386 THE EEGOLITH 



ment of the soil, but of the deeper lying rocks and their min- 

 eral contents. In the name of development he has squandered ; 

 through careless husbandry he has not merely impoverished 

 the soil, but in many cases allowed it to run waste and be lost 

 beyond recovery. So long ago as 1846, when Lyell made his 

 second visit to America, he was struck by the rapid denuda- 

 tion of the land in our Southern states due to the reckless cut- 

 ting away of the forests. He described near Milledgeville, in 

 Georgia, a washout in a lately deforested area. ' ' Twenty years 

 ago,'' he wrote, ''before the land was cleared, it [the washout] 

 had no existence; but when the trees of the forest were cut 

 down, cracks 3 feet deep were caused by the sun's heat in the 

 clay ; and during the rains, a sudden rush of water through the 

 principal crack deepened it at its lower extremity, from whence 

 the excavating power worked backwards, till in the course of 

 20 years, a chasm measuring no less than 55 feet in depth, 300 

 yards ^'length, and varying in width from 20 to 180 feet was 

 the result. The high road has been several times turned to 

 avoid this cavity, the enlargement of which is still proceeding, 

 and the old line of road may be seen iq have held its course, 

 directly over what is now the widest part of the ravine. In 

 the perpendicular walls of this great chasm appear beds of clay 

 and sand, red, white, yellow, and green, produced by the de- 

 composition in situ of hornblendic gneiss, with layers of veins 

 of quart., which remain entire, to prove that the whole mass 

 was once solid and crystalline. ' ' ^ 



The same lack of foresight or wanton disregard for coming 

 generations is still manifested, and every muddy stream bears 

 downward to the sea an increased load of silt from lands im- 

 properly cultivated and from which every rain removes a por- 

 tion of the finest and richest of the soil, leaving behind but the 

 barren gravel, channelled it may be beyond the possibility of 

 cultivation. McGee^ has more recently made observations of 

 a similar nature in southern Mississippi, where the softer loam 

 of the Columbia formation, which here forms the soil, has 

 been allowed to become eroded down to the barren sandy loam 

 of the Lafayette. ''Old fields are denuded by the acre, leaving 

 mazes of pinnacles divided by a complex network of runnels 

 glaring red toward the sun and sky in strong contrast to the 

 rich verdure of the hillsides never deforested; the plantations, 



=^ Lyell, Principles of Geology, 9tli ed., 1846, p. 204. 

 = 12tli Ann. Kep. TJ. S. Geol. Survey, 1890-91. 



