CHAPTER X

Summary

Jan. 22. — I now turned my course northwards, and, after a short voyage in a steamer from Charleston, landed at Wilmington, in North Carolina. Here I collected fossils from tertiary formations of two ages, the Miocene marls, and an underlying Eocene limestone, harder than that of Shell Bluff and the Santee canal before mentioned; but containing many of the same shells, corals, and teeth of fishes. I then went by railway to South Washington, visiting several farms on the banks of the northeast branch of Cape Fear river. Here I found cretaceous green marls, similar to those which I had seen 350 miles to the N. E. in New Jersey, with belemnites and other characteristic organic remains, some of species not previously known.

On several of the small plantations here I found the proprietors by no means in a thriving state, evidently losing ground from year to year, and some of them talking of abandoning the exhausted soil, and migrating with their slaves to the south-western States. If, while large numbers of the negroes were thus carried to the South, slavery had been abolished in North Carolina, the black population might ere this have been reduced considerably in numbers, without suffering those privations to which a free competition with white labourers must expose them, wherever great facilities for emigration are not afforded.