Epoch Of Its Formation.
Bitumen and petroleum still issue from the mica-slate; these
substances are ejected whenever the soil is shaken by a subterranean
force (between Cumana, Cariaco and the Golfo Triste).
Now, in the
peninsula of Araya, and in the island of Marguerita, saliferous clay
impregnated with bitumen is met with in connexion with this early
formation, nearly as gem-salt appears in Calabria in flakes, in basins
inclosed in strata of granite and gneiss. Do these circumstances serve
to support that ingenious system, according to which all the
co-ordinate formations of gypsum, sulphur, bitumen and gem-salt
(constantly anhydrous) result from floods passing across the crevices
which have traversed the oxidated crust of our planet, and penetrating
to the seat of volcanic action. The enormous masses of muriate of soda
recently thrown up by Vesuvius,* (* The ejected masses in 1822 were so
considerable that the inhabitants of some villages round Vesuvius
collected them for domestic purposes.) the small veins of that salt
which I have often seen traverse the most recently ejected lavas, and
of which the origin (by sublimation) appears similar to that of
oligist iron deposited in the same vents,* (* Gay-Lussac on the action
of volcanoes in the Annales de Chimie volume 22 page 418.) the layers
of gem-salt and saliferous clay of the trachytic soil in the plains of
Peru and around the volcano of the Andes of Quito are well worthy the
attention of geologists who would discuss the origin of formations.
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