Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 18, 2025
There is also much imperfect rubbly pitchstone, with the interstices charged with powdery carbonate of lime apparently of contemporaneous origin. These lavas are conformably associated with strata of breccia and of brown tuff containing lignite. The whole mass has been broken up and tilted at an angle of 45 degrees, by a series of great volcanic dikes, one of which was thirty yards in breadth.
Along with the breccias which I have thus incidentally noticed, but to which a whole essay might be devoted on account of their beauty, rich variety, and great value and rarity, should be classified a kind of "breccia dure," called Breccia d' Egitto.
Their resemblance to the great trappean series of Western India, even in minute particulars, is referred to by Mr. Blanford, who suggests the view that they belong to one and the same great series of lava-flows extruded over the surface of this part of the globe. This view is inherently probable. Beds of volcanic ash or breccia also frequently occur, and often contain augite crystals.
The number of strata was very great, and only a few inches or even lines thick: they presented all varieties of jasper, hornstone, and quartz of numerous colours, with occasional seams of porphyry or breccia. The racks were elegantly fringed with a fern I had not hitherto seen, Polypodium proliferum, which is the only species the Soane valley presents at this season.
It is important to examine, in each of the cayos, on what this breccia reposes; whether it covers edifices of mollusca still living, or those secondary and tertiary rocks, which judging from the remains of coral they contain, seem to be the product of our days. The gypsum of the cayos opposite San Juan de los Remedios, on the northern coast of the island of Cuba, merits great attention.
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.
Deer Park station suggests the leaving point for that charmingly picturesque resort, snuggling in the heart of Bear Canyon. Now we pass the masses of tuffaceous breccia that "Pap" Church, the old stage-driver used to call the Devil's Pulpit, and the devil's this and that or the other, until many a traveler would wish they were all with the devil.
A sharp frost-wind, which made itself heard and felt from time to time, removed the clouds of mist which might otherwise have slumbered till morning on the valley; and, though it could not totally disperse the clouds of vapour, yet threw them in confused and changeful masses, now hovering round the heads of the mountains, now filling, as with a dense and voluminous stream of smoke, the various deep gullies where masses of the composite rock, or breccia, tumbling in fragments from the cliffs, have rushed to the valley, leaving each behind its course a rent and torn ravine resembling a deserted water-course.
From it there radiate in all directions, like the spokes of a wheel, long dikes whose rock grows rapidly finer of grain as it leaves the vicinity of the once heated core. The remainder of the base of the ancient mountain is made of rudely bedded tuffs and volcanic breccia, with occasional flows of lava, some of the fragments of the breccia measuring as much as twenty feet in diameter.
The Kulock Cave, now some six hundred and fifty feet above the river, contained the remains of no less than 2,500 bears, and similar relics occur by thousands in the osseous breccia of Santenay and in the cave of Lherm, where they form a regular ossuary. It would be easy to quote similar facts from Belgian, German, and Hungarian caves.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking