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"Ho! stop, I say, uncle," he exclaimed for the twentieth time that day, as he picked up some object of interest. "What now, lad?" said the Captain, stopping and wiping his heated brow. "Here is another specimen of these petrifactions look!" "He means a vegetable o' some sort turned to stone, Chingatok," explained the Captain, as he examined the specimen with an interested though unscientific eye.
There are, in the neighborhood of Mokini, stones which are considered petrifactions of the canoe, paddles, and fish-hooks of Paao. At Pololu, toward the mountain, are found fields of a very beautiful verdure. The old priest cultivated these fields himself, where no one since his time has dared to use spade or mattock.
In the highest and steepest parts of the mountain chain may be found marine petrifactions of every variety the sea-hedgehog, the oyster, the mussel, and the star-fish; and in the beds of trachytic rock, deposited in such order that one might fancy they had been placed there by a careful and tasty housewife, are layers of the most curious shells, univalve, bivalve, sublivalve and multivalve, madrepors, and shapeless remnants of creatures now no longer known, and petrified fish.
"Then you judge a sect by its buildings?" "Every faith has its own architecture. The temple at Karnak and the tabernacle at Salt Lake City are petrifactions of faith. In time the places of worship are the only tangible remains witness Stonehenge."
Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out? and supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty.
During his stay in Dampier's Bay, he had made a fine collection of shells and petrifactions, which form long banks on these shores, and which are so much the more interesting, as most of them seem to have their living resemblance at the feet of the same rocks, which are composed of these petrified shells."
Near Maniquarez, breccia or sandstone with calcareous cement, which might easily be confounded with real limestone, lies immediately over the mica-slate; while on the opposite side, near Punta Delgada, this sandstone covers a compact bluish grey limestone, almost destitute of petrifactions, and traversed by small veins of calcareous spar.
Yet, if he doubt, and care to explore the original mine whence our specimen petrifactions have been dug, he will find that we have by no means exhausted the supply; and that there are many most curious and suggestive facts, not contained in the statistics or intended by the compiler, which are embraced in the CENSUS REPORTS.
The only petrifactions of shells which I found in this limestone formation consist of a heap of turbinites and trochites, on the flank of Turimiquiri, at more than 680 toises high, and an ammonite seven inches in diameter, in the Montana de Santa Maria, north-north-west of Caripe.
To find other trees between Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a little in time to dig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forest of conifers lay as petrifactions, their heads all in one direction, as blown down by a gale in the Secondary geologic epoch. Dusk had closed in, and he now proceeded with what was, after all, the real business of his sojourn.
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