344 On the Low Country of North Carolina. 



gervation had been less ample, there will appear to be a very 

 exact resemblance. 



That the shells are every where in the same state of decay, 

 in places remote from each other, at a distance from and 

 contiguous to the sea, is a matter of no uncertainty. If a 

 person be presented with parcels from the upper part of Bla- 

 den county, from the bank of the northeast at Wilmington, 

 seventy miles nearer to the sea, from the sides of the natural 

 well in Duplin, and the banks of Fishing creek near Infield, 

 and of the Meherrin at Murfriesborough, he will be unable to 

 tell, except from the color and consistency of the sand and 

 clay that is intermixed with them, from which locality they 

 came. 



All these appearances are totally at variance with the theo- 

 ry which attributes the low country to the gradual accretions 

 of its shores. Were this view of the matter correct, we 

 should have few large beds of shells — the shells would be 

 worn smooth by the attrition of the sand, and the genera and 

 species, and the state of preservation or decay, in which they 

 are found, would be continually varying as we approached 

 the ocean. This argument will not apply to the tract of al- 

 luvial that lies between the first shells and the fixed rocks, 

 but most persons will be inclined to assign a common origin 

 to the whole of this district. 



3. Though the low country became dry land throughout its 

 whole extent, or nearly its whole extent, at one time, it was 

 not formed by the sudden transportation, from a distance, into 

 the beds which they now occupy, of the sand and clay, which 

 constitute its strata. 



It is now a long time since I read Dr. Hayden's Geological 

 Essays, so that I have but an imperfect recollection of their con- 

 tents ; but I believe he attributes the low country, in part at 

 least, to the currents that have swept across the continent, and 

 brought the sand and gravel of the regions about Hudson's 

 Bay, and deposited them along our seaboard. Of course, that 

 which now occupies the lower district of North Carolina, South 

 Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, must have been borne 

 across the central and western parts of North Carolina. 



That such currents may have swept over the Northern 

 States, I am, from the few faint recollections I have of the 

 beds of sand and gravel, strewed over the interior of the 

 country, inclined to believe. But that they did not pass over 

 the central and western parts of North Carolina, or that if 



