636 The American Naturalist. [August, 
Monmouth Highlands mark the extreme south and north 
points of the county coast line; for the rest, the New Jersey 
shore is mainly a sandy flat, which formerly was thickly 
fringed with evergreens, much of it being cedar and cypress, 
though the prominences mentioned were densely wooded with 
deciduous trees. 
In the southern part of the State exists a curious industry— 
the mining for cedar—exhuming from their swampy burials 
the white cedars, Cupressus thyoides. Some of these noble trees 
much exceeded three feet in diameter, with the timber per- 
fectly sound. “The lay” of these uprooted trees indicates the 
devastation probably of extraordinary cyclones occurring at 
immense intervals of time, thus leveling one forest upon 
another that had been thrown long before. Even the cedars 
standing there to-day are a growth over their long buried 
ancestors. Of two at least of these buried forests beneath the 
present growth the evidence is indisputable. Counting the 
season rings some of these exhumed trees must have taken 
1500 and possibly 2000 years to grow. But I am not espec- 
ially concerned with the question of time—it is the fact of 
subsidence. 
And this action is still in progress. Nay, some notable 
instances there are which present phenomena appealing to our 
eyes. On the south side of Raritan Bay, or rather Keyport 
Bay, which is simply an indenture of Raritan, is a clay bluff 
that in my own recollection has lost much in altitude. Stand- 
ing on this eminence some ten or twelve feet higher than the 
line of high tide, I have seen at times of very low tide, in the 
distance, stumps of trees, in the same position in which they 
were left by the woodman’s axe when he cut down the forest 
or grove which grew on that bluff when it reached much far- 
ther seaward than now. And perhaps even stranger still, a 
little north of this, and something nearer the shore, I once 
saw a great number of broken bricks and a well-curb, the 
remains, as I learned, of a brick yard, which, like the ancient 
bluff, had also gone to sea. But I will leave this for a 
moment. 
