SOUTHWESTERN PINE HILLS. 69 



gallberry and the two kinds of tyty, are important sources 

 of honey. The herbaceous vegetation furnishes pasturage 

 most of the year for thousands of cattle, which have free 

 range on all unfenced land. (The same is true also of the 

 lime-sink region, but not now of many other places in Ala- 

 bama.) 



ANIMALS. 



Two characteristic animals des.erve to be mentioned 

 here. At many places in the long-leaf pine forests on 

 the more sandy uplands, east of the Tombigbee River, one 

 can see at any time of the year, but especially in early spring 

 after the burning of the grass, small mounds of sand aver- 

 aging a foot or two in diameter and a few inches high. 

 These are made by the "salamander," a rodent, Geomys 

 Tuza Mobiliensis, which travels underground, feeding on 

 roots, and gets rid of the sand excavated from its tunnels 

 by pushing it out from below without leaving an opening. 

 In areas where it is abundant it keeps the soil pretty well 

 stirred up and must counteract the leaching effect of the 

 summer rain to a considerable extent. It ranges eastward 

 with some variations to the Savannah River, but has never 

 managed to cross the Tombigbee. It is rare in the red hills 

 and unknown in the black belt, but reappears on the pine 

 hills in the central part of the State. Open burrows with 

 mounds of sand of about the same size at their mouths are 

 made in the same general region by a turtle known as the 

 gopher, Testudo or Gopherus Polyphemus, but that is much 

 less abundant in Alabama. 



POPULATION. 



On account of the sandy soil not being very favor- 

 able to agriculture by the older methods, this region 

 has always been sparsely settled. Previous to the Civil War 

 the settlements were practically all either on the edges of 

 the alluvial bottoms of the Mobile delta, where there were 

 a number of large plantations, or along the shores of Mobile 

 Bay, where fishing and commerce furnished a livelihood. 

 The building of railroads, beginning shortly before the war, 

 stimulated the lumber industry, which brought consider- 

 able wealth to some sections and some persons ; and as the 

 timber was removed, ways for making the soil more pro- 



