56 ,T. C. BRANNER — GEOLOGY OF NORTHEAST COAST OF BRAZIL 



but among the heaps of stones brought together for building purposes 

 are occasional small blocks of a diabase-like rock, evidently boulders 

 of decomposition. The schists are cut by many quartz veins and the 

 slopes of the low hills are strewn with a thin covering of waterworn 

 boulders. Some of these boulders are nearly half a meter in diameter. 



In a cut made in the town for the prolongation of the railway the 

 schists are well exposed; they are not much crumpled but they split 

 readily. From the hills about Independencia the topography has the 

 appearance of a peneplain into which the streams have cut their valleys 

 and above which the higher peaks rise. 



There are a few places along the line of this railway where there are 

 large exfoliated boulders or bare rounded rocks in place. 



Ala^goa Grande was not visited, but Mr H. G. Sumner tells me that the 

 hills in the vicinity of that place are all of granite or other crystalline 

 rocks. The accompanying plates from photographs by Mr Sumner 

 show the character of the topography of that region. 



The writer has not examined the geology farther west in the state of 

 Parahyba, but a few notes of value are available from the observations 

 of others. 



In 1854 a French physician, Jacques Brunet, was authorized by the 

 president of the province of Parahyba to explore its interior. He sent 

 to Mr Burlamaque, of the Museo National, at Rio de Janeiro, two fossil 

 shells found in the Serra de Teixeira.* 



In a somewhat later paper Dr Burlamaque saysf that Brunet sent 

 specimens of limestone from Rio do Peixe and Sao Joao in the extreme 

 western part of Parahiba; he also sent salt-bearing clays from Area. 

 These localities are not far from the Cretaceous beds of the interior of 

 Ceara. 



Williamson's trip to the interior, made in 1866, extended to Pianco, 

 about 265 kilometers west of Independencia. The rocks over most of 

 this distance are reported by him to be granites, gneisses, and schists^ 

 but on the western side of the Serra da Borborema, " at Teixeira, where 

 granitoid rocks abound, large quantities of brecciated conglomerates, 

 sands, and marls are found flanking the mountains and covering the 

 valleys." J It seems probable that these sedimentary beds are the ones 

 from which Brunet obtained the fossil shells, and that they are the re- 



*Noticia acera dos animaes de racas extinctas descobertos em varios pontos do Brazil. Pelo Dr 

 F. L. C. Burlamaque. Bibliotheca Guanabarense. Trabalhos da Sociedade Vellosiana, 1855, pp. 

 19, 20. 



tNotieia acerca de alguns mineraes e rochas de varias provincias do Brazil, recebidos no Museo 

 Nacional durante o anno de 1855. Por Dr F. L. C. Burlamaque. Revista Brazileira, Rio de Janeiro 

 (1858), vol. ii, pp. 73-104. 



X Williamson: Geology of Parahiba and Pernambuco gold regions, Trans. Manchester Geol. 

 Soc, 1867, vol. vi, p. 115. 



