50 FOSSILS COLLECTED AT LANDINGS. [CHAP. XXIII. 



lected organic remains for a friend in the college of 

 Louisville, Kentucky ; so that while the cotton or 

 wood were taking on board, he would often assist me 

 in my labours. Were it not for one serious drawback, 

 a cruise in a cotton steamer would be the paradise of 

 geologists. Unfortunately, in the season when the 

 water is high, and when the facilities of locomotion 

 are greatest, the base of every bluff is many feet, 

 and sometimes fathoms, under water, and the lower 

 portion of a series of horizontal strata is thus entirely 

 concealed from view. The bluffs which I first exa 

 mined consisted of a marlite divided into horizontal 

 layers as regular as those of the lias of Europe, and 

 which might have been taken for lias but for the 

 included fossils, which prove them to belong to the 

 cretaceous formation. At Centreport these unc 

 tuous marls or calcareous clays are called by the 

 people soap-stone, and form cliffs 150 feet in per 

 pendicular height, in which, as well as at Selma, 

 I collected the large Grypluza costata and the Ostrea 

 falcata, more than one species of Inoceramus, and 

 other characteristic fossil shells. At White Bluff, 

 where the blue marlite whitens, when exposed to the 

 air, a fine range of precipices covered with wood 

 forms a picturesque feature in the scenery ; but I 

 obtained the richest harvest of cretaceous fossils far 

 below, at a landing called Prairie Bluff. 



The banks of the Alabama, like those of the Sa 

 vannah and Alatamaha rivers, are fringed with canes, 

 over which usually towers the deciduous cypress, 

 covered with much pendant moss. The misletoe 

 enlivens the boughs of several trees, still out of 



