CHAP. XXIII.] FOSSILS COLLECTED AT LANDINGS. 47 



is thus advantageously situated, usually builds a warehouse, not 

 only for storing up for embarkation the produce of his own land, 

 but large enough to take in the cotton of his neighbors. A long 

 and steeply-inclined plane is cut in the high bank, down which 

 one heavy bale after another is made to slide. The negroes show 

 great dexterity in guiding these heavy packages ; but occasionally 

 they turn over and over before reaching the deck of the boat, and 

 sometimes, though rarely, run off the course and plunge into the 

 river, where they float till recovered. Had I not been engaged 

 in geological inquiries, I should probably have had my patience 

 severely tried by such repeated stoppings at every river cliff; but 

 it. so happened that the captain always wanted to tarry at the 

 precise points where alone any sections of the cretaceous and ter 

 tiary strata were visible, and was often obliged to wait long 

 enough to enable me to make a tolerably extensive collection of 

 the most characteristic fossils. In the present instance and I 

 shall have by-and-by to mention other similar ones Captain 

 Bragdon was not only courteous, but perfectly understood, and 

 entered into my pursuits, and had himself collected organic re 

 mains 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 labors. 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 lo\ver 

 portion of a series of horizontal strata is thus entirely concealed 

 from view. The bluffs which I first examined 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 creta 

 ceous formation. At Centerport these unctuous marls or calca 

 reous clays are called by the people soap-stone, and form cliffs 

 150 feet in perpendicular height, in which, as well as at Selma, 

 I collected the large Gryphcea costata and the Ostrea falcata, 

 more than one species of Inoceramus, and other characteristic 

 fossil shells. At White Bluff, where the blue marlite whitens 



