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that the danger of any popular movement is truly appalling.

The negroes, so far as I have yet seen them, whether in domestic service or on the farms, appear very cheerful and free from care, better fed than a large part of the labouring class of Europe; and, though meanly dressed, and often in patched garments, never scantily clothed for the climate. We asked a woman in Georgia, whether she was the slave of a family of our acquaintance. She replied, merrily, "Yes, I belong to them, and they belong to me." She was, in fact, born and brought up on the estate.

On another occasion we were proceeding in a wellappointed carriage with a planter, when we came unexpectedly to a dead halt. Inquiring the cause, the black coachman said he had dropped one of his white gloves on the road, and must drive back and try to find it. He could not recollect within a mile where he had last seen it we remonstrated, but in vain. As time pressed, the master in despair took off his own gloves, and saying he had a second pair, gave them to him. When our charioteer had deliberately put them on, we started again.

CHAPTER IX.

Return to Charleston.-Fossil Human Skeleton.—Geographical Distribution of Quadrupeds in North America.-Severe Frost in 1835 in South Carolina.-White Limestone of the Cooper River and Santee Canal.-Referred to the Eocene Period, not intermediate between Tertiary and Chalk.-Lime-sinks.—Species of Shells common to Eocene Strata in America and Europe.-Causes of the increased Insalubrity of the Law Region of South Carolina.-Condition of the Slave Population.--Cheerfulness of the Negroes: their Vanity.—State of Animal Existence.—Invalidity of Marriages.-The Coloured Population multiply faster than the Whites. -Effects of the Interference of Abolitionists.-Laws against Education.-Gradual Emancipation equally desirable for the Whites and the Coloured Race.

Jan. 13. 1842.-FROM Savannah we returned to Charleston in a steam-ship, on board of which we found an agreeable party, consisting chiefly of officers of the U. S. army returning from Florida, where they had nearly brought to a close a war of extermination carried on for many years against the Seminole Indians. They gave a lively picture of the hardships they underwent in the swamps and morasses during this inglorious campaign, in the course of which the lives of perhaps as many whites as Seminoles were sacrificed. The war is said to have been provoked by the attacks of the Indians on new settlers.

In the Museum at Charleston, I was shown a fossil human skull from Guadaloupe, imbedded in solid limestone, which they say belongs to the same skeleton of a female as that now preserved in the British Museum, where the skull is wanting.

Dr. Bachman, whom I saw here, is engaged in a great work on the quadrupeds of North America. He pointed out to me the boundary of several distinct zones of indigenous mammalia, extending east and west on this continent, where there are no great natural barriers running in the same direction, such as mountain ridges, deserts, or wide arms of the sea to check the migrations of species. The climate alone has been sufficient to limit their range. The mammiferous fauna of the State of New York, comprising about forty species, is distinct from that of the arctic region 600 miles north of it, and described by Dr. Richardson. It is equally distinct from that of South Carolina and Georgia, a territory about as far distant to the south. In Texas, where frosts are unknown, another assemblage of species is met with. The opossum, for example, of that country (Didelphis cancrivora) is different from that of Virginia. The latter (Didelphis virginiana) is one of those species which is common to many provinces, extending from Florida as far north as Pennsylvania, where it has been observed while the snow was lying two feet deep on the ground. The racoon has a still wider habitation, ranging as did the buffalo originally (Bison americanus) from the north of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. But these are exceptions to the general rule. Similar restrictions seem to have prevailed in the era of extinct quadrupeds, the great mastodon (M. giganteus) having evidently abounded in Canada and New York, as well as Kentucky and Georgia, while the megatherium and mylodon were almost entirely confined to the Southern States.

When discoursing here on the influence of climate, many accounts were given me of a frost which visited

Charleston n February, 1835, so severe that wine was frozen in bottles. The tops of the Pride-of-India tree, of Chinese origin, were killed: all the oranges, of which there were large orchards, were destroyed. Beds of oysters, exposed between high and low water mark, perished in the estuaries, and the effluvia from them was so powerful as to injure the health of the inhabi

tants.

Several planters attribute the failure of the cotton crop this year (1842) to the unusual size and number of the icebergs, which floated southwards last spring from Hudson's and Baffin's Bays, and may have cooled the sea and checked the early growth of the cotton plant. So numerous and remote are the disturbing causes in meteorology! Forty degrees of latitude intervene between the region where the ice-floes are generated and that where the crops are raised, whose death-warrant they are supposed to have carried with them.

Before I visited the Southern States, I had heard from several American geologists that calcareous rocks occurred there intermediate in age between the chalk and the tertiary formations, and helping to fill the void which separates those two well-marked eras in the European series. Having satisfied myself that all the white limestone of the Savannah river was referable to the Eocene epoch, I now set out to determine whether the same could be said of that exposed to view on the Cooper river and Santee canal, about thirty miles north of Charleston. I was accompanied in an excursion of a week by Dr. Ravenel, who kindly offered to be my guide; and we first visited a plantation of his, called "The Grove," near the mouth of the Cooper river,

where, in the marshes, there are deep deposits of clay and sand, enclosing the stools and trunks of the cypress, hickory, and cedar, often imbedded in an erect position, which must have grown in fresh water, but are now sunk six and even sixteen feet below the level of high water. Every where there are proofs of the coast having sunk, and the subsidence seems to have gone on in very modern times; for some old cedars still standing on the surface have been killed by the encroachment of the salt water. We had come from Charleston in a small private steam-boat, and after passing Strawberry Ferry and entering the Santee Canal, were allowed by favour to pass through the locks without paying tolls, and, contrary to the usual regulations, which exclude steam-boats. The thoughtless negroes allowed the chimney of our vessel to get so choked up with soot that we were soon forced to quit this conveyance, and travel by land. The barges on the canal are constructed of different sizes, so that, after going down laden with cotton, they are put one into another when returning empty, and thus escape a large part of the tolls at the locks. The slaves are fond of cockfighting; and on the prow of each barge there stood usually a game-cock, perched as if he were the ensign of the vessel.

We passed the Brygon Swamp, about forty miles north of Charleston, where the remains of the mastodon were found when the canal was cut. Wild animals might still be mired in the same morass, latitude 33° 20′ N., showing that these fossils in the Southern States occur in precisely the same geological position as in New York and Canada. We slept at Wantcot, and then went by Eutaw to Vance's Ferry on the Santee

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