Page:A Physical and Topographical Sketch of the Mississippi Territory, Lower Louisiana, and a Part of West Florida.djvu/26

 the cornus florida, æsculus flava, pyrus coronara, with quantities of the vitis campestris, that attach themselves to their trunks and branches; and here and there a solitary horse chesnut, in places where the soil loses its sandy complexion, remote from the large savannas, and on the borders of the streams which wind through these gently swelling sand knolls.

As we approach the Tombigby river, or bay of Mobille, the country becomes more hilly, and the land richer; producing extensive forests of juglans hickory, fraxinus, nyssa sylvatica, cornus florida, magnolia grandiflora, quercus nigra, juglans nigra, quercus semper virens, flammula rubra, myrica, and, until we reach the river, when we once more meet with swamps covered with the cupressus, populus deltoides, acer, and bordered round with the arundo gigantea. This observation will apply more especially to the west side of the bay and river, the east being either sand plains, or, immediately contiguous to the bay, extensive salt marshes. A chain of islands, between twenty and twenty-five miles in length, and five or six in breadth, lie in the Tombigby river, above where it expands into what afterwards takes the name of Mobille Bay; which, for several months in the beginning of the warm season, are inundated by the freshes in that river.

The country between the town of Mobille and lake Ponchantrain, keeping the course of the gulf, for a width of thirty or forty miles, is uniformly level and dry;