The Sicilian coast, the island of Ascension, and King George's Sound in Australia, are instances of this mode of formation. On the coasts of the Antilles, these formations of the present ocean contain articles of pottery, and other objects of human industry, and in Guadaloupe even human skeletons of the Carib tribes.*
[footnote] *[In most instances the bones are dispersed; but a large slab of rock, in which considerable portion of the skeleton of a female is embedded, is preserved in the British Museum. The presence of these bones has been explained by the circumstance of a battle, and the massacre of a tribe of Gallibis by the Caribs, which took place near the spot in which they are found, about 120 years ago; for, as the bodies of the slain were interred on the sea-shore, their skeletons may have been subsequently covered by sand-drift, which has since consolidated into limestone. Dr. Moultrie, of the Medical College, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S., is, however, of opinion that these bones did not belong to individuals of the Carib tribe, but of the Peruvian race, or of a tribe possessing a similar craniological development.] —Tr.
The negroes of the French colonies designate these formations by the name of
'Maconne-bon-Dieu'.*
Moreau de Jonnes, 'Hist. Phys. des Antilles', t. i., p. 136, 138, and 543;
Humboldt, 'Relation Historique', t. iii., p. 367.
A small colitic bed, formed in Lancerote, one of the Canary Islands, and which, notwithstanding p 251 its recent formation, bears a resemblance to Jura Limestone, has been recognized as a product of the sea and of tempests.*
[footnote] *Near Teguiza. Leop. von Buch, 'Canarische Inseln', s. 301.
Composite rocks are definite associations of certain crytonostic, simple minerals, as feldspar, mica, solid silex, augite, and nepheline. Rocks very similar to these consisting of the same elements, but grouped differently, are still formed by volcanic processes, as in the earlier periods of the world. The character of rocks, as we have already remarked is so independent of geographical relations of space,* that the geologist recognizes with surprise, alike to the north or the south of the equator, in the remotest and most dissimilar zones, the familiar aspect, and the repetition of even the most minute characteristics in the periodic stratification of the silurian strata, and in the effects of contact with augitic masses of eruption.
[footnote] *Leop. von Buch, op. cit., p. 9.
We will now enter more fully into the consideration of the four modes in which rocks are formed — the four phases of their formative processes manifested in the stratified and unstratified portions of the earth's surface; thus, in the 'endogenous' or 'erupted rocks', designated by modern geognosists as compact and abnormal rocks, we may enumerate the following principal groups as immediate products of terrestrial activity:
1. 'Granite and syenite' of very different respective ages; the granite is frequently the more recent,* traversing the syenite in veins, and being, in that case, the active upheaving agent. "Where the granite occurs in large, insulated masses of a faintly-arched, ellipsoidal form, it is covered by a crust of shell cleft into blocks, instances of which are met with alike in the Hartz district, in Mysore, and in Lower Peru.