334 BOTANY AND PALEONTOLOGY 



characteristic, more than the chemical nature of the stone. This may be 

 true for a number of species, and is easy to explain ; for such trees, like 

 the Pines, receive their food and moisture from the humidity of the 

 atmosphere, and thrive on every soil, provided it is strong enough to fix 

 their roots, and porous enough to give access to atmospheric air. But even 

 among the species of trees there are some of which the distribution cannot 

 be explained in this manner. Thus, the Juniper is peculiar to the lime- 

 stone, and vegetates as well upon the naked rock as in the loose, alluvial, 

 or dry soil of the hills, when they are derived from limestone. A number 

 of herbaceous plants have, still more than the trees, this disposition to 

 follow a peculiar formation, rather than be ruled in their distribution by 

 purely physical laws. Even considering such species as the Pine, it is not 

 certain at all that secret and purely geological influences have no action in 

 their distribution, although we see them growing upon two as different 

 formations as the cherty limestone and the sandstone. If the amount of 

 silex of the sandstone favors their growth, this chemical principle is still 

 more predominant in the chert. If the Pines follow the ridges all along 

 the Arkansas River, and in Pulaski County cover by themselves hills 

 entirely formed of quartz, we can see there that this quartz is either a 

 metamorphic sandstone, or a peculiar substance which has taken the place 

 of the sandstone, keeping still in its fissures a good deal of the remains or 

 pieces of the original stone. Thus the Pines, though growing there appa- 

 rently upon the quartz, can still spread their rootlets in its numerous 

 fissures, where fragments of sandstone are still remaining. Moreover, chemi- 

 cally considered, quartz does not differ from flint or chert, and sandstone 

 is mostly a compound of quartz. 



The divide between "War Eagle and White River is high, steep, and 

 formed of a cherty limestone so porous that it resembles pumice. This 

 rock is of course barren and uncultivated, being entirely deprived of water 

 by percolation. It is covered by the Yellow Pine, the Chincapin, and the 

 Chestnut, the Rock Chestnut Oak, the Black Jack, and the Post Oak, with 

 some of the hardest species of herbaceous plants of the prairies. 



From White River, after passing a rocky divide, the road ascends to a 

 high plateau, covered with the far-extended and beautiful prairies of the 

 Osages. They still overlay the cherty Subcarboniferous limestone; in some 

 parts apparently the sandstone ; and have the same nature and the same 

 soil as the other prairies of this section. They are flat and of wide extent, 

 and the lowest parts of the surface are marshy and somewhat difficult to 

 drain. In the spring the low grounds are covered by three feet of water. 

 Where the drainage has been attended to, the prairie soil produces, on an 

 average, forty bushels of corn, or fifteen to twenty bushels of wheat an acre, 

 or one thousand to fifteen hundred pounds of tobacco. It gives also fine 

 crops of oats and of hay. 



