170

NEGRO COACHMAN.

CHAP. VIII.

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.

Geographical

Return to Charleston. - Fossil human skeleton.. 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. — LimeSpecies of shells common to Eocene strata in America and Europe. Causes of the increased insalubrity of the low region of South Carolina.- Condition of the slave population.

sinks.

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.

172

FOSSIL HUMAN SKELETON.

СНАР. ІХ.

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 opos. sum, 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 in February, 1835, so severe that wine was frozen in bottles. The tops of the Prideof-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 inhabitants.

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

174

TERTIARY FORMATIONS.

CHAP. IX.

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, hiccory, 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