Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/300

294 and another of the Catholic church. We had seen farther out, towards the sea, little farms with small enclosures framed in stone walls, or with turf walls, consisting of grass fields. The cemetery, near at hand, was a quaint silent bleak spot on the edge of the water, with a fence round it, and bristling with wooden crosses. Some small houses were covered with sod and had green roofs. It was all singularly new and exhilarating. The storm refused to lift nor did the rain desist. It came down in deluges, and the streams leaped more impetuously, and the cataracts became swollen and vociferous, until a murmurous roar arose from the shores around us. The fog hung low on the mountain-sides, and, as if from their drenched edges, streams poured over the sheer slopes.

Then out to sea over rolling surges and tilting swells. The palisades of rock continued, with higher peaks at intervals, and then we entered Eskifiord, where the renowned Iceland spar is obtained, those pellucid cakes of carbonate of lime, from which the optician adroitly cuts the Nicol prisms for microscopes, which again in the hands of the lithologist reveal the structure and the composition of rocks. I went ashore at night in a pelting rain, and after some miserable wandering over the shore path, by the little huts and houses, through plentiful pools of water, entered a comfortable ware room where the precious material, weighed in small cleavage rhombs, could be secured. Eighty cents was paid for one of these specimens. New quarries are reported from the south side of the island.

This beautifully clear phase of the carbonate of lime forcibly recalled analogous developments in the palisades—the trap formation—of New Jersey at home. Iceland, indeed, throughout most of its northern section is a vast basaltic terrain, a land built up of igneous effusions exuded from opening crevices in the earth's crust in viscous semi-slaggy flows, and piled upon each other, possibly beneath the surface of the sea. Elevation succeeded, and these accumulations rose gently, with only unimportant dislocations upward. They were built upon a submarine spur, probably extending interruptedly from Norway with a southern arm towards Scotland, the whole hidden chain surrounding a deep northern area which, at some time, when its cow submerged barriers were exposed, may have formed a landlocked ocean, framed indeed on its southern margin by a dry north sea.

The igneous material involved in this construction of Iceland, though analogous to the New Jersey palisades, began its constructive work much later in geological time. The New Jersey palisades date from the Jura-triassic period, those of Iceland are referred to the middle, at the earliest, of the Tertiary age, though continuously since that time through preglacial, glacial and postglacial time, up to the present era, volcanic outbursts and now accessions, whether of lava