CHAP. XXV.] COAL-FIELD OF ALABAMA. 6D 



hill 450 feet above the level of the sea. Here I was welcomed 

 by the professor of chemistry, Mr. Brumby, who had the kindness 

 to set out immediately with me (Feb. 10) to examine the coal 

 fields lying immediately north of this place. Starting in a north 

 easterly direction, we first entered a hilly country formed of sand 

 stone, grit, and shale of the coal formation, precisely like the strata 

 in Avhich 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 injured by fire, 

 than that of the fir tribe. Every where the young seedlings of 

 the long-leaved pine were coming up in such numbers that one 

 might have supposed 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 

 northeast of Tuscaloosa, we came to a higher country, where 

 nearly all the pines disappeared, and were replaced by oak, hick 

 ory, 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 equaled the 

 wood contained in the aboriginal forest. 



Near the banks of the Black Warrior River, we examined sev 

 eral open quarries of coal, where the edges of the beds had been 

 dug into by different proprietors, 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 Western Virginia. In the beds of black shale cover 

 ing each coal-seam, were impressions of fossil plants, precisely sim 

 ilar to those occurring in the ancient coal-measures of Europe 

 and America. Among these we found more than one species of 

 Catamite, several ferns of the genera Sphenopteris and JVeurop- 

 teris, the trunks of Lepidodendron and Sigilaria, the stems and 

 * Ante, vol. i. p. 214. 



