[10] It has been said that cotton will thrive as well in a sandy soil,
with a _sea_ exposure, as in a rich loam in the interior.
[11] The alligator is found on the shores of the lower Mississippi, in
bayous and at the mouths of creeks. It is seldom seen far above 32 deg.
north latitude. There has been much dispute as to the identity of the
crocodile and alligator, nor are naturalists yet united in their
opinions upon this point. The opinion that they belong to the same
species is supported by the systema natura, as it came from the hand of
Linneus, but it is positively contradicted in the last edition of this
work, published by Professor Gmelin.
[12] "The experienced savage or solitary voyager, descending the
Mississippi for a thousand miles, paddles his canoe through the deep
forests from one bluff to the other. He moves, perhaps, along the
inundated forests of the vast interval through which the Mississippi
flows, into the mouth of White river. He ascends that river a few miles,
and by the Grand Cut-off moves down the flooded forest into Arkansas.
From that river he finds many _bayous_, which communicate readily with
Washita and Red river; and from that river, by some one of its hundred
bayous, he finds his way into the Atchafalaya and the Teche; and by this
stream to the Gulf of Mexico, reaching it more than twenty leagues west
of the Mississippi. At that time this is a river from thirty to a
hundred miles wide, all overshaded with forests, except an interior
strip of little more than a mile in width, where the eye reposes upon
the open expanse of waters visible between the forests, which is the
Mississippi proper."
[13] A bed of lime-stone has been recently discovered on the shore at
Natchez below high water mark, two hundred feet lower than the summit
level of the state of Mississippi. There are some extraordinary
petrifactions in the north part of this state, among which is the fallen
trunk of a tree twenty feet in length, converted into solid rock. The
outer surface of the bark, which is in contact with the soil, is covered
as thickly as they can be set, with brilliant brown crystals resembling
garnets in size and beauty.
Thin flakes of the purest enamel, the size of a guinea and irregularly
shaded, have been found in the ravines near Natchez. In the same ravines
mammoth bones are found in great numbers, on the caving in of the sides
after a heavy rain.