| THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF MISSISSIPPI |
By Professor CALVIN S. BROWN
UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
THE petrified forests of Arizona are well known to geologists and others interested in such things, but I am not aware that anything has yet been published on the petrified forest at Flora, Mississippi.
There are various forms of petrified woods in the state of Mississippi, but the great majority of them are silicified woods. Many of them are white or at least light-colored, and because of the color often go popularly under the name of hickory wood or hickory logs. Petrifactions which are formed in the lignite beds are often stained to a dark brown or even black shade; one and the same trunk is sometimes found partly petrified and partly lignitized. In the northeastern corner of the state there are also found samples of wood in which iron-ore is the material replacing the original woody structure. The beautiful wood jaspers, carnelians, opals and agates of Colorado, Arizona and other western states, are not ordinarily to be found in this state; though the Mississippi trees sometimes show excellent quartz crystals of small size.
Much of the Mississippi wood shows the vegetable structure almost perfectly and tends to split with the grain of the wood. Through a large
Fig. 1. Showing line of demarcation between Quaternary and Tertiary. Above this line a log is seen in its original position. Flora, Miss., June, 1912.
