64 DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY. [CHAP. XXIV 



chant and speculator. The maize, or Indian corn, appears to be 

 almost as precarious a crop, for this year it has entirely failed in 

 many places, owing to the intense summer heat. I passed some 

 mills in which the grain, cob, arid husk were all ground up to 

 gether for the cattle and hogs, and they are said to thrive more 

 on this mixture than on the grain alone. 



The different stages of civilization to which families have 

 attained, who live here on terms of the strictest equality, is often 

 amusing to a stranger, but must be intolerable to some of those 

 settlers who have been driven by their losses from the more ad 

 vanced districts of Virginia and South Carolina, having to begin 

 the world again. Sometimes, in the morning, my host would be 

 of the humblest class of &quot; crackers,&quot; or some low, illiterate Ger 

 man or Irish emigrants, the wife sitting with a pipe in her mouth, 

 doing no work and reading no books. In the evening, I came to 

 a neighbor, whose library was well stored with works of French and 

 English authors, and whose first question to me was, &quot; Pray tell 

 me, who do you really think is the author of the Vestiges of 

 Creation?&quot; If it is difficult in Europe, in the country far from 

 towns, to select society on a principle of congeniality of taste and 

 feeling, the reader may conceive what must be the control of 

 geographical circumstances here, exaggerated by ultra-democratic 

 notions of equality and the pride of race. Nevertheless, these 

 regions will probably bear no unfavorable comparison with such 

 parts of our colonies, in Canada, the Cape, or Australia, as have 

 been settled for an equally short term of years, and I am bound 

 to say, that I passed my time agreeably and profitably in Ala 

 bama, for every one, as I have usually found in newly peopled 

 districts, was hospitable and obliging to a stranger. Instead of 

 the ignorant wonder, very commonly expressed in out-of-the-way 

 districts of England, France, or Italy, at travelers who devote 

 money and time to a search for fossil bones and shells, each 

 planter seemed to vie with another in his anxiety to give me in 

 formation in regard to the precise spots where organic remains 

 had been discovered. Many were curious to learn my opinion 

 as to the kind of animal to which the huge vertebrae, against 

 which their plows sometimes strike, may have belonged. The 



