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At Quail Island, the calcareous deposit is replaced in its lowest part by a soft, brown, earthy tuff, full of Turritellae; this is covered by a bed of pebbles, passing into sandstone, and mixed with fragments of echini, claws of crabs, and shells; the oyster-shells still adhering to the rock on which they grew.
They act in the economy of nature as vast reservoirs of water and of elastic fluids. The gypseous caverns glitter with crystallized selenites. Vitreous crystallized plates of brown and yellow stand out on a striated ground composed of layers of alabaster and fetid limestone. The calcareous grottoes have a more uniform tint.
"Africa dances all the night," is an expression which has become proverbial among the Europeans who have travelled there. There is not an atom of calcareous stone in the whole country: almost all the plants are twisted and thorny. The Monbins are the only species of timber that are met with.
Infection generated by associated men in health. Blue Mountains. View of the grand gulf-like valleys. Their origin and formation. Bathurst, general civility of the lower orders. State of society. Van Diemen's Land. Hobart Town. Aborigines all banished. Mount Wellington. King George's Sound. Cheerless aspect of the country. Bald Head, calcareous casts of branches of trees. Party of natives.
It is quite one of the most magnificent natural phenomena I have ever seen, and suggestive of comparison with the calcareous deposits in New Zealand and Yellowstone Park; and to those who visited this harbour in ancient days it must have been a familiar object, so no wonder that when they went home and talked about it, the town near it was called the City of the Abyss, and Ptolemy, as was his wont, gave the spot a fresh appellative, just as he called the capital the Oracle of Artemis.
I have them like needles, and in every degree of proximity or contiguity, at the same time that they are perfectly solid. Therefore, it is plainly impossible that they could have been formed upon this principle of calcareous stalactite.
The passage from slate through porphyritic diorite into granite may, I think, be best explained by the increasing degree of metamorphism, and at the same time a change of the original sediments at this point; granite being the last term of metamorphism of pure clays, or clayey sandstones, while bedded diorites are similarly formed from ferruginous and calcareous slates.
There are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires which special science calls moutardes. The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans.
It must be evident that this is chalk; naturally a soft calcareous earth, but which may be also found consolidated in every different degree. Through the middle of the Isle of Wight, there runs a ridge of hills of indurated chalk. This ridge runs from the Isle of Wight directly west into Dorsetshire, and goes by Corscastle towards Dorchester, perhaps beyond that place.
On the night of the 5th of September, and the following morning, there was a thick fog; yet we were not more than a hundred toises above the level of the sea. I determined geometrically, at the moment of our departure, the height of the great calcareous mountain which rises at 800 toises distance to the south of San Fernando, and forms a perpendicular cliff on the north side.
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