88 STEVENSON— INTERRELATIONS OF THE FOSSIL FUELS. 



Wright^-^ has described the buried forest near the Muir glacier 

 in Alaska. This was deeply buried under gravels, over which the 

 ice extended at a later period. The ice retreated and erosion began, 

 which eventually uncovered the forest. The trees are of large size, 

 mostly like those now growing on the Alaskan mountains and are in 

 a state of complete preservation. These are standing upright in the 

 soil on which they grew, with the humus still about their roots. 

 Some are exposed throughout while others are shown only in part. 

 Many are broken off at from 5 to 20 feet above the roots ; Wright 

 thinks this fracturing due to cakes of ice, that being indicated by 

 scars on the trunks. Russell,^-^ writing about a portion of Alaska 

 farther west, states that the Yahtse River, issuing as a swift cur- 

 rent from beneath a glacier, has invaded a forest at the east and has 

 surrounded the trees with sand and gravel to a depth of many feet. 

 Some of the dead trunks, still retaining their branches, project above 

 the mass, but most of them have been broken off and buried in the 

 deposit. Other streams east from the Yahtse have invaded forests, 

 as is indicated by dead trees standing along their borders. Where 

 the deposit is deepest, the trees have already disappeared and the 

 forest has been replaced with sand flats. The decaying trunks are 

 broken off by the wind and the stems are buried in prostrate position. 

 Nordenskiold,^-* in discussing the distribution of trees in the Yenesei 

 region says : 



" Besides these there are to be found in the most recent layer of the 

 Yenesei tundra, considerably north of the present limit of actual trees, large 

 trees with their roots fast in the soil, which show that the limit of trees in 

 the Yenesei region, even during our own geological period, went farther 

 north than now, perhaps as far as, in consequence of favorable local circum- 

 stances, it now goes on the Lena." 



Resistance to Erosion. — The opinion, that trees would be up- 

 rooted and carried away by the strong current of a flood, is not well- 

 supported as a generalization. The instances cited from Russell and 

 Wright would seem to suffice in refutation and the writer has dis- 



122 G. F. Wright, " Ice Age in North America," 1889, pp. 57-59. 



123 I. C. Russell, "Second Expedition to Mount St. Elias," Thirteenth Ann. 

 Rep. U. S. Geol. Surv., 1893, Pt. I., p. 14, PI. XII. 



12* A. E. Nordenskiold, " The Voyage of the Vega," p. 287. 



