Chapter 8 - Page 2

clay-slate, like some of the varieties alternating with gypsum on the Peuquenes range.

The upper half of this gypseous formation is mainly formed of the same calcareous clay-shale rock, but without any gypsum, and varying extremely in nature: it passes from a soft, coarse, earthy, ferruginous state, including particles of quartz, into compact claystones with crystallised oxide of iron,--into porcellanic layers, alternating with seams of calcareous matter,--and into green porcelain-jasper, excessively hard, but easily fusible. Strata of this nature alternate with much black and brown siliceo-calcareous slate, remarkable from the wonderful number of huge embedded logs of silicified wood. This wood, according to Mr. R. Brown, is (judging from several specimens) all coniferous. Some of the layers of the black siliceous slate contained irregular angular fragments of imperfect pitchstone, which I believe, as in the Uspallata range, has originated in a metamorphic process. There was one bed of a marly tufaceous nature, and of little specific gravity. Veins of agate and calcareous spar are numerous. The whole of this gypseous formation, especially the upper half, has been injected, metamorphosed, and locally contorted by numerous hillocks of intrusive porphyries crowded together in an extraordinary manner. These hillocks consist of purple claystone and of various other porphyries, and of much white feldspathic greenstone passing into andesite; this latter variety included in one case crystals of orthitic and albitic feldspar touching each other, and others of hornblende, chlorite, and epidote. The strata surrounding these intrusive hillocks at the mines of Los Hornos, are intersected by many veins of copper-pyrites, associated with much micaceous iron-ore, and by some of gold: in the neighbourhood of these veins the rocks are blackened and much altered. The gypsum near the intrusive masses is always opaque. One of these hillocks of porphyry was capped by some stratified porphyritic conglomerate, which must have been brought up from below, through the whole immense thickness of the overlying gypseous formation. The lower beds of the gypseous formation resemble the corresponding and probably contemporaneous strata of the main Cordillera; whilst the upper beds in several respects resemble those of the Uspallata chain, and possibly may be contemporaneous with them; for I have endeavoured to show that the Uspallata beds were accumulated subsequently to the gypseous or Neocomian formations of the Cordillera.

This pile of strata dips at an angle of about 20 degrees to N.E. by N., close up to the foot of the Cuesta de Los Hornos, a crooked range of mountains formed of intrusive rocks of the same nature with the above described hillocks. Only in one or two places, on this south-eastern side of the range, I noticed a narrow fringe of the upper gypseous strata brushed up and inclined south-eastward from it. On its north-eastern flank, and likewise on