2 



Relations of Geology to Agriculture 



tised eye, are most clearly distinct in the character of their soils 

 and in the nature of their vegetable productions, whether natural 

 or cultivated. 



First. Rich muddy flats line the shore, intersected in some 

 places by creeks and swampy hollows. To these low lands the 

 negroes repair at the proper season of the year, and put in, tend, 

 or reap the sea-island cotton and the rice, which here yield great 

 returns. The white masters, or superintendents, visit them as 

 rarely as possible, the climate in the hot season being rife with 

 fevers fatal to the constitution of the white man. When these 

 swampy flats are still in a state of nature, the swamp willow, the 

 cypress, the swamp hickory, the green palmetto — the proud 

 badge of North Carolina — the tall magnolia, the red maple, and 

 the cotton- wood, form a distinguishmg natural vegetation, rich 

 and beautiful to the eye, but reminding the practised observer at 

 once of a soil full of natural fruitfulness and of an atmosphere 

 prolific in shivermg ague and in depressing and rapidly wasting 

 fever. 



A few miles inland brings him to higher ground. The allu- 

 vial plain gi'adually rises a few feet above the sea-level, and dry, 

 rich soils support a natural growth of hickory, oak, beech, mag- 

 nolia, walnut and tulip trees, and of holly. Tobacco and sugar 

 are the staple marketable crops, which the cultivator raises on 

 these drier soils, where generations of exhausting culture have 

 not already worn them out. They yield also large crops of 

 Indian com — the main food of the coloured labourers — to which 

 the warmth of the climate is as propitious as the soil. 



Second. Pursuing his journey towards the hills, after twenty 

 miles or thereby — a breadth which varies in different parts of the 

 coast — he reaches the edge of the drier alluvial plain, and ascends 

 a low escarpment of yellowish sand. He now finds himself in 

 the midst of forests of unmixed natural pine, covering a belt of 

 barren sand generally unfit for cultivation, and which for hundreds 

 of miles girdles in the lower plain of rich land he has already 

 crossed. The worthlessness of this pine region for the purposes 

 of the cultivator is illustrated by the history of that portion of 

 the belt which runs through the State of Georgia. After the 

 settlement of the boundary line between Georgia and Florida, 

 the State Legislature of Georgia passed an Act ordering all the 

 unsold lands of the State, after being surveyed, to be divided bj 

 lot among the resident population. The cost of surveying and 

 other expenses imposed a charge of two cents an acre on these 

 lands, which fell to be paid by the allottees. But a great many 

 of those who drew the pine barren lots refused to take out their 

 grants, thinking them not worth the two cents an acre they had 

 to pay for them. The State Legislature, therefore, subsequently 



