80 COAL-FIELD OF ALABAMA. [CHAP. XXV. 



coal formation, precisely like the strata in which 

 coal occurs in England. These hills were covered 

 with long-leaved pines, and the large proportion 

 they bear to the hard wood is said to have been 

 increased by the Indian practice of burning the 

 grass ; the bark of the oak and other kinds of hard 

 wood being more combustible, and more easily in 

 jured by fire, than that of the fir tribe. Everywhere 

 the young seedlings of the long-leaved pine were 

 coming up in such numbers, that one might have sup 

 posed the ground to have been sown with them ; and 

 I was reminded how rarely we see similar self-sown 

 firs in English plantations. When we had gone 

 about twenty miles north* east of Tuscaloosa, we came 

 to a higher country, where nearly all the pines dis 

 appeared, and were replaced by oak, hiccory, sumach, 

 gum trees, sassafras, and many others. In some 

 clearings here, as in Georgia and the Carolinas, the 

 quantity or cordage of wood fit for charcoal produced 

 in thirty years by the new growth, is said, from its 

 greater density, to have equalled the wood contained 

 in the aboriginal forest. 



Near the banks of the Black Warrior river, we 

 examined several open quarries of coal, where the 

 edges of the beds had been dug into by different pro 

 prietors, no regular mining operations having as yet 

 been attempted. Even at the outcrop the coal is of 

 excellent quality, and highly bituminous, and I soon 

 satisfied myself that the strata were not of the age of 

 the Richmond coal before described * , but were 

 as ancient as that of the Alleghany Hills, or of 



* Ante, vol. i. p. 283. 



