Successive Forests-Terrors of the Mississippi.

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those with black roots, which formed the inferior ranges. By two different modes of computation, we found that there must have been 4 ranges,—that is, either four or five generations of trees must have grown in succession, and perished on the spot.

The danger of navigating the Mississippi did not deter our author from visiting the mouths of the great river, in order to examine the banks of sand, mud, and drift timber, which have been recently formed there during the annual inundations. According to published accounts of the casualties of the preceding year, 50 steamers had been snagged in the river, (penetrated with stumps of trees called snags); 27 sunk; 16 burst their boilers; 15 had been run into by other vessels; 13 destroyed by fire; 10 wrecked; and 7 cut through by Ice.

Notwithstanding this display of terrors, with the enumeration of the number of persons drowned or injured, our author, accompanied by Dr. Carpenter, embarked in the "Wave" steamer. After having been seated half-an-hour on the deck, Dr. Carpenter was advised by a friend to go, by preference, in a rival and safer boat, which was ready to start. They accordingly did so, and she sailed first. Eight hours later when they were detained at a "landing," the rival steamer slowly approached, and had no sooner reached them, than all her passengers came into the other steamer in the greatest alarm, but uninjured, from the bursting of their steam-pipe. In spite of this ominous commencement of their voyage, they descended the river in safety, and "entered the long promontory or tongue of land, if such it can be called, which consists simply of the broad river flowing between narrow banks, protruded for so many miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Each bank, including the swamps behind it, is about 200 or 300 yards wide, covered with dead reeds." The strange circumstance of the "river thus, as it were, going to sea," and preserving its channel for centuries, in spite of the waters of the Gulf breaking over its banks, is justly ascribed by our author to the powerful body of fresh water flowing in a valley from 100 to 250 feet deep, and between vast mounds of mud and sand on each side, into a sea comparatively shallow. On their arrival at Balize, a village with 250 souls, they were surprised at seeing 70 or more dwellings, erected on piles driven into the mud banks, and among reeds half as high as the houses, and which often grew close to them; a wooden bridge over a pool of water uniting the building with its outhouses. A long wooden platform of planks on piles, along the main channel entered by the steamer, served as a promenade upon which the "pilots' wives and daughters, and among them the belles of the place, well dressed and accompanied by their pet dogs, took their evening walk." Whenever a hurricane is apprehended, the

VOL. XIV. NO. XXVIII.

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greater part of the houses built on piles are moored like ships to strong anchors! The population is so great that should the Gulf rise six feet, as it did in 1812, there are scarcely boats enough to save the people,

This mighty river often bursts its banks and finds a shorter cut to the sea. In May 1846 it burst through the Carthrage crevasse which continued open for eight weeks, during which it obtained a breadth of eighty feet. The water rushed into Lake Pontchartrace, when nothing was visible between that great Lagoon and the Mississippi, but the tops of tall cypress trees growing in the morass, and a narrow black stripe of earth which was the top of the levée or embankment that marked the course of the river. In 1844 the river burst its banks in another place, inundating the low cultivated land between the highest part of the bank and the swamp. The water rushed through the opening at the rate of ten miles an hour, injuring thousands of valuable acres, sucking in several flat boats, and carrying them over a watery waste into a dense swamp forest, where the voyagers might remain entangled among the trees till they were starved, if canoes were not sent to traverse the swamps in the hope of rescuing such wanderers from destruction. It has been asked why the river when it has burst its banks, does not continue in the same course and reach the Gulf of Mexico in a few miles, instead of flowing 200 miles before it reaches the sea. This arises from the great depth of its channel, the bottom of which is greatly below the level of the plain, though the levée or embankinent is raised above it. When the Mississippi is at its height it pours several streams of fresh water tinged with yellow sediment, twelve or more miles into the sea beyond its mouths. When the keels of vessels plough these broad fields of as it were fluid soil, they turn up a furrow of clear blue water which forms a dark streak in the middle of the ship's wake. The quantity of drift wood floated down the river has not sensibly diminished within the last twenty years, but nearly all of it is now intercepted in the last forty miles above New Orleans, where it is split up into logs for the furnaces of steamers. The Government snag boats have greatly improved the navigation of the river by the extraction of the snags or trunks of uprooted trees which get fixed in the mud, having sunk with their heavier end to the hottom, and remain slanting down the stream, so as to pierce through the bows of vessels sailing up.

Passing over much interesting information respecting the navigation and banks of the Mississippi, and the increase of its Delta,* we are attracted by a curious description given to

*The area of the Delta being about 13,600 square statute miles, and the quantity of solid matter annually brought down by the river 3,702,758,400 cubic feet.

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The Mississippi and its Delta-Fish beneath the Soil. 579

our author of the region of Attakapas, which contain wide quaking prairies" upon which cattle are pastured, and where you may fancy yourself far inland; yet if you pierce any where through the grassy turf to the depth of two feet, you find sea fish swimming about which make their way in search of food under the superficial sward from the Gulf of Mexico through subterranean watery channels. In a country like this we need not wonder at the floating island on Lake Solitude, (a crescent striped sheet of water which was once a bed of the Mississippi,) upon which a gentleman once landed from a canoe, when to his surprise and horror it began to sink with his weight. "In great alarm he climbed a cypress tree, which also began immediately to go down with him as fast as he ascended. He mounted

up higher and higher into its boughs, until at length it ceased to subside, and looking round he saw in every direction, for a distance of 50 yards, the whole wood in motion.

"It appears," says Sir Charles, in explanation of this incident, "that there is always a bayou or a channel connecting, during floods, each deserted bend or lake with the main river, through which large floating logs may pass. These often form rafts and become covered with soil, supporting shrubs and trees. At first such green islands are blown from one part of the lake to the other by the wind, but the deciduous cypress if it springs up in such a soil, sends down roots many yards long, so as to cast anchor in the muddy bottom, rendering the island stationary."-Second Visit, &c., vol. ii., pp. 185, 186.

At Port Hudson, 165 miles above New Orleans, our author went to examine the fossil forest discovered by Bartram in 1777. In 1838 Dr. Carpenter found that the river had worn it away at such a rate as to expose to view a section several hundred feet further east. It consisted of horizontal logs and erect stumps of cypress pushing their roots deep into the clay beneath. This buried forest is covered by a bed of clay 12 feet thick, which is succeeded by another bed of vegetable matter four feet thick, containing top branches and erect stumps, in which none of the large cypresses occur. Sir Charles Lyell could not, on account of the height of the river, see the lowest part of the forest, which was 12 feet under water. In proof that the fossil site of the carried forest must be far from the point where Bartram and Carpenter saw it, the following description of a recent landslip was given him :

"A few years ago when by the curving in of the bank, three acres of ground, 50 or 60 feet high, composed of clay and sand, and covered

(the solid matter being about th part in volume of the water,) it must have taken 67,000 years for the formation of the whole, and if the alluvial matter of the plain above be 264 feet deep, (the Delta being 528 feet thick,) it must have required 33,500 more years for its accumulation, its area being supposed equal to that of the Delta."-Vol. ii. p. 250.

* Seven hundred of these snags were extracted in four weeks from the bed of the Missouri.

by a forest, sank down bodily into the river, and were then gradually washed away, one of the eye-witnesses related to me that the trees were at first seen to tremble, then large rents began to open in the soil deeper and deeper, after which the movement was such that the boughs of the trees lashed each other, and acorns and beach nuts were showered down like hail. A herd of pigs was so intent on devouring these, that they allowed themselves to be carried down vertically 50 feet, the subsidence occupying about five minutes. The outer edge of the bluff with some of the swine fell into the river, but these swam to the next part of the bluff and joined their companions. The owners watched them anxiously till dusk, unable to go to their rescue; but at length, to their surprise, they saw a leader followed by all the rest, wend his way along narrow ledges on the face of the precipice from which the fallen mass had been detached, and climb up to the top. Next morning, to their no less astonishment, they found the herd feeding again on the same perilous ground, and saw them again return by the same path at night."-Second Visit, gc., vol. ii. p. 182.

its

Near Natchez there is an interesting narrow valley, about seven miles long, and in some parts sixty feet deep, which, with its numerous ramifications, has been formed since the earthquake of 1811-12, by which this region was fissured, its floods dried up, and many landslips produced. It is called the "Mammoth Cave," from the fossils which it contained; but it has derived a higher interest throughout Europe and America, from the discovery in it of part of a human pelvis, a fragment of the os innominatum. After a careful examination of the fact, Sir Charles believed that it had been dislodged from some old Indian grove, near the surface, not five, ten, or twenty centuries old, and fallen down into the stream. Had it been found, in situ, at the bottom of the precipice, age would probably have exceeded 100,000 years; but there is no evidence whatever to prove that it occupied such a position. Upon an eminence called St. Rosalie, near Natchez, there are several Indian mounds, from which Dr. Dickson obtained some curious remains of pottery, indicating a much greater progress in the arts than their descendants, who were driven out by the Europeans. Till very recently the antiquities of the United States have been but partially studied, but a most important contribution to antiquarian lore has been recently made by the Smithsonian Institution, founded by James Smithson, Esq., in England, for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men. A copy of this splendid work, illustrated by forty-eight quarto engravings, and three hundred and seren wood engravings, and presented to the writer of this Article by the Trustees of the Institution, is now before us. It contains the most interesting details respecting the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, to which it is limited, and forms the first volume of a noble work, to which nothing analogous has yet been published in

Antiquities-Smithsonian Institution.

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Europe, entitled, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.* The annual income of the fund is £6500, and by the Act of Congress one half of this is to be devoted to the increase and diffusion of knowledge, by means of original research, and publications, and the other to the formation of a library, a museum, and a gallery of art. Our readers will be surprised when we tell them that this noble fund was offered to a Society in England, which refused to comply with the conditions upon which it was to be given.

In order to make geological observations on the region shaken by the great earthquake of 1811, which destroyed Guayra and Caraccas, Sir Charles went to the large village of New Madrid. This town was destroyed, and the Mississippi now flows over its ruins. Its graveyard was precipitated into the river, which swept off the dead as well as the living. The ground quaked almost incessantly for three months. The ground swelled up, and the river flowed backward. The fissures and chasms took certain directions, and the country-people, observing this, felled the tallest trees, and placed them at right angles to this direction. They then stationed themselves on these trees, and thus escaped from being swallowed up by the yawning earth.

"Mr. Bringier, the engineer, related to us that he was on horseback, near New Madrid, when some of the severest shocks were experienced, and that as the waves advanced he saw the trees bend down, and often in the instant afterwards, when in the act of recovering their position, meet the boughs of other trees similarly inclined, so as to become interlocked, being prevented from righting themselves again. The transit of the wave through the woods was marked by the crashing noise of countless branches, first heard on one side and then on the other. At the same time powerful jets of water, mixed with sand, mud, and pieces of bituminous shale, were cast up with such force, that horse and rider might have perished had the undulating ground happened to burst beneath them."-Second Visit, vol. ii. pp. 231, 232.

At the places where the principal fountains of mud and water were thrown up, there were circular cavities, called sink holes, some of which our author found to be ten yards wide and five deep. Sir Charles next made an excursion to what is called the" sunk country," where the descent from the upper to the lower level is not less than twenty, or even thirty feet; but we cannot find room for the very interesting details which will be found in his thirty-third chapter.

In the alluvial plain on the banks of the Mississippi, cypress trunks have been found, containing from 800 to 2000 rings of annual growth. Michaud mentions cypresses forty feet in circuit

*Vol, i. 4to, p. 306. Washington, 1848. Organized in 1846.