148 UPRIGHT BURIED TREES. [CHAP. XXXI. 



repeated at several different levels iii the face of the same bank. 

 I first remarked one of these at a point forty-five miles above New 

 Orleans, and they increased in number as we ascended. When 

 first told of this phenomenon, before visiting the Mississippi, it 

 appeared to me very difficult of explanation. I soon, however, 

 discovered that the great river, in its windings, often intersects 

 the swamps or cypress basins which had been previously filled up 

 with fine mud or vegetable matter, at various distances from the 

 former river-channel. 



Suppose an ancient bed of the Mississippi, or some low part 

 of the plain, to become fit for the growth of cypress, yet to be 

 occasionally flooded, so that the soil is slowly raised by fine mud, 

 drift wood, or vegetable matter like peat. As the cypress ( Taxo- 

 diuin distichum} often attains to the age of three or four centu 

 ries, and, according to many accounts, occasionally in Louisiana 

 to that of two thousand years, it is clear that the bottoms of the 

 oldest trees will often be enveloped in soil several feet deep, before 

 they die, and rot down to the point where they have been covered 

 up with mud. In the mean time other trees will have begun to 

 grow on adjoining spots, at different and considerably higher levels, 

 and eventually some of these will take root in soil deposited directly 

 over the stump or decayed trunk of some of the first or oldest 

 series of cypresses. They who have studied the delta affirm that 

 such successive growths of trees are repeated through a perpendic 

 ular height of twenty-five feet without any change occurring in 

 the level of the land.* 



Proceeding up the river, we soon passed Bayou Sara on our 

 right hand, and came to the isthmus called the Raccourci cut 

 off, across which a trench nine feet deep has been dug, in the 

 hope that the Mississippi would sweep out a deep channel. This 

 &quot; cut-off/ should it ever become the main channel, would enable 

 a steamer to reach, in one mile, a point, to gain which costs 

 now a circuit of twenty-six miles, and two and a half hours. 

 Unfortunately, when they cleared the forest in this spot, the soil 

 of the new canal was found to consist of a stiff blue clay, 



* See Dickeson and Brown, Silliman s Journal, Second Series, vol. v. p. 

 17, Jan. 1848. 



