PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT.21

A coastal plain is a region which has been elevated above sealevel a comparatively short time, and has not developed any mountains either by folding or erosion, its strata being comparatively level, and elevated only a few hundred feet at the most. By far the' largest and most typical coastal plain in the world is that of the southeastern United States, which extends from New York to Texas or beyond, and covers about 200,000 square miles, including all of Florida and Louisiana, nearly all of Mississippi, over half of the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, and parts of several other states, even as far inland as southern Illinois. Most of this region is believed to have been under water at about the same time the glaciated region was covered with ice, and it has been very little eroded since then, on account of its prevailing low elevation and sandy soils. The coastal plain contains many lakes and ponds, formed in very different ways from those in the glaciated region, but just as well adapted to the accumulation of *peat. Estuaries too are numerous in the coastal plain, not so much on account of its topographic immaturity as for the simple reason that it border.;the coast.
Within these regions of immature topography there are of course places where climatic or other conditions do not favor the formation of peat. For example, in the United States west o[ about the 95th meridian the climate is almost too dry for peat, both in the glaciated region* and in the coastal plain. On the other hand, there are other parts of the world where the climate compels (as one might say) the formation of peat, although the topography does not favor it.
For example, the island of Anticosti, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is said by Txvenhofel* to, be made uip mostly of flat terraces which are almost completely covered with peat, and he attributes the abundance of peat to the cool, wvet, foggy Climate. Darwin on his voyage around the world in the first half of the 19th century found peat exceptionally abundant in Tierra del Fuego and the
*A report on the peat of Iowa recently published in the Annual Report of the Iowa Geological Survey for 19o8 brings out some interesting facts. Out of about 300 samples of peat analyzed, none had less than 15% of ash when perfectly dry, and the average was over 25%. This state of affairs is doubtless correlated with the rather dry climate (the average annual rainfallgfor Iowa being about 31 inches). A large part of the mineral matter probably comes to the petat in the"+ frmo"f-%;dust1C1 fr ow i4sidtobeepeialysujet -o-trn

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