Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 2.djvu/302

292 worn by the rains, and there was no appearance of any other rock. Leaving this forest, the track passes over a series of green hills which we traversed in about two hours, and at last halted to water our mules at a spot called el barranco del pino de la meruenda, where there is a small spring of bad and brackish water issuing from a lava rock. The ravine is of considerable depth. After the vegetable earth, which is 2 or 3 feet deep, a layer of tufa succeeds, which is followed by a lava of a greyish-blue colour, 30 or 40 feet in depth. It is compact, contains olivine, and the strata lap over each other, but shew no appearance of columnar formation. The range of green hills extends a mile or two further, the soil shallowing by degrees, more lava and scoria shewing themselves on the surface, the ravines or channels, worn by the rains, becoming more common, the trees and shrubs gradually dwindling in size, and of them all the Spanish broom alone at length covers the ground. Leaving behind us this range of green hills, the track still ascending leads for several hours across a steep and difficult mass of lava rock, broken here and there into strange and fantastic forms, worn into deep ravines, and scantily covered in places by a thin layer of yellow pumice. The surface of the country, for miles and miles around, is one continuous stream of lava; the rents or ravines of which seem to be formed partly by the torrents from the hills flowing for so many ages, and partly from that tendency, characteristic of a lava current, to keep itself up in embankments, and in its cooling process to open out into those hollows which I have uniformly found in every eruption of lava that I have had an opportunity of examining. This lava is cellular beyond any I have ever seen, is of a clayey earthy porphyritic composition, and contains few, if any, pieces of olivine, though here and there felspar in a semicrystallised form. As we proceeded on our road, the hills on our left, though broken at