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found. There are no roads, and for many miles not even a solitary 

 settler is to be seen, but with a good horse and a guide familiar with 

 the cracks, blows and ' sand slews/ the region can be penetrated and 

 tbc earthquake features examined. It is in the depths of these forests 

 along the St. Francis river that the cracks reach their greatest de- 

 velopment. How wide they may have been when first formed and 

 how deep, no one can tell. The 

 originally steep banks have crum- 

 bled and the fissures partly filled 

 until at the present time they re- 

 semble a deep ditch more than a 

 crack. Yet some of these ditch- 

 like depressions are still thirty feet 

 or more across and so deep that a 

 man on horseback can not see over 

 the top, even when he has suc- 

 ceeded in scrambling or sliding 

 down the steep sides. From cracks 

 of this size there are all gradations 

 down to little ones of only a half 

 a foot in depth, but all are still 

 distinctly recognizable. Most of 

 them are within a quarter or half 

 a mile from some river and have a 

 general north-south direction, as if 

 the surface of the land shifted bodily towards the waterways, leaving 

 great rents in the ground where the materials parted. One of the 

 smaller of the cracks is shown by one of the illustrations of the present 

 article (Fig. 1). 



Fissures of another, but equally conspicuous type are the land-slide 

 cracks formed where steep slopes, such as those along the east side of 

 Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee, occurred within the earthquake 

 area. Here the bluffs, which are several hundred feet in height, were 

 literally shaken to pieces by the shocks, the trees uprooted, overturned, 

 or prostrated, and great masses of earth precipitated down the steep 

 hillsides. Figure 2 shows some of the scarps thus formed, while 

 another shows trees overturned at the same time (Fig. 3). Some- 

 times the original trunks are decayed and gone, all perhaps but a 

 projecting stump, but shoots from the original have often taken their 

 place as giants of the forest. 



The features for which the Xew Madrid earthquake is most re- 

 nowned, however, are the swamps and lakes which resulted from the 

 warping of the surface. The former may be seen at many places in 

 southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. In the view of such a 

 VOL. lxix. — G. 



3. Trees Tilted by New Madrid Earth- 

 quake. (Photo by Fuller.) 



