Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/91

 the red oak and the willow oak, with {53} Equisetum hiemale or Shave-rush, and other vegetable remains, not much unlike the black beds of leaves which occur along the banks of the Ohio, but much more intermingled with earth. In this bed also occur masses or nodules of a hard and very fine-grained light gray sandstone, bordering almost upon hornstone, likewise charged with vegetable remains, resembling charred wood, together with leaves of oaks and of other forest trees. Nearly on a level with the present low stage of the river, there was a second bed of this coal, more interrupted than the first in its continuity, though constant in its locality, no less in some places (like basins) than 8, 12 or 15 feet in thickness. Below, clays again succeeded, and terminated the visible stratification.

In two or three places, I observed that the mud, which was very deep, had been boiling up into circular masses like fumeroles, and have no doubt, but that the decomposition of this vast bed of lignite or wood-coal, situated near the level of the river, and filled with pyrites, has been the active agent in producing the earthquakes, which have of late years agitated this country. The deposition of vast rafts of timber, thus accidentally brought together by the floods of the river, are continually, even before our eyes, as I may say, accumulating stores of matter, which, in after ages, will, no doubt, exert a baneful influence over the devoted soil, beneath which they are silently interred! How much has the vegetable kingdom to do with the destiny of man! The time, though slowly, is perhaps surely approaching, which will witness something like volcanic eruptions on the banks of the Mississippi. The inhabitants frequently, and almost daily, experience slight oscillations of the earth: I have even witnessed them myself while descending the river.