PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT.

mangrove bushes reaching a uniform height of three or four feet, and these are entirely absent from the Everglades.
The peat resources of the coast prairie have not been investigated, but are probably insignificant.
THE KEYS.
The Keys, a curved line of narrow rocky islands extending from Soldier Key (just south of Cape Florida or Key Biscayne) to Key West, long ago attracted the attention of geologists and other naturalists, and a good deal of more or less accurate information about them has been published. It does not seem to have been generally known until a few years ago, though, that they can be divided into two distinct groups.*
Those lying northeast of Bahia Honda channel (sometimes distinguished as the upper Keys) are generally long and narrow in a direction parallel to the general trend of the coast line, and composed of a limestone in which large fossil corals are extremely abundant. Fresh water, pines, saw-grass, saw-palmetto, and even the cabbage palmetto seem to be absent from these keys, and the vegetation is chiefly made up of a large variety of tropical hardwoods and palms, growing in dense hammocks.
I have not yet visited the lower keys, but a glance at the map suffices to show that they are larger and more irregularly shaped than the upper ones, and from the accounts of Mr. Sanford and several people that I have talked with they must resemble the Miami limestone region in many-ways. The highest recorded elevation on any of the keys, according to Sanford, is I8 feet, and the greater part of their area is considerably less than half as high as that.
One might travel the whole length of the Keys without noticing any peat, but there seems to be a good deal of it in certain channels and coves protected from the waves. It is formed chiefly by the mangrove, and, is said to occur on both the upper and lower keys. An analysis of mangrove peat from the upper keys can be found farther on, under miscellaneous No. 7*See Sanford, 2nd Ann. Rep. Fla. Geol. Surv., ct seq. 19o9.