places, particles of feldspath and schorl,—a species of rock conspicuous only in the
vicinity of Airoloj for, prior to these, I had remarked that they were mostly of effervescent
schistus; and, in the neighbourhood of Fontana, lofty calcareous mountains, iri
which no fossils were imbedded.
On leaving the town of Airolb, which is seated at the junction of several valleys
watered by rivers that form the Tesino, we began to ascend that part of St. Gothard
called by the people of the country Thé last Step of Ike Mountain. And here the road i
in many places resembling a broken stair-case, follows the windings of the precipice,
at the bottom of which runs the Tesino» whichj owing to the abrupt state of thé
mountain on the side of Italy, forms a continuation t>f beautiful falls, of which thé
drawing N°XXV. gives a faint idea, it being extremely difficult to do justice to such
views,—the objects in that part of the Alps being, as before noticedj of tóq_great magnitude
to give an exact resemblance of them. I have however endeavoured to be as
correct as possible in my representations, and have done my best to copy the stupendous
masses of rock, with the form and direction of their strata, particularly attending
to those which border the main road, which appear to be partly composed of micaceous
schistias, striated with quartz and a kind of indurated serpentine of a greenish tinge,
and partly of a species of compound rock of a deep green, spotted with black quartz
and white dots, apparently of schorl, containing silex that strikes fire with steel.
Besides this variety of rock, the valley is likewise, in many parts, covered with huge
blocks of red granite ; and, about two miles from Airólo, these same rocks may be said
to lose themselves under wide strata of a whitish stone, whose thin and undulated
larainse contain a quantity of red mica and pieces of schorl of great hardness, as also
garnets of about five or six lines diameter, of a dodecagon, or twelve-sided figure, with
a faded tinge of red, nearly opaque, but so extremely induratedj that neither time nor
water, which have both visibly worn the riliceous paste in which these garnets aré, as it
were, buried, have in the least impaired or changed the form of the crystals, which still
appear like brown salient spots.
Four miles hence I passed by a mountain of a hard kind of sand-stonej in which I
found pieces of black and white quartz, red mica, and crystals of schorl of five lines in
length. At the basis of this perpendicular mountain stands a small chapel, covered
with ex-votos, dedicated to St. Anna, which, in a place naturally so wild and elevated,
wonderfully increased the rude and romantic state of this part of the road, and rendered