190 THE WORLD'S LUMBER ROOM. 



passes into anthracite where the strata have been most 

 disturbed by earthquake; and one remarkable bed, now 

 fifty feet thick, is computed to have been probably two or 

 three hundred feet thick before it was thus compressed. 



And now to consider some of the other metamorphoses 

 undergone by dead vegetable matter. 



Landing on the point of La Brea, in the island of 

 Trinidad, we see that the beach is black with pitch, and 

 that the so-called rocks, or reefs, consist also of pitch. One 

 of the " rocks " indeed has been almost dug away to 

 make asphalt pavement in New York and Paris. The 

 " pebbles " on the shore are of the same substance, and 

 everywhere there is pitch, no more than a foot or two 

 beneath the surface, which is constantly oozing through the 

 brown soil, itself half pitch, in which the pineapples for 

 which La Brea is famous grow to especial perfection. 

 A pitch road leads up to the famous Pitch Lake, a mile 

 and a half in circumference, which glares and glitters in 

 the sunlight, and has something the appearance of a bed of 

 gigantic black mushrooms of all shapes and sizes, from ten 

 to fifty feet across, their round heads pressed close to- 

 gether, and the spaces between filled with water. In one 

 part of the lake the pitch is constantly oozing up from the 

 depths below, and is quite liquid ; and the ground every- 

 where in the vicinity is full of pitch and coal-like matter to 

 the depth of hundreds of feet. Beneath the lake there is 

 said to be a bed of coal, and it is this coaly matter, as it 

 seems, which is constantly turning into pitch and oil, which 

 are forced up through every crack by the enormous weight 

 of shale and sandstone above. 



