112 Fossil Trees. 



a table or an old fashioned case of drawers ; other fragments are worn 

 into inverted pyramids. This deposit is very interesting in another 

 point of view^ ; it contains a vast many fossil trees entombed in its 

 bosom, of a family much more recent, than those found in the strata 

 below^. They are composed of silicious matter, tinged vfith iron, 

 which has given them durability to resist decomposition, after the 

 sandstone, has crumbled away and left them. Whole trees with their 

 roots and branches attached have been found on the hills a few 

 miles from Charleston, at an elevation of six hundred feet. The 

 crevices in the original wood, have been filled with fine drusy crys- 

 tals of limpid quartz, which gives to many fragments a beautiful ap- 

 pearance. The trees appear to be generally of the coniferous family 

 and much resemble the Yellow Pine in the form of the knots and 

 arrangement of the ligneous fibres. The bark is always bitumin- 

 ized. That these immense fossils are numerous is inferred from the 

 great number of fragments, of broken branches and roots, strewed 

 over the beds of streams. Some trees have been found, fifty or 

 sixty feet in length and three feet in diameter. They seem to have 

 been torn with violence from their native beds, as the greater num- 

 ber have their roots attached. Whatever may have been the catas- 

 trophe which overwhelmed them, it appears to have been very ex- 

 tensive, as trees of the same character are found imbedded in a sim- 

 ilar rock, at Gallipolis, below the mouth of the Kenawha, and on 

 Shade river a few miles south of Athens ; at the latter place they 

 are very numerous. The same are also found on the hills in Scioto 

 county, and without doubt on the Sandy river, as its sandstone rocks are 

 similar. I have specimens from several of these places. This stra- 

 tum, seems to have been among the last of the sedimentary rocks, 

 and completed the series deposited from the waters which once cov- 

 ered this region. It was formed long after the coal beds, as I have 

 seen fragments of bituminous coal, taken from the rock, disclosed 

 by the quarry men in preparing the stone for building. A living 

 toad was also found in the same deposit, it being, where not wasted 

 away by natural causes, the upper one on our hills. 



Very few fossil shells, or animal remains of any species, are found 

 in the valley of the Kenawha, in the surface strata, although it is 

 probable, from the composition of the lower strata, that they con- 

 tain numerous relics of the ancient world. They cannot, however, 

 be reached without the aid of shafts, which, it is thought will 

 not be attempted very soon, in search of the rock salt, supposed to 



