第78章 ON THE OLDER TERTIARY FORMATIONS OF PATAGONIA AND

At the northern extremity of the island, near S.Carlos, there is a large volcanic formation, between five and seven hundred feet in thickness.The commonest lava is blackish-grey or brown, either vesicular, or amygdaloidal with calcareous spar and bole: most even of the darkest varieties fuse into a pale-coloured glass.The next commonest variety is a rubbly, rarely well characterised pitchstone (fusing into a white glass) which passes in the most irregular manner into stony grey lavas.This pitchstone, as well as some purple claystone porphyry, certainly flowed in the form of streams.

These various lavas often pass, at a considerable depth from the surface, in the most abrupt and singular manner into wacke.Great masses of the solid rock are brecciated, and it was generally impossible to discover whether the recementing process had been an igneous or aqueous action.(In a cliff of the hardest fragmentary mass, I found several tortuous, vertical veins, varying in thickness from a few tenths of an inch to one inch and a half, of a substance which I have not seen described.It is glossy, and of a brown colour; it is thinly laminated, with the laminae transparent and elastic; it is a little harder than calcareous spar; it is infusible under the blowpipe, sometimes decrepitates, gives out water, curls up, blackens, and becomes magnetic.Borax easily dissolves a considerable quantity of it, and gives a glass tinged with green.I have no idea what its true nature is.On first seeing it, I mistook it for lignite!) The beds are obscurely separated from each other; they are sometimes parted by seams of tuff and layers of pebbles.In one place they rested on, and in another place were capped by, tuffs and girt-stones, apparently of submarine origin.

The neighbouring peninsula of Lacuy is almost wholly formed of tufaceous deposits, connected probably in their origin with the volcanic hills just described.The tuffs are pale-coloured, alternating with laminated mudstones and sandstones (all easily fusible), and passing sometimes into fine-grained white beds strikingly resembling the great upper infusorial deposit of Patagonia, and sometimes into brecciolas with pieces of pumice in the last stage of decay; these again pass into ordinary coarse breccias and conglomerates of hard rocks.Within very short distances, some of the finer tuffs often passed into each other in a peculiar manner, namely, by irregular polygonal concretions of one variety increasing so much and so suddenly in size, that the second variety, instead of any longer forming the entire mass, was left merely in thin veins between the concretions.In a straight line of cliffs, at Point Tenuy, I examined the following remarkable section (Figure 19):--(FIGURE 19.)

On the left hand, the lower part (AA) consists of regular, alternating strata of brown tuffs and greenish laminated mudstone, gently inclined to the right, and conformably covered by a mass (B left) of a white, tufaceous and brecciolated deposit.On the right hand, the whole cliff (BB right)consists of the same white tufaceous matter, which on this side presents scarcely a trace of stratification, but to the left becomes very gradually and rather indistinctly divided into strata quite conformable with the underlying beds (AA): moreover, a few hundred yards further to the left, where the surface has been less denuded, the tufaceous strata (B left) are conformably covered by another set of strata, like the underlying ones (AA)of this section.In the middle of the diagram, the beds (AA) are seen to be abruptly cut off, and to abut against the tufaceous non-stratified mass;but the line of junction has been accidentally not represented steep enough, for I particularly noticed that before the beds had been tilted to the right, this line must have been nearly vertical.It appears that a current of water cut for itself a deep and steep submarine channel, and at the same time or afterwards filled it up with the tufaceous and brecciolated matter, and spread the same over the surrounding submarine beds; the matter becoming stratified in these more distant and less troubled parts, and being moreover subsequently covered up by other strata (like AA) not shown in the diagram.It is singular that three of the beds (of AA) are prolonged in their proper direction, as represented, beyond the line of junction into the white tufaceous matter: the prolonged portions of two of the beds are rounded; in the third, the terminal fragment has been pushed upwards: how these beds could have been left thus prolonged, I will not pretend to explain.In another section on the opposite side of a promontory, there was at the foot of this same line of junction, that is at the bottom of the old submarine channel, a pile of fragments of the strata (AA), with their interstices filled up with white tufaceous matter: this is exactly what might have been anticipated under such circumstances.

(FIGURE 20.GROUND PLAN SHOWING THE RELATION BETWEEN VEINS ANDCONCRETIONARY ZONES IN A MASS OF TUFF.)