68 THE TOMBECKBEE RIVER. [CHAP. XXV. 



noeuvre which could not be practiced when vessels are going 

 in the opposite direction. Al| the chairs in the cabin of the 

 Tuscaloosa were so constructed as to be capable of floating, and 

 acting as life-preservers a useful precaution on a river, whatever 

 may be thought of such safeguards in an ocean steamer. 



The river Tombeckbee was so high that the trees of both 

 banks seemed to be growing in a lake. Before dark, we came 

 to the limestone bluff at St. Stephen s, more than sixty miles due 

 north of Mobile, and nearly 150 miles by the windings of the 

 river. The tide is still slightly perceptible, even at this distance 

 from the sea, and the water never rises during a flood more than 

 five or six feet above its ordinary level ; whereas, higher up, at 

 Demopolis, the extreme rise is not less than fifty feet, and at 

 Tuscaloosa, sixty-nine feet. At the latter place, indeed, we 

 found the waters so high, that the falls were converted into 

 mere rapids. The magnificent scale of the navigation on these 

 southern rivers in the rainy season, contrasts remarkably with 

 the want of similar facilities of water communication in Texas 

 and the more western countries bordering the gulf of Mexico. 

 We admired the canes on the borders of the river between Tus 

 caloosa and Dernopolis, some of which I found to be thirty feet 

 high. Whether this magnificent reed, which is said sometimes 

 to grow forty feet high, is a distinct species, or merely a variety 

 of Miegia macrosperma, which I had seen from six to ten feet 

 high, as far north as Kentucky and North Carolina, botanists 

 are not yet agreed. 



Tuscaloosa is situated, like Augusta, Milledgeville, and Co 

 lumbus, at the falls of a river, though, in this instance, the falls 

 do not occur, as usual, at the junction of the granitic rocks, with 

 the tertiary or cretaceous strata, but at the point where the latter 

 first meet the carboniferous formation. The lower beds of the 

 horizontal cretaceous series in contact with the inclined coal-mea 

 sures, consist of gravel, some of the quartzose pebbles being as 

 large as hens eggs, and they look like an ancient beach, as if the 

 cretaceous sea had terminated here, or shingle had been accumu 

 lated near a shore. 



There is a flourishing college at Tuscaloosa, standing upon a 



