Tennessee Flora. 13 



due to waves of excessive cold ; such, at least, seem the dead trunks, 

 looming up here and there, to suggest. 



VALLEY LANDS. 



If you approach the mountains of East Tennessee from their 

 western slope, taking a direct course eastward, traveling from 

 Cleveland along the road which leads to the copper mines in Polk 

 Count}^, you are constantly uphill and downhill for nearly fifteen 

 miles, intersecting a series of low parallel ridges. The soil is 

 directly derived from the underlying rock, one of the lowest mem- 

 bers of the Silurian formation, and only very small strips of allu- 

 vium line the few streamlets which you have to cross. Along this 

 line is also the watershed, between the Tennessee Eiver system and 

 the Coosa Eiver. It belongs mainly to that class of land which, all 

 over the State, is not very favorably known as gravelly hills, from a 

 superficial covering of sharp cherty or dolomitic gravels of all 

 sizes, generally small, but often also protruding in dykelike masses. 

 Magnesian and siliceous rocks, no matter to which geological age 

 they may belong, are, all the world over, the most unavailing min- 

 eral constituents of soil, and, for the lack of alkali and phosphates, 

 are soon exhausted by crops which consume much of these elements. 

 The generally thin covering of humus supports a meager herbage, 

 and cattle have to be on their feet all the while in defense against 

 starvation. Black-jack oaks, Spanish oak, black oak, sourwood, 

 dogwood, slim chestnuts, loblolly pine, scrub pine, and here and 

 there a yellow pine which has escaped the ax, make up the forest, 

 which, throughout this . region, is stripped of the merchantable 

 timber. I have, myself, within thirty-five years, witnessed the rise 

 and fall of this empire. The short space of time which passed be- 

 tween the first harvest and hopeless abandonment had not yet 

 prostrated all the dead timber girdled in the first clearing, when 

 the returns became too small to pay for the expense of cultivation. 

 Stunted sassafras and persimmon, here and there a loblolly pine, 

 sumacs (Bhus glabra and copallina), are the growth by which 

 regenerating nature tries to reclaim those ruined lands. The herb- 

 age consists generally of very humble plants; the buttonweed 

 (Diodia teres), Virginia plantain (Plantago Virginica) , the flow- 

 ering spurge (Euphorbia coroUota), butterfly weed (Asdepias tube- 

 rosa), two species of broom grass (Andropogon Virginicus and sco- 

 parius), the foxtail grass (Setaria glauca), the poverty grass (Arts- 



