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Updated: May 31, 2025
These 'hard-heads, which try the hammer, show a revetment of cellular iron upon a solid core of greenstone and bluish trap. Some fragments not a little resembled the clay-slates of the Brazilian gold-mines. Such was the concession which we named São João do Principe. Presently the chief, Mrá Kwámi, announced to us that we had reached the northern boundary-line of the estate.
Down many of them run long streams of trap or basalt; occasionally there are dykes of porphyry and greenstone, and then patches of sandstone, before the limestone and flint recur."
Except for the occasional ridges of metamorphic rocks mentioned above, and some hills of intruded greenstone, the lower plain is stoneless, its subjacent rocks being covered with a thicker stratum of the same alluvium which is thinly spread over the higher table-land above.
"And finer, closer spirals of dark blue Were never seen than in his cheek's tattoo; Fine as if engine turned those cheeks declared No cost to fee the artist had been spared; That many a basket of good maize had made That craftsman careful how he tapped his blade, And many a greenstone trinket had been given To get his chisel-flint so deftly driven."
They did not trade, though an exchange of gifts regulated by strict etiquette amounted to a rude and limited kind of barter, under which inland tribes could supply themselves with dried sea-fish and sea-birds preserved in their melted fat, or northern tribes could acquire the precious greenstone found in the west of the South Island.
Near the Pacific, the mountain-ranges are generally formed of syenite or granite, and or of an allied euritic porphyry; in the low country, besides these granitic rocks and greenstone, and much gneiss, there are, especially northward of Valparaiso, some considerable districts of true clay-slate with quartz veins, passing into a feldspathic and porphyritic slate; there is also some grauwacke and quartzose and jaspery rocks, the latter occasionally assuming the character of the basis of claystone porphyry: trap-dikes are numerous.
We were in consequence obliged to stand off and on in this narrow arm of the sea, during a pitch-dark night of fourteen hours long. June 10th. In the morning we made the best of our way into the open Pacific. The western coast generally consists of low, rounded, quite barren hills of granite and greenstone.
There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was calm and still; the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha, and the faint cry of a goatsucker, were occasionally to be heard. Besides these, few birds, or even insects, frequent these dry, parched mountains. August 17th. In the morning we climbed up the rough mass of greenstone which crowns the summit.
There was also a good deal of greenstone and gneiss, and some of the spires of these that shot up to a considerable height were particularly striking and picturesque objects. But the great sight of the day's excursion was that which unexpectedly greeted their eyes on rounding a cape towards which they had been walking for several hours.
That the claystone, greenstone, and other porphyries and amygdaloids, which lie CONFORMABLY between the beds of conglomerate, are ancient submarine lavas, I think there can be no doubt; and I believe we must look to the craters whence these streams were erupted, as the source of the breccia- conglomerate; after the great explosion, we may fairly imagine that the water in the heated and scarcely quiescent crater would remain for a considerable time sufficiently agitated to triturate and round the loose fragments, few or many in number, would be shot forth at the next eruption, associated with few or many angular fragments, according to the strength of the explosion.
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