56 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 2. 
injury received from an unusual succession of high tides, due, 
perhaps, to a series of storms of very great severity. If a 
downward movement of the coast is now in progress, and is so 
rapid as to be recorded during the short lifetime of a tree, we 
might reasonably expect to find, in a situation like this one, 
trees in all stages of destruction and of burial by the advancing 
salt marsh. 
In one other place, of those which I visited in 1911, is there 
perhaps a record of forest destruction through submergence. 
At the head of the southeast branch of Saint Simon inlet, near 
the railway that runs to Shippigan, the low upland bordering 
the salt marsh is occupied by many stumps and dead trees. 
The suggestion of subsidence here in modern time is strengthened 
by the discovery of a number of stumps farther out on the marsh 
itself, entirely surrounded by Spartina and other halophilous 
plants, and of a black stratum of leaf mould or swamp deposit 
containing birch bark, beneath three feet of salt marsh material, 
near the edge of the creek, about 300 feet out from the margin 
of the upland. Some of the stumps are charred, as if by fire. 
Most of them, however, bear axe marks, as if the forest had 
been cut while living; for there is no apparent reason why a 
tide-killed forest should have been visited by the woodsman 
in a district where standing timber is abundant and little fuel 
is used. The encroachment of the salt marsh upon the forest 
border, therefore, must have taken place within the two cen- 
turies or so of occupation of the district by the French. A 
series of borings indicates that the buried stratum of leaf mould, 
at its greatest depth, is not more than four and a half feet 
below the surface of the marsh. As Professor Johnson points 
out, there are a number of ways to account for slight submer- 
gence without subsidence. The local high tide surface may 
creep up over a low upland border and bury it with a few feet 
of salt marsh in a district, for instance, where the widening 
and deepening of passageways across barrier beaches allows a 
constantly increasing play of the tides, or where the same 
result is accomplished in a single great storm, as at Marshfield, 
Massachusetts, in 1898. 1 On a rapidly retrograding coast like 
1 D. W. Johnson; Botanical evidence of coastal subsidence. Science, vol. 33, 
1911, pp. 300-302. 
