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Show 165 ( The height above the level of the sea, measured by my friend, Mr. Francis Klett, is 2,260 feet.) On the other side of the Sierra, looking then toward the south, are the springs and the bored well of Mr. Temple. The rocks present the same folds and contortions as at Pico's Spring; only the direction of the dip of the strata is to the south, at an angle of from 15° to 25°. Fia. 5.- Pico's Spring.- a Asphaltic sandstone covered with vegetation. If there is no hope of ever finding abundant springs of mineral- oil in the San Fernando Sierra itself, there is at least a prospect of getting magnificent and very rich quarries of asphaltum. These quarries will certainly one day be worked with the moot satisfactory results. In the vicinity of the San Francisquito ranch the sandstone contains fossils, the most abundant of which is the Pecten Cerrosensis Gabb. • San Francisquito Pass.- The plain from the San Francisqnito ranch, as far as Moore's Station, is composed of fine sand, of great thickness, which forms the entire bottom of the valley, and indicates that large rivers must have descended from the passes of Soled ad and San Francisquito; and there is some reason to suppose that at the commencement of the modern period the Santa Clara Valley was the outlet of a part of the Western Rio Colorado. A mile to the east of Moore's Station we again meet with the Miocene sandstone or molassic rocks, more or less inclined in directions varying from north to west and south. However, the westerly direction seems to prevail. Before reaching the stage- station, doleritic trap- rocks, interstratified in the blue molasse, are found on both sides of the road, but particularly on the right. The molasse is then somewhat metainorpbic, and its argillo- arenaceous schist becomes a lustrous black schist, similar to the fishy schists of Glarus or to the " flisch" of the Alpine geologists. The reader must not be surprised if I constantly remind him of the freat lithological resemblance between the Tertiary rocks of California and those of witzerland, Vorarlberg, and Bavaria. It is unusual to find so many points of comparison and similarity at such great distances from each other on the terrestrial globe. The conditions of the deposits must evidently have been the same in California and in Switzerland. The Sierra Nevada, or its prolongation, the Sierra Madre, performs the same part as the Alps in furnishing the materials which were deposited in the Cali-fornian and Helvetic Tertiary seas. The Tertiary rocks, both sandstone and schist, come to an end at Humphrey's ranch, where they are very much raised, some even to AP. J J- 11 |
