140 BURIED TREES. [CHAP. XXX 



Sellick. who commanded the Rainbow, that, last season, when, 

 the water was low, the stumps of the buried trees were as con 

 spicuous as ever at the base of the cliff, which has been much 

 undermined by the river since the year 1838, when Dr. Carpenter 

 explored it. The fossil forest was 12 feet under water when I 

 landed, but at higher levels I saw the trunks of two trees buried 

 in a vertical position at different levels, each of them about 2 

 feet high. I estimated the height of the entire cliff to be about 

 75 feet, consisting in part of stiff unctuous clay, and partly of 

 loam, but with no chalk, as stated by Bartram. A small 

 streamlet, artificially led to the top of the bluff, had, within the 

 last four years, cut out a ravine no less than sixty feet deep 

 through the upper loamy beds. In the sections thus laid open, 

 I saw precisely such deposits as a river would form in its bed, or 

 in the swamps which it had occasionally flooded. Near the 

 bottom was a layer of leaves, resembling those of the bay, with 

 numerous roots of trees and wood in a fresher state than I ever 

 saw them in any tertiary formation. Taking a canoe, I after 

 ward proceeded to examine that part of the cliff which extends 

 about a mile down the river s left bank, immediately below Port 

 Hudson, where it is between seventy and eighty feet high. The 

 deposits laid open to view were divisible into three groups, the 

 topmost consisting of brown clay, the middle of whitish siliceous 

 sand, and the lower of green clay. I found some men digging 

 the middle or sandy stratum for making bricks, and they had just 

 come upon a prostrate buried tree, black and carbonized, but not 

 turned into lignite. I counted in it 220 rings of annual growth. 

 Near it I found two other smaller fossil trunks, all lying as if 

 they had been drift wood carried down by a river and buried in 

 sand. One of the men pointed out to me that the structure of 

 the wood showed distinctly that they belonged to three different 

 species, one being oak, another hickory, and the third sassafras. 

 Their texture seemed certainly that of distinct genera of trees, 

 but for the accuracy of my informant s determination I can not 

 vouch. At this point they told me the bluff has, in the course 

 of the last eight years, lost ground no less than 200 feet by the 

 encroachment of the river. 



