Crossword-Solution: BRECCIAS 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

The whole country appears composed of breccias (and I imagine slates) which universally have been modified and oftentimes completely altered by the action of fire.

The tuffs are pale-coloured, alternating with laminated mudstones and sandstones (all easily fusible), and passing sometimes into fine-grained white beds strikingly resembling the great upper infusorial deposit of Patagonia, and sometimes into brecciolas with pieces of pumice in the last stage of decay; these again pass into ordinary coarse breccias and conglomerates of hard rocks.

All the varieties of porphyritic conglomerates and breccias pass into each other, and by innumerable gradations into porphyries no longer retaining the least trace of mechanical origin: the transition appears to have been effected much more easily in the finer-grained, than in the coarser-grained varieties.

Hence they differ from the volcanic rocks, not only by their more crystalline texture, but also by the absence of tuffs and breccias, which are the products of eruptions at the earth’s surface, or beneath seas of inconsiderable depth.

Such breccias may have been partly the result of the subÆrial waste of an old land-surface which gradually sank down and suffered littoral denudation in proportion as it became submerged.