TOPOGRAPHY. 19 



table lands, or solitary cones or buttes, or often presenting only a vista of 

 gentle undulations; valleys, which are in places only steep-sided ravines, but 

 further on widen out into pasture land and farm and meadow; and the lower 

 lying river bottoms, often miles in width, through which the sluggish rivers 

 wind their way in tortuous channels, spreading out here and there into lakes; 

 these are all carved out from this ancient table land by erosive action, assisted 

 in some measure by the later submergences to which it has been subjected. So 

 far we have found little evidence of any disturbance of the strata which can- 

 not readily be referred to the action of just such agencies as are now at work 

 over the entire region. Faults are not uncommon, but usually they are of 

 slight extent, and are in most cases certainly only due to sub-erosion or induced 

 by the drying and shrinking of the strata. These causes are ample, also, to 

 explain many of the numerous benches which may be observed in various 

 places. 



The Highlands. — This table land was not confined by the limits given to 

 the district, but stretched into Arkansas and Louisiana on the northeast and 

 east, as well as still further to the southwest. By far the larger portion of it 

 which remains in this part of Texas is to be found in a series of plateaus or 

 flat-topped mountains, mesas, and buttes, beginning in the southern part of 

 Cherokee County, running north and northwest, and spreading across the 

 Neches into Anderson County and east into Rusk and Henderson. Southeast- 

 ward areas are found in Nacogdoches, Sabine, and other counties. Northward 

 they extend into Smith County, beyond which their identity is lost; the other 

 highlands, although originally parts of the same table land, lacking the dis- 

 tinguishing marks of these principal remnants. 



These plateaus have, in almost every case, " their summits capped by a 

 horizontal or nearly horizontal bed of iron ore or sandstone, and to this cov- 

 ering they owe their existence, it having protected them from the erosion 

 which has worn down the surrounding country. The hills, locally called 

 'mountains,' sometimes occur as small flat-topped hills — the butte and mesa 

 of the west — and in others spread in broad plateaus, sometimes covering an 

 area of twenty or thirty square miles, deeply cut by the steep-sided canyons, 

 and often showing an almost perpendicular slope." 



The highest points now remaining of this old table land are parts of the 

 flat-topped hills of Cherokee County, which have an extreme altitude of six 

 hundred and sixty feet. From this the elevation decreases in all directions, 

 sinking in some places to or even below the three hundred feet level. Four 

 hundred and fifty feet is probably the extreme variation of elevation in the 

 entire district. 



" These are the uplands of this portion of the State, and possess a soil far 



different from the surrounding lowlands, and a climate excellently adapted 

 9— geol. 



