192 UPRIGHT BUEIED TREES. [CHAP. XXXI. 



I saw here and there the buried stools of cypresses, 

 and other trees, in an upright position, with their 

 roots attached, sometimes repeated at several different 

 levels in the face of the same bank. I first remarked 

 one of these at a point forty-five miles above New 

 Orleans, and they increased in number as we as 

 cended. When first told of this phenomenon, before 

 visiting the Mississippi, it appeared to me very diffi 

 cult of explanation. I soon, however, discovered 

 that the great river, in its windings, often intersects 

 the swamps or cypress basins which had been pre 

 viously filled up with fine mud or vegetable matter, 

 at various distances from the former river-channel. 



Suppose an ancient bed of the Mississippi, or some 

 low part of the plain, to become fit for the growth of 

 cypress, yet to be occasionally flooded, so that the 

 soil is slowly raised by fine mud, drift wood, or 

 vegetable matter like peat. As the cypress ( Taxodium 

 distichum) often attains to the age of three or four 

 centuries, and, according to many accounts, occasion 

 ally in Louisiana to that of two thousand years, it is 

 clear that the bottoms of the oldest trees will often 

 be enveloped in soil several feet deep, before they 

 die, and rot down to the point where they have been 

 covered up with mud. In the mean time other trees 

 will have begun to grow on adjoining spots, at dif 

 ferent and considerably higher levels, and eventually 

 some of these will take root in soil deposited directly 

 over the stump or decayed trunk of some of the first 

 or oldest series of cypresses. They who have studied 

 the delta affirm that such successive growths of trees 

 are repeated through a perpendicular height of twenty- 



