﻿FIELD AND FOREST. 95 



other and at intervals welded together, or coalesced into a solid mass, 

 while below the flat top the several smaller upright trunks were in 

 places joined by a growth extending between them, exactly after the 

 manner of the cartilage connecting the Siamese twins. Independent 

 of their immense conical bases, however, none of these cypresses 

 would be considered large trees in the heavy forest surrounding them, 

 for the tall sweet gums and white ashes scattered among them tow- 

 ered above the highest, while the very finest cypress trunks could not 

 compare in length or symmetry with those of the former tree, they 

 being, though long, rapidly tapering, and disfigured by numerous knots. 

 Some of them had no ramification of the trunk whatever, but merely 

 horizontal lateral branches near the top; one such, a felled one, meas- 

 uring a hundred feet to where the top was broken off, though its 

 diameter near the base was scarcely over a foot. The tallest of 

 these trees were about a hundred and forty feet high, the average of 

 the larger growth being about one hundred and twenty. 



In appearance the Bald Cypress is by all odds the most striking and 

 peculiar-looking tree of our forests. The observer is surrounded by 

 enormous conical masses (they do not look like tree-trunks) of a reddish 

 colored wood, from the centre of which rise tall pillars of the same 

 material, these growing so near together that the intervening spaces 

 are often entirely taken up by the conical excrescences growing from 

 the roots, the whole surface thus being an irregular wooden one, 

 with soil or water only in ' the depressions. Viewed across a 

 pond, these large cypresses are observed to stand in dense clumps, 

 composed of half a dozen or more lofty columnar trunks, straggling 

 branched for three-fourths their height, and surmounted by a flat-topped 

 mass of feathery, light green foliage, while the trunks look bare and 

 cinnamon-colored beneath. 



The undergrowth of the swamp under consideration was not particu- 

 larly dense, but the ground was rendered so rugged by the confusion of 

 knees, fallen logs and the general debris that it proved exceedingly 

 difficult to get through, even in the absence of brushwood. The latter 

 consisted chiefly of water locust, ( Gleditschia monosperma) large- 

 leafed poplar, (Populus heterophylla) red birch, (Betula nigra) — (these 

 of large size, the first sixty and the latter eighty-five feet high, and 

 mostly along the edge, or overhanging the ponds,) Forestiera acumi- 

 nata, Cephalanthus occidentalis (these two in clumps, the former from 



