it
the evil spirit, sometimes the scourge, and many other such
appellations. It has never yet been described by any naturalist, and I
never yet saw one dead, although I have heard of their having
been killed.

In Texas, the country presents two different aspects, much at variance
with each other, the eastern borders, and sea-coast being only a
continuation of the cypress swamps, mud creeks, and cane-brakes of south
Arkansas, and west Louisiana; while, on the contrary, the north and west
offer much the same topography as that of the countries I have just
delineated. The climate in Texas is very healthy two hundred miles from
the sea, and one hundred west of the Sabine, which forms the eastern
boundary of Texas; but to the east and south the same diseases and
epidemics prevail as in Louisiana, Alabama, and the Floridas.

The whole of Texas is evidently of recent formation, all the saline
prairies east of the Rio Grande being even now covered with shells of
all the species common to the Gulf of Mexico, mixed up with skeletons of
sharks, and now and then with petrified turtle, dolphin, rock fish, and
bonitas. A few feet below the surface, and hundreds of miles distant
from the sea, the sea-sand is found; and although the ground seems to
rise gradually as it recedes from the shores, the southern plains are
but a very little elevated above the surface of the sea until you arrive
at thirty degrees north, when the prairies begin to assume an undulating
form, and continually ascend till, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains,
they acquire a height of four and five thousand feet above the level
of the sea.

Texas does not possess any range of mountains with the exception that,
one hundred miles north from San Antonio de Bejar, the San Seba hills
rise and extend themselves in a line parallel with the Rocky Mountains,
as high as the green peaks in the neighbourhood of Santa Fe. The San
Seba hills contain several mines of silver, and I doubt not that this
metal is very common along the whole range east of the Rio Grande. Gold
is also found in great quantities in all the streams tributary to the
Rio Puerco, but I have never heard of precious stones of any kind.

Excepting the woody districts which border Louisiana and Arkansas, the
greater proportion of Texas is prairie; a belt of land commences upon
one of the bends of the river Brasos, spreads northward to the very
shores of the Red River, and is called by the Americans "The Cros