248 ON THE TIMBER LANDS TRAVERSED BY A 
teen miles of Jackson, Breathitt county; and at its mouth the 
road leaves the river and turns up it, follows it to its head, 
crosses the divide at its head waters, and descends onto West 
Fork of Cane Creek, down which it follows toward North 
Fork of Kentucky river. The timbers all through these high, 
abrupt, and inaccessible hills, and deep, rich, ravine-like hol- 
lows, are scarcely surpassed in the State. A considerable 
amount of fine old forest walnut, black birch, and cherry still 
stand in these fastnesses, and gigantic liriodendrons, white 
oaks, ashes, lindens, locusts, chestnuts, elms, buckeyes, mag- 
nolias, and maples have, so far, bid defiance to the axes that 
have laid these timbers waste in other parts of the State. 
Civilization has not yet penetrated into these forest wilds, 
and the grandeur of the trees and the silence of the woods 
make a striking impression upon one. 
The tall, dark, rich-green oak spoken of heretofore, and 
which I have called vzch red oak, flourishes all through these 
woods. It is probably the macrocarpa of the botanies. A 
few hackberries, considerable gray birch, some white pine, 
&c., are met with. 
High up on Upper Twin Creek, about seven miles from 
Jackson, on a hill-side facing north and east, at a barometric 
height of thirty-five feet above the small stream below, a 
rich belt of black walnut trees encircles the hill. There 
are not a great many trees in the belt, but some of them are 
exceedingly fine. Beds of coal are found along Upper Twin 
Creek, and the formation is coal-measure sandstone. All 
through the woods there is found, in great abundance, a hick- 
-ory which I have called mzcrocarpa, because it is evidently a 
variety of the ‘‘white hickory” of former reports on Ken- 
tucky timbers. It is a tall, clean-trunked, fine-bodied tree, 
branching high; bark comparatively thin, nearly smooth right 
at base, where the shallow interspaces of the bark are nearly 
straight, or only slightly chipped, but considerably more 
chipped higher up the trunk; leaves linear, acute at base, 
lance-tipped, serrate and smooth, except slightly downy at 
‘base of veins. 
204 
