OF SANTO DOMINGO. ■ • 139 



From there, the heavy bedded sandstones of Nizao Arriba, and the jaspery slates 

 extend to near Maniel. A specimen of the rock brought on from the north face of 

 Mount Vanilejo is a black granitoid material, containing much black hornblende, 

 very little feldspar, some quartz, and some light reddish-brown mica. From the 

 south side I received a very fine-grained gray syenite, and from the neighborhood of 

 Rancho Arriba, high up on the ]^izao River, Mr. Pennell brought reddish brown, 

 fine-grained sandstone with lime seams ; bluish-grey jaspery slate like that of the 

 ]S[igua, and a white quartz sandstone, full of small crj^stals of pyrites. The last rock 

 is entirely unlike any other encountered by us, but Mr. Pennell reports that the grains 

 of pyrites are by no means a rare feature in the beds of this vicinity. 



* ■ 



The Bonao pass, as it is always called, continues south from Piedra Blanca, across 

 low rolling ground to Aguacate, crosses the creek of the same name, and a short 

 piece of rather level ground and then ascends the hill of the Laguneta. At Agua- 

 cate, is a little settlement which extends, straggling along both sides of the road, to 

 the Maimon River. The inhabitants cultivate a little corn and tobacco, and raise a 

 few pigs which run wild in the surrounding forest. The place owes its only impor- 

 tance, perhaps its existence, to the fact that it is the last spot with inhabitants ; really 

 the last spot comfortably habitable before crossing the mountains. The hills of La- 

 guneta are too steep and the canons too narrow to give a good site for occupation, 

 and, although the savanas on the summit of the Laguneta ridge are broad enough for 

 a good-sized village, the nearest water is hundreds of feet down in the bottoms. This 

 ridge is made up of a gray to greenish semi-talcose slate, and is fall of quartz veins, 

 some of them four and five feet thick. The quartz is so abundant here as to make a 

 very large part, possibly as much as a third of the mass. I have already alluded to 

 the fine views obtained from this point. Half a mile of these grassy hills take us to 

 the edge of the woods of the main ridge, and here the scattered pine trees give way 

 along a sharp line of demarkation to a forest in every respect tropical. The under- 

 l3^ing rock is a white shale, very soft, easily decomposing on exposure, stained every- 

 where with peroxide of iron, and making a clay soil of a brick red color that is almost 

 impervious to water. It is covered Avith a dense growth of an infinitude of species 

 of large trees, tangled and tied together by long vines, some of them with trunks as 

 thick as the trees that support them, climbing to the tops of the tallest trees and 

 hanging in festoons or loops across every open space, l^or is the undergrowth less 

 dense. The young trees, with their entanglement of smaller vines, the bushes and 

 shrubs are all overgrown with the terrible yal^acoa grass, a climbing plant, jointed 

 and leaved like a gi'ass, every leaf with a notched edge that cuts like a knife. The 



