7S ECONOMIC BOTANY OF ALABAMA. 



B. (Central) Long-leaf Pine Hills. 



(Figures 28-30.) 



The boundaries of this belt are so vague that its area 

 cannot be estimated with accuracy, but it is probably 

 about 850 square miles. Besides the area shown on the 

 map there are several patches of almost precisely similar 

 country a few square miles in extent in the eastern part 

 of Tuscaloosa County within a few miles of Brookwood, 

 where the underlying rocks are Coal Measures. Al- 

 though this belt does not extend beyond the borders of 

 the state, it has a good deal in common with the fall-line 

 sand-hills of Georgia and the Carolinas. Westward it 

 has no counterpart. 



References.— Reed (44-68), Smith 8 (349, 541, 545- 

 546). Also U. S. soil surveys of Hale, Bibb, Perry and 

 Autauga Counties. 



Geoiogy ar.d soils. — The strata of this belt are all of 

 the Tuscaloosa formation, and vary from pink and yellow 

 cross-bedded loamy sands to mottled white and purple 

 clays, with the various phases often passing into each 

 other in short distances horizontally. The liver-colored 

 and mouse-colored clays with their fine network of 

 cracks, described under the short-leaf pine belt, seem to 

 be wanting here. The summits of many of the hills are 

 capped with ledges of horizontally bedded blackish fer- 

 ruginous sandstone, which are doubtless only local in- 

 durations. Thin plates and fragments of the same kind 

 of rock and of shiny brown limonite are strewn profusely 

 over many of the higher slopes. The Lafayette forma- 

 tion, if it exists in this belt, is less typical than elsewhere. 

 The soils are mainly sandy, and deficient in lime. 



Topography and hydrography. — This belt is pretty 

 hilly, for the coastal plain, and almost mountainous in 

 Tuscaloosa County, where some of the hilltops are prob- 

 ably at least 250 feet above valleys less than half a mile 

 distant. The valleys are rather narrow, and sometimes 

 ravine-like. The northeastern or inland edge of this belt 

 makes a sort of escarpment which can be seen from the 

 Mobile & Ohio R. R. nearly all the way from Duncanville 



