230 FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY-THIRD ANNUAL REPORT.
CLASSIFICATION OF FLORIDA PEAT DEPOSITS.
Florida undoubtedly has a greater variety of swamps, bogs, marshes, and other places where peat accumulates, than any other state or equal area in North America (if not in the worldd, and it is an extremely difficult matter to classify them. They are related to each other in so many different ways that it is almost impossible to decide what characters should be used for primary subdivisions and what for secondary ones. The problem is still further complicated by the fact that many if not most of them have their vegetation arranged in zones (which usually correspond approximately to the depth of the solid ground below the surface of the water or peat). While in any one deposit the zones might be pretty sharply defined, no two are exactly alike in this- respect, anti another deposit of essentially the sam-e character might have quite a different series of vegetation zones, owing to slight differences in size, or depth, or age, or some more obscure factor, or merely to the fact that certain plants happened to get established in one bog and not in another of the same kind.
In the present classification attention is first dfirected to tkhe nature of the water, i. e., to the substances dissolved or suspended in it. The surface waters of Florida can be divided into four principal classes, namely, salt, muddy, calcareous and swamp water. These of course intergrade m-ore or less, but this does not cause much confusion, for wherever two of these kinds of water come together it nearly always happens that they are so unequal in volume that one is soon swallowed up, as it were, by the other.
Swamp water, which characterizes most of our peat deposits, can be further classified as flowing, seeping and stagnant, and the.stagnant water according to its depth and fluctuations, and the amount of vegetation in it.
A few peat deposits which do not seem to fit very well into any particular class will be treated by themselves, as exceptions.
The swamps, bogs, etc., described in the succeeding pages may be classified about as follows. Those enclosed in brackets are only briefly mentioned, without their vegetation being described.