340 Why certain kinds of Timber prevail, etc. [April, 
not again for that year, the trees that shed their seed with the 
flood that barely covers such bars will plant them to overflowing 
fullness of their kind, and once they are secure from other floods 
they live out their time of two hundred to three hundred years. 
The upper surface of the interior of the bottoms (back from the 
rivers) is built up by sedimentation, and when built above the 
height of the average floods, the burr oak, black walnut, buck- 
eye, pawpaw and bottom hickory make their appearance. Such 
sycamores, cottonwoods and maples as live long enough to be 
relegated to the interior (as very few of them do) by the bottoms 
building riverward away from them, do not and cannot reproduce 
themselves, as the conditions that sprout their seeds have moved 
away from them. They die at the end of three hundred years at 
most, and leave no heirs to the soil. 
How do the occasional lone, stray sycamore and cottonwood 
find their way to the uplands? I can see how in one case it was 
not only possible but very probable. Five miles south-east of 
where I am now writing (Rockville, Indiana) is a pasture of hill 
land, so fenced as to include a section of a small stream at the 
foot of a hill facing north. There stand several half-grown syca- 
mores which bear and shed their seed in this corner watering 
place. There these seeds are sprouted. There the cattle and 
horses resort for water. Every thimbleful of mud that may 
stick to their hoofs is liable to contain from one to five half- 
sprouted seeds, which are carried up the hillside and on the up- 
land, as the cattle and horses return to their grass, and dropped 
where the sun takes up the unfinished work of growing the tree. 
The result is, that on every square rod of ground near this water- 
ing place stands one to five sycamores, varying in age from one 
to ten years, and they diminish in number as the distance from 
the watering place increases. It has been used as a pas- 
ture about ten years. I remember when it contained no syc- 
amore at all. Just outside of the pasture fence, to the east- 
ward, the land has never been fenced. The cows may drink 
where they please, and there are no sycamores scattered over the 
adjacent hills. If any seeds are thus carried there, the forest 
leaves and shade prevent their sprouting and growing. But 
along the little sand and gravel bars of the stream, they sprout 
as thick as grass, only to be killed by the floods from the early 
summer showers. 
