Page:A Physical and Topographical Sketch of the Mississippi Territory, Lower Louisiana, and a Part of West Florida.djvu/24

 inhabitants of the forests. As if conscious of its supernatural stature and thickness, it here usurps the sovereignty, denying residence to all other citizens of the vegetable republick; but a few towering magnolias, the liriodendron tulipifera, juglans nigra, laurus sasfafras, and, rarely, a solitary cotton tree, that on silken pinions, while in embryo, has strayed from the aqueous region that stimulated the passions of its parents to imbue it with vitality, and has settled here among strangers. Like Proteus's herds it has come here visere montes.

On the eastern side of these hills, their declivity is so extremely gradual, that, in travelling over them, we are insensible of the place of their termination. From giddy heights and deep hollows the face of the country is insensibly transmuted into a fertile plain, from fifteen to twenty miles in width; intersected with small streams of limpid water, rolling over beds of black sand, and meandering through rich forests, until they find some chasm in the hills by which they discharge themselves into the Mississippi. This beautiful plain, of at least two hundred miles in length from north to south, abounds in a great variety of trees, among which are the following, viz. liriodendron tulipifera, gleditsia, morus, several species of ulmus and fraxinus, magnolia grandiflora, mag. auriculata, laurus sassafras, l. borbonia, juglans nigra, jug. hickory, fagus sylvatica, quercus nigra, q. rubra, q. alba, fagus caftanea, and among the more humble kind the cornus florida, carica, several species of æsculus and ilex, rhus,