Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 19.djvu/162

TENNENT. shortly after his return to England, again entered Parliament (1852). There he was successively secretary for the Poor Law Board (1852), and a joint secretary of the Board of Trade (1852-67). After resigning the latter post, he was made a baronet. Under his original name of Emerson, to which he had added his wife's name, Tennent, Sir James published a number of books, including: A Picture of Greece in 1825 (1826); Christianity in Ceylon (1850); Ceylon: An Account of the Island (2 vols., 1859); Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon (1861); and The Story of the Guns (1865).  TENNESSEE′. A South Central State of the United States, popularly called ‘The Volunteer State.’ It lies between latitudes 35° and 36° 36′ N., and between longitudes 81° 37′ and 90° 28′ W., and is bounded on the north by Kentucky and Virginia, on the east by North Carolina, on the south by Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and on the west by Arkansas and Missouri. The western boundary is formed by the Mississippi River, the eastern by the crest of the Unaka Mountains, while the southern boundary is a straight line. Tennessee has an extreme length from east to west of 432 miles, and an extreme breadth of 109 miles. Its area is 42,050 square miles, giving it the thirty-first rank in size among the States.

The surface features fall into eight natural and well-marked topographical regions. The easternmost is the Unaka or Great Smoky Mountains, forming a belt of bold ridges. The average elevation of the main ridge is nearly 5000 feet, but a number of peaks within the State rise above 6000 feet, and Mount Guyot has an altitude of 6636 feet. Along the western base of the mountains stretches the Eastern Valley of the Tennessee, forming a succession of almost unbroken parallel minor ridges and valleys with an average elevation of 1000 feet. The valley is bounded on the west by the abrupt and rugged escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau. This is a nearly level table-land, rising about 1000 feet above the East Tennessee Valley, and falling on the western edge in a somewhat less rugged slope to a lower plateau known as the Highland Rim. This occupies the central portion of the State as far west as the north course of the Tennessee River, with an altitude of nearly 1000 feet. As its name implies, it forms a rim encircling the Central Basin, a large oval depression lying several hundred feet below the surrounding highland. The Highland Rim, though generally level, is cut by deep river valleys, and it is separated by the narrow Western Valley of the Tennessee from the Western Plateau Slope. The latter slopes gradually toward the Mississippi River, near which it ends abruptly in a line of bluffs bounding the Mississippi Flood Plain, a low and almost unreclaimed region covered by large lagoons and heavily forested cypress swamps.  Tennessee belongs wholly to the Mississippi Valley, and its western quarter is drained directly into the Mississippi through a number of streams, the largest of which are the Obion and the Big Hatchie. The remainder of the State is drained by the two great tributaries of the Ohio, the Cumberland and the Tennessee. Both enter the State across the northern boundary in the east, and both leave it over the northern boundary in the west after making a large semicircular curve in which the Tennessee passes beyond the southern State limits. Both of them are large, navigable waterways, and the Tennessee has, besides, a number of navigable headstreams within the State, such as the Clinch, the French Broad, the Holston, and the Hiawassee. There are no lakes except the lagoons and cut-offs in the Mississippi bottomland. The largest of the lagoons is Reelfoot Lake, 25 miles long and 5 miles broad.

The climate is in general mild, equable, and, except in the western lowlands, remarkably healthful and pleasant. The mean temperature varies but slightly in the different sections of the State, being scarcely two degrees lower in the east than in the west, excepting, of course, on the high mountains in the extreme east. For July the mean temperature is 77°, and for January 38°. The maximum may reach 104°, but the minimum is seldom lower than 10°, though it occasionally falls below zero in the mountains. The rainfall is also nearly equally distributed both as to seasons and localities, being somewhat heavier in the spring than in the autumn and heavier in the middle section than in the east and west. The normal average for the eastern section is 47 inches, for the middle section 52 inches, and for the west 50 inches, while the highest and lowest normals are respectively 61 and 42 inches.

There is great diversity in the soils of the State, depending on the character of the rock formations, whose outcrops are coincident with the topographical regions. The alluvium of the Mississippi bottoms is the richest soil. It is followed beyond the bluffs by a brown loam becoming sandy and barren toward the Tennessee River. The Highland Rim has a siliceous soil of indifferent quality, but the Central Basin has a very fertile calcareous soil. The Cumberland Plateau is sandy and unproductive, but good magnesian limestone soil again occurs in the East Tennessee Valley.

Numerous species of oak, as well as beech, hickory, walnut, locust, the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), and persimmon, are common throughout the State. On the mountains the pine, hemlock, sugar maple, and ash are abundant, though pine also grows in the sandy belt of the western plateau. Red cedar is especially common in the Central Basin, and in the swampy lowlands of the west are found the cypress, larch, swamp cedar, and papaw. Tennessee still has a very large forest area, chiefly distributed over the extreme eastern and western sections and in the southwestern and northeastern parts of the middle section.

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. The outcrops of the geological formations of Tennessee correspond with the topographical regions described above. In the western three-fourths of the State the strata lie nearly horizontal and undisturbed, and the Central Basin and Cumberland Plateau are formed by the wearing away in the one case of the overlying, and in the second case of the surrounding portions of the strata. East of the Cumberland Plateau the strata are upturned so that their exposed edges form the ridges of the East Tennessee Valley and the mountain ranges. The great eastern Archæan area comes but slightly within the State limits in the extreme east. The Unaka Mountains are mostly of the Ocoee