The Cypress. 215 
the woodland basins; here it attains its highest perfection, ex- 
hibitino- trunks not unusually of enormous proportions. It towers 
to a height, in some instances, of a hun- 
dred and twenty feet without a limb, with 
a circumference at top often exceeding 
sixteen feet, and at butt more than twenty 
feet, and this above the usual swell near 
the base, fig. 17. These cypress basins 
or swamps present an interminable array 
of stately columns, shooting up their tall 
and symmetrical shgifts, and supporting a 
dome-like ceiling which excludes half the 
light of day. The columns are crowded 
closely together, and the observer is struck 
with the uniformity of elevation which 
Y^„ 17 they maintain, although varying much in 
diameter. These fine cypress columns 
terminate abruptly under a cap consisting of a few disproportion- 
ate and inconsiderable limbs, altoo-ether constitutino- a kind of 
vaulted ceiling; and there is so perfect a reflection of sound from 
it, that falling timber often causes a reverbration throughout 
these silent and sombre shades to a distance of ten miles. But 
while the tops of the cypresses are so disproportionate, it is 
not so with their roots; for they ramify through the soil in every 
direction, extending from fifty to seventy-five feet from the parent 
stems; some remaining parallel with the surface of the ground, 
whilst others protrude deep into the more consolidated subsoil or 
under strata of clay ; and they are thus so fortified that a cypress 
is rarely torn up from the ground in which it grows. The roots 
which shoot out horizontally to such distances from their trunks, 
always assume wave-like flexures whh respect to the hoiizon; the 
most prominent part of the convex curve rises within a little 
distance of the surface of the ground, and from them projects a 
series of. perpendicular cone-shaped protuberances usually called 
" knees,^' which are from three to thirty inches in circumference 
at the base, and rise to a height varying from two to ten feet; 
these knees growing from the innumerable interlacing roots in a 
dense forest of cypress timber are closely crowded together, and 
resemble (in all but their color,) the stalagmites on the pavement 
of some enormous cavern; to which a cypress basin, take it all 
in all, is not unlike. The bases of these knees are usually very 
much enlarged beyond the size of the roots; thence they proceed 
and terminate upwards, in an obtuse point, from which protrudes 
neither leaf nor limb. ***** An unusual swelling of the 
butts of the tree takes place, arising from an enlargement and 
continuing up the superficial or knee-bearing roots. Such en- 
