36 CHARLES H. WHITE 



Tertiary sediments (Ripley, Lignite, Buhrstone, Claiborne, and 

 White limestone) deposited in an area, limited on the east by a 

 line midway between the Alabama and the Chattahoochee, and 

 on the west by a line similarly drawn between the Alabama and 

 the Tombigbee Rivers; sediments that occupy an area of 6,500 

 square miles and a volume of 2,340 cubic miles. The volume of 

 material carried away from the basin of the Alabama and its 

 tributaries between the Cretaceous and Tertiary peneplains is 

 about 622 cubic miles; but if we add to this the volume carried 

 from between the two peneplains in the upper Tennessee valley, 

 the total amounts to 2,500 cubic miles. 



If it be admitted that the only source of the Cretaceous and 

 Tertiary sediments in the area named was from between the Cre- 

 taceous and Tertiary peneplains in the two river basins, and that 

 this detritus was carried out in the direction named, the evidence 

 is conclusive that the Appalachian River was a reality. But 

 from the character of the coastal plain beds in this particular 

 area, it is doubtful if the Alabama River, or its ancestor, should 

 be held wholly responsible for the strata lying along its lower 

 course. At least one-third of the thickness of these beds shown 

 in outcrops is of limestone, bearing quantities of corals and other 

 fossils.^ The Alabama River cannot be held accountable for 

 those deposits transported in solution or in a very finely divided 

 state to the exclusion of the other rivers emptying into the 

 Mississippi embayment. After the formation of the Nita cre- 

 vasse in 1890, fine mud from the Mississippi River was deposited 

 in Mississippi Sound even up to the mouth of Mobile Bay, driving 

 out the fish and killing the oysters.^ The thickest and most 

 important of the beds attributed to the Appalachian River, the 

 Lignitic (900 feet), is composed of cross-bedded sands and 

 clays, and would seem, at first sight, more than all others, to 

 have been deposited by this river ; but a study of the whole area 

 shows that this formation increases in thickness and in coarseness 

 toward the west, in western Alabama and in Mississippi ; while 



' Eugene A. Smith, L. C. Johnson, and Daniel W. Langdon, Jr., Report 

 on the Geology of the Coastal Plain of Alabama (1894), pp. 107 ff- 

 ^ Ibid., p. 30. 



