Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Mountains Of Mica-Slate And Gneiss In
Peru And New Grenada Immediately Touch The Volcanic Porphyries Of
The Provinces Of Quito And Pasto.
To the south and north of these
countries, in Chile and in the kingdom of Guatimala, the active
volcanoes are grouped in rows.
They are the continuation, as we may
say, of the chains of primitive rocks, and if the volcanic fire has
broken forth in some plain remote from the Cordilleras, as in mount
Sangay and Jorullo,* (* Two volcanoes of the Provinces of Quixos
and Mechoacan, the one in the southern, and the other in the
northern hemisphere.) we must consider this phenomenon as an
exception to the law, which nature seems to have imposed on these
regions. I may here repeat these geological facts, because this
presumed isolated situation of every volcano has been cited in
opposition to the idea that the peak of Teneriffe, and the other
volcanic summits of the Canary Islands, are the remains of a
submerged chain of mountains. The observations which have been made
on the grouping of volcanoes in America, prove that the ancient
state of things represented in the conjectural map of the Atlantic
by M. Bory de St. Vincent* (* Whether the traditions of the
ancients respecting the Atlantis are founded on historical facts,
is a matter totally distinct from the question whether the
archipelago of the Canaries and the adjacent islands are the
vestiges of a chain of mountains, rent and sunk in the sea during
one of the great convulsions of our globe.
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