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Updated: June 18, 2025
The hill of fort San Antonio, solitary, white, and bare, reflects a great mass of light, and of radiant heat: it is composed of breccia, the strata of which contain numerous fossils. In the distance, towards the south, stretches a vast and gloomy curtain of mountains. These are the high calcareous Alps of New Andalusia, surmounted by sandstone, and other more recent formations.
First, there was a period when the carbonate of lime was carried out gradually by springs; secondly, an era when engulfed rivers or occasional floods swept organic and inorganic debris into the subterranean hollows previously formed; and thirdly, there were such changes in the configuration of the region as caused the engulfed rivers to be turned into new channels, and springs to be dried up, after which the cave-mud, breccia, gravel, and fossil bones would bear the same kind of relation to the existing drainage of the country as the older valley-drifts with their extinct mammalian remains and works of art bear to the present rivers and alluvial plains.
Dolomitic conglomerate. Near Bristol, in Somersetshire, and in other counties bordering the Severn, the lowest strata belonging to the Triassic series consist of a conglomerate or breccia resting unconformably upon the Old Red Sandstone, and on different members of the Carboniferous rocks, such as the Coal Measures, Millstone Grit, and Mountain Limestone.
What took place in Palestine, took place in every part of the world wherever there are limestone and chalk and volcanic breccia and sandstone. It would seem as though a merciful Providence had not only provided the first shelters for man against the inclemency of the weather, but had also furnished him with places of secure refuge against the violence of his fellow-man.
The ores of Tolfa, Milo and Nipoligo; those of Montione, in which silica does not accompany the alumina; the siliceous breccia of Mont Dore, which contains sulphur in its cavities; the alumiferous rocks of Parad and Beregh in Hungary, which belong also to trachytic and pumice conglomerates, may no doubt be traced to the penetration of sulphurous acid vapours.
During the day our route had still been over the same character of country as before, with this exception, that it was more stony and barren, with breccia or iron-stone grit covering the surface.
I say a breccia, because we must not confound the fresh and white corallites of this very recent littoral formation, with the corallites blended in the mass of transition-rocks, grauwacke, and black limestone. We were astonished to find in this uninhabited spot a large Parkinsonia aculeata loaded with flowers.
In part of Sutherlandshire, near Brora, common granite, composed of feldspar, quartz, and mica is in immediate contact with Oolitic strata, and has clearly been elevated to the surface at a period subsequent to the deposition of those strata. This breccia consists of fragments of shale, sandstone, and limestone, with fossils of the oolite, all united together by a calcareous cement.
In the cavern of Bize, in the south of France, and in the caves of Engis, Engihoul, Chokier, and Goffontaine, near Liége, human bones and teeth, together with fragments of rude pottery, have been found enveloped in the same mud and breccia, and cemented by stalagmite, in which are found also the land shells of living species and the bones of mammalia, some of extinct, and others of recent species.
At one part we have breccia of altered marl or slate in quartz, and various amygdaloids. It is curious to observe the different forms which silica assumes.
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