The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of the sea.  They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of French explorers.  The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the buildings which are usually near them.  The soil is of a light, sandy mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of ginned cotton to the acre,—­quite different from the plantations in Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred pounds.  The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one finds but little turf.  The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks, furnish the chief material for manure.  The long-fibred cotton peculiar to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks which permeate the land in all directions.  The seed of this cotton, planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a like period produce the finer staple.  The Treasury Department secured eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces, including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in storehouses, when our military occupation began.

The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as lignum-vitae, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,—­and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and coat-of-arms to the State.  Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash.  The soil is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines.  These interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which the cassena is the most distinguished variety, and faced with ditches, make the prevailing fences of the plantations.  The hedges are adorned in March and April with the yellow jessamine, (jelseminum,)—­the cross-vine (bignonia,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,—­the Cherokee rose, (loevigata,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,—­and, two months later, the palmetto royal, (yucca gloriosa,) which protects the fence with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its pyramid-like clusters of white flowers.  Some of these trees and shrubs serve a utilitarian end in art and medicine.  The live-oak is famous in shipbuilding.  The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto, as it is called, resists destruction