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Updated: June 20, 2025
It has been already alleged, that granite, porphyry, and whinstone, or trap, graduate into each other; but here M. Pallas informs us that he has found the granite not only changed into porphyry, but also into the other alpine compositions. How an argument for the originality of these mountains can be established upon those facts, I am not a little at a loss to conceive.
"It was, like the rest of these desolate isles, all of dark whinstone, cracked in every direction, and worn with the action of winds, waves, and tempests since the world began. Over the greater part of it was not a blade of grass, nor a grain of earth; it was bare and iron-like stone, crusted, round all the coast as far as high-water mark, with limpet and still smaller shells.
Then I took down my father's sword from its deer-horn brackets over the chimney-piece, and set myself to fine its edge and point with a bit of Scotch whinstone. It was a good blade; a true old Andrea Ferara got in battle in the seventeenth century by one of the Nottingham Iretons. I whetted it well and carefully.
She thanked him, but coldly, and the two climbed the ridge above the lake, whence the whole glen may be seen winding beneath. It was still, hot July weather, and the far hills seemed to blink and shimmer in the haze; but at their feet was always coolness in the blue depth of the loch, the heath-fringed shores, the dark pines, and the cold whinstone crags.
We ascended wrinkled hills of black stone, and descended into worn and dismal dells of the same; into some of which, where the tide got entrance, it came pouring and roaring in raging whiteness, and churning the loose fragments of whinstone into round pebbles, and piling them up in deep crevices with seaweeds, like great round ropes and heaps of fucus.
The house has a dark look, being built of the native whinstone, or grau-wacke, as the Germans call it, relieved by the quoins and projections of the windows and turrets in freestone. All look classic, and not too large for the poet and antiquarian builder. The dog Maida lies in stone on the right hand of the door in the court, with the well known inscription.
It would appear that the first decided break in the sandstone formation which penetrates into the county of Camden, is at Mittagong Range. It is there traversed by a dike of whinstone, of which that range is wholly composed.
These signs of improvement, however, vanish the moment Mittagong range is crossed, and sand-stone again forms the basis of the country to a considerable distance beyond Bong-bong. At a small farm called the Ploughed Ground, it is again traversed by a dike of whinstone, and a rich but isolated spot is thus passed over.
Farther on, the ridge enlarged and formed small hillocks, with bare rock cropping out at their tops; a form of surface peculiar to the basaltic or whinstone country of this colony. The singular hissing or grinding note of the bower bird was heard all along the river; the fruit of the fig trees growing near, which seemed to supply it with its principal food during this part of the year. April 15.
It was interesting to observe how strictly the scrub kept to the sandstone and to the stiff loam lying upon it, whilst the mild black whinstone soil was without trees, but covered with luxuriant grasses and herbs; and this fact struck me as remarkable, because, during my travels in the Bunya country of Moreton Bay, I found it to be exactly the reverse: the sandstone spurs of the range being there covered with an open well grassed forest, whilst a dense vine brush extended over the basaltic rock.
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