Morning journal and courier., 1881-08-12

1 and floats on the water, which quickly nils ] the ditch almost to the surface. The log is
 next sawed into lengths two feet long, which are split by hand and worked into shingles as well as into the slaves used for pails and I tubs. The wood has 8 coarse grain which 1 splits as straight an arrow. The shingles | made from it last for sixty to seventy years
 are eagerly sought for by builders in south. ] ern New Jersey, and command in the market | 8 much higher price than the ordinary shin. ! gles made of pine or chestnut. In color the ! wood of the white cedar is 8 delicate pink | and it has strong flavor, resembling that oi l the red cedar used in making lead pencils. l The trees once fairly buried under the swamp never become water-logged, as is shown by ! their floating in the ditches as soon as they I are pried up; and, what is more singular, as | soon as they rise they turn invariably under l sides uppermost. These two facts are mys- | teries which Science has thus far left so. The | men who dig the logs up and split them earn | their money The work is hard, and exact | ing, beside lusty manual labor, skill and ex- perience; the swamps are soft and treacherous, no machinery can be used, and long stretches of mud and water must be covered with boughs or bark before the shingles can reach | the village and civilization.
 The number of the trees which lie below | the surface of the ten square miles of swamp ! is almost countless. In many places the probe will be sunk many times before. it fails ! tO SGTtk0 U 4US. A5 GAo WO1A1u04 OA1y O1S TUT l those near the surface, and none but the best | trees are selected, it is certain that only a small portion of the logs have been exhumed l since 1872, when the industry first sprang up. The sunken forests lie in all shapes. Some | times the trees are found parallel as though ! a wind blowing from one quarter had felled I them. But usually they lie pointing in every | direction, and when, as occasionally happens, the wet soil sinks or dries, the mighty trunks ' are seen piled upon each other as in a Maine ! log jam. What are seen, too are but the up | permost strata of piles on piles unseen below. ! One or two evidences may be cited to show ! not only the great depth but the wide exten- \ sion of the forest beyond the limits of the swamp. Down near the tide waters of the ! Delaware, seven miles away, where no sur i face indications appear, white cedar log was | found some years ago at the depth of twelve | feet. At Cape May, twenty miles distant, | the tools of workmen digging artesian | well were stopped twenty feet down by 8 big | cedar log, which, it was thought would dis ! color and defle the water if the work pro | ceeded. In 1873 the city council of Cape | May ordered that an artesian well should | be dug to supply the city reservoir I with water. At the depth of eighty-seven feet, after the tools had penetrated half a dozen strata of gravel, sand or hard clay, an | alluvial deposit was reached exactly like that | in which lie the cedars at Dennisville. In it I was struck solid log. four feet in diameter, ! which was bored through, and specimens brought to the surface. In digging an arte- sian well at the Columbia House, Cape May some time ago. pieces of wood were found at the depth of ninety-two feet.
 Perhaps the most remarkable of all the phenomena relating to the subterranean woods is the singular preservation of the I logs, whose fibre is clean and smooth as when their green tops, a hundred and fifty feet above the swamp, rustled in the breeze long long cons ago. Doctor Maurice Beeslay, the patriarchal Galen of Dennisville, to whose courtesy and kindness I am indebted for many facts concerning the sunken forests, and who has made them special study, be- lieves that the trees. soon as they are cov- cred by the soil of the sWamps, become her medically sealed, and that they will remain preserved as long as the world lasts and the swamp soil surrounds them. If this theory be tested, however, it seems strange that wood placed at great depths in ordinary soils and covered closely from the air should not be similarly preserved, We have wooded swamps in New York State as soft and deep as those in Dennisyille, but no sunken for ests. It seems more credable that there is some subtle and unknown quality either of the amber-colored walter of the Dennisville swamps or of the peculiar alluvial deposit which accounts for the phenomenon. It is a well known fact that in certain peat forma- tions of Great Britain human bodies can be preserved for many years without losing their rotund1ty and freshness. Perhaps the analogy applies to the big archaic trees of Dennisville.
 The age of the sunken trees opens large and shadowy vista for research. The age of single tree is readily found by counting its rings Dr. Beeslay has thus counted 10SO rings of a white cedar stump, representing an age of the same number of years. But this stump was only five feet in diameter, Al 1oryo ,o4kn s<Nf seven feet. The rings near the centre are perhaps three -eighths of an inch apart, while toward the circumference they are so crowd ed that they must be counted with the mi croscope; so that the ratio of seven to five cannot be used to find the longevity of a ! seven-foot cedar which probably lived some 2, GOO years before it fell. The absolute age of the underground logs-that is, the time that has elapsed since they sprouted-is as- certained only by approximations. Dr. Bees l lay, however, has made some valuable and sug- gestive investigations of the subject. In one case he found tree six feet through and about the same number of feet underground. 1 This trunk was accidentally discovered by workmen who had exhumed a smaller log above it. On top of the great log was found l large underground stump five feet in diam eter, and a smaller stump was superimposed on the larger one As the tree of the larger stump could not have begun to grow before the large tree-trunk fell, and the upper stump belonged to tree that germinated on
 the trunk underneath, by counting the rings of the stumps-or the rings of trees of the same size-and also the rings of the underly- ing tree the minimum age of the latter was ascertained. It was twenty-one hundred and fifty years. But counting the age of the overlying soil, and also of 8 covered tree
 which lay over the upper stump, the doctor concludes that the big tree underneath all Tlorroinafa6 1E0 Another fest the doctor applied in the following man ner: He found half covered in Q cedar swamp log with the ends cut evidently by human hands. It was found that the log had been cut for an adjacent sawmll which was running about 100 years ago. Old citizens of Dennisville whose memory retraced seventy years of time could recall TO period when the locality of the cut log had been worked eith- CT for living sunken timber. The 1nfer- ence then was just that the log had been cut for the old sawmill, and was at least 100 years old. Four inches of peaty soil had &C., cumulated up the sides of the log. Here then was unit by which the rate of ac- emulation of soil over the big trees could be measured. Each four inches represented a century's growth of the alluvial
 mud The bottom of the big tree under
 the stumps was twelve feet beneath
 the surface of the ground. By dividing
 twelve feet or one hundred and forty four
 inches by four we get thirty-six hundred
 years as the time since the log first sprouted
 from its little seed, which was about one
 quarter the size of buckshot, or say, one
 eighth of an inch in diameter. Of course
 ali, calculations of the foregoing kind are
 rough and lnexact In the case of the tree
 cited the accumulation of debris 8 thousand
 years ago might have been more or less rapid
 than now, nor can the interval that elaps ed
 between the growths of the stumps and the
 tree be estimated But the computation of
 thirty six hundred years for the old tree is
 probably below rather than above the truth.
 A State Ball.
 The Royal Fete at Buckingham Palace
 Flower and Bric-a-Brac.
 Writing of the recent State ball in London,