VITALITY OF BURIED VEGETABLE GERMS. 257 



atively sound. Old Savoy Place, in the city of London, is 

 sustained on piles driven more than six hundred and fifty 

 years ago, and they are yet perfectly sound. The ancient 

 and historic city of Venice consists of brick and stone 

 structures resting upon wooden piles which were driven in 

 the seventh and eighth centuries. One of the piles taken 

 up from the bridge built by the Emperor Trajan across the 

 Danube was found petrified to the depth of three quarters 

 of an inch, while the remainder of the substance was un- 

 changed after an interval of sixteen hundred years. The 

 timber maul-handles, shovels, and other wooden imple- 

 ments found in the ancient mines of Lake Superior still re- 

 main in a good state of preservation in cases where they 

 have been immersed in water ; and the wheels employed in 

 draining some of the ancient Roman mines in Spain are 

 represented to be in a perfect state of preservation after 

 the lapse of fourteen hundred and fifty years. The ancient 

 piles in the lake habitations of Central Europe retain a re- 

 markable degree of soundness, though driven before the 

 epoch of written history. 



Passing beyond the range of human records, we remark 

 the existence, along the Atlantic borders of New Jersey, 

 of extensive buried swamps, in which the trunks of the 

 white cedar (Cupressus thyoides, not the "White Cedar" of 

 the West) are found in such a state of preservation that 

 the inhabitants work them up for lumber. So extensive 

 are these deposits of buried tree-trunks that the " mining 

 of timber" has long been a prominent branch of business 

 along some parts of the beach (Fig. 87). They lie from 

 two to fifteen feet beneath the surface. We may form 

 some conjecture in reference to the antiquity of these fossil 

 cedar swamps from the age of the trees which have evi- 

 dently grown upon spots that had been occupied by still 

 earlier generations of trees. Professor Cook informs us 



