mosphere, and the solid materials of large forests are given out from the earth in an invisible form, or in bubbles rising through the water of springs. Peatmosses of no slight depth, and covering thousands of square miles, are thus fed with their mineral constituents without materially deranging the constituents of the atmosphere breathed by man. Thousands of trees grow up, float down to the delta of the Mississippi, and other rivers, and are buried, and yet the air, at the end of many centuries, may be as much impregnated with carbonic acid as before.

Coral reefs are year after year growing in the ocean -springs and rivers feed the same ocean with carbonic acid and lime; but we have no reason to infer that when mountain masses of calcareous rock have thus been gradually formed in the sea, any essential change in the chemical composition of its waters has been brought about. We have no accurate data as yet for measuring whether in our own time, or at any remote. geological era, the relative supply and consumption of carbon in the air or the ocean causes the amount of those elements to vary greatly; but the variation, if admitted, would not have caused an excess, but rather a deficit of carbon in the periods most productive of coal or peat, as compared to any subsequent or antecedent epochs. In fact, a climate favouring the rank and luxurious growth of plants, and at the same time checking their decay, and giving rise to peat or accumulations of vegetable matter, might, for the time, diminish the average amount of carbonic acid in the atmosphere ―a state of things precisely the reverse of that assumed by those to whose views I am now objecting.

122

TOUR TO CHARLESTON.

CHAP. VII

CHAPTER VIII.

Tour to Charleston, South Carolina.—Facilities of Locomotion.Augusta.-Voyage down the Savannah River.-Shell Bluff.— Slave-labour.-Fever and Ague.-Millhaven.-Pine Forests of Georgia.-Alligators and Land-Tortoises.--Warmth of Climate in January.-Tertiary Strata on the Savannah.-Fossil Remains of Mastodon and Mylodon near Savannah.—Passports required of Slaves.-Cheerfulness of the Negroes.

Dec. 28.-CHARLESTON, South Carolina. We arrived here after a journey of 160 miles through the pine forests of North Carolina, between Weldon and Wilmington, and a voyage of about 17 hours, in a steam ship, chiefly in the night between Wilmington and this place. Here we find ourselves in a genial climate, where the snow is rarely seen, and never lies above an hour or two upon the ground. The rose, the narcissus, and other flowers, are still lingering in the gardens, the woods still verdant with the magnolia, live oak, and long-leaved pine, while the dwarf fan palm or palmetto, frequent among the underwood, marks a more southern region. In less than four weeks since we left Boston, we have passed from the 43d to the 33d degree of latitude, carried often by the power of steam for several hundred miles together through thinly peopled wildernesses, yet sleeping every night at good inns, and contrasting the facilities of locomotion in this new country with the difficulties we had contended with the year before when travelling in Europe, through populous parts of Touraine, Brittany, and other provinces of France.

At Charleston I made acquaintance with several persons zealously engaged in the study of natural history, and then went by an excellent railway 136 miles through the endless pine woods to Augusta, in Georgia. This journey, which would formerly have taken a week, was accomplished between sunrise and sunset; and, as we scarcely saw by the way any town or village, or even a clearing, nor any human habitation except the station houses, the spirit of enterprise displayed in such public works filled me with astonishment which increased the farther I went South. Starting from the sea-side, and imagining that we had been on a level the whole way, we were surprised to find in the evening, on reaching the village of Aikin, sixteen miles from Augusta, that we were on a height several hundred feet above the sea, and that we had to descend a steep inclined plane to the valley of the Savannah river. The strata cut through here in making the railway consist of vermilion-coloured earth and clay, and white quartzose sand, with masses of pure white kaolin intermixed. These strata belong to the older or Eocene tertiary formation, which joins the clay-slate and granitic region a few miles above Augusta, where I visited the rapids of the Savannah.

I had been warned by my scientific friends in the North, that the hospitality of the planters might greatly interfere with my schemes of geologizing in the Southern states. In the letters, therefore, of introduction furnished to me at Washington, it was particularly requested that information respecting my objects, and facilities of moving speedily from place to place, should be given me, instead of dinners and society. These injunctions were every where kindly and politely com

124

SHEIL BLUFF.

CHAP. VIII.

plied with. It was my intention, for the sake of getting a correct notion of the low country between the granitic region and the Atlantic, to examine the cliffs bounding the Savannah river from its rapids to near its mouth, a distance, including its windings, of about 250 miles. After passing a few days at Augusta, where, for the first time, I saw cotton growing in the fields, I embarked in a steam-boat employed in the cotton trade, and went for forty miles down the great river, which usually flows in a broad alluvial plain, with an average fall of about one foot per mile, or 250 feet between Augusta and the sea. Like the Mississippi and all large rivers, which, in the flood season, are densely charged with sediment, the Savannah has its immediate banks higher than the plain intervening between them and the high grounds beyond, which usually, however distant from the river, present a steep cliff or "bluff" towards it. The low flat alluvial plain, overflowed in great part at this rainy season, is covered with aquatic trees, and an ornamental growth of tall canes, some of them reaching a height of twenty feet, being from one to two inches in diameter, and with their leaves still green. The lofty cedar (Cupressus disticha), now leafless, towers above them, and is remarkable for the angular bends of the top boughs, and the large thick roots which swell out near the base.

I landed first at a cliff about 120 feet high, called Shell Bluff, from the large fossil oysters which are conspicuous there. About forty miles below Augusta, at Demery's Ferry, the place where we disembarked, the waters were so high that we were carried on shore by two stout negroes. In the absence of the proprietor to whom I had letters, we were hospitably received by his

overseer, who came down to the river bank, with two led horses, on one of which was a lady's saddle. He conducted us through a beautiful wood, where the verdure of the evergreen oaks, the pines, and hollies, and the mildness of the air, made it difficult for us to believe that it was mid-winter, and that we had been the month before in a region of snow storms and sledges. We crossed two creeks, and after riding several miles reached the house, and were shown into a spacious room, where a great wood fire was kept up constantly on the hearth, and the doors on both sides left open day and night.

Returning home to this hospitable mansion in the dusk of the evening of the day following, I was surprised to see, in a grove of trees near the court-yard of the farm, a large wood-fire blazing on the ground. Over the fire hung three cauldrons, filled, as I afterwards learned, with hog's lard, and three old negro women, in their usual drab-coloured costume, were leaning over the cauldrons, and stirring the lard to clarify it. The red glare of the fire was reflected from their faces, and I need hardly say how much they reminded me of the scene of the witches in Macbeth. Beside them, moving slowly backwards and forwards in a rockingchair, sat the wife of the overseer, muffled up in a cloak, and suffering from a severe cold, but obliged to watch the old slaves, who are as thoughtless as children, and might spoil the lard if she turned away her head for a few minutes. When I inquired the meaning of this ceremony, I was told it was "killing time,” this being the coldest season of the year, and that since I left the farm in the morning thirty hogs had been sacrificed by the side of a running stream not far off.