EASTERN RED HILLS. .V: 51 



weevil came to interfere with the cotton crop,f and they 

 may be first now ; and the raising of hogs has increased cor- 

 respondingly. These changes have proved so profitable to 

 the farmers that plans have been made to erect a monument 

 to the boll-weevil in the town of Enterprise. 



4. The lime-sink region. 



(Figures 16-18; tables 9-12.) 



The lime-sink region, which extends from Southwest 

 Georgia to West Florida, covers about 1,300 square miles in 

 Alabama, where its typical features are not so well dis- 

 played as in the other two states, however. A small area in 

 Washington County, extending westward into Mississippi, 

 which cannot very well be combined with the regions north 

 and south of it, is also referred to this region provisionally. 

 The southeastern corner of Alabama is often called the 

 "wire-grass country," from the fact that wire-grass is more 

 abundant there than elsewhere in Alabama ; but this name 

 cannot be appropriately used for the whole lime-sink region 

 in three states, for wire-grass is still more abundant farther 

 east in Georgia and farther south in Florida, in quite dif- 

 ferent regions. 



GEOLOGY. 



The underlying strata are mostly of the Vicksburg for- 

 mation (uppermost Eocene), probably chiefly limestone 

 when first deposited, but now very largely silicified, per- 

 haps on account of the overlying sandy soil and copious 

 .summer rain. A reddish or yellowish, often mottled, sandy 

 clay several or many feet thick usually overlies the rock, 

 and is paler and sandier at the surface, making prevailingly 

 acid soils, with very little indication of the limestone be- 

 neath. The limestone contains many subterranean chan- 

 nels into which a good deal of the surface water finds its 

 way, so that running water is scarcer than in most other 

 parts of Alabama, and in some places wells have to be dug 

 fifty feet or more to reach water for domestic purposes. 

 Good artesian water can be had almost anywhere from a 

 depth of a few hundred feet, but the wells do not overflow. 

 There are a few large limestone springs, and Healing 

 Springs, a small spring in the western division, is noted for 

 its supposed medicinal virtues. 



