PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT.
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As one can easily imagine from the illustration, the shrubs are chiefly confined to the timber and the herbs to the open prairie. As far out as I could conveniently go in the largest of these prairies (which was very boggy) on l1ay 24, 1910, the peat was about five feet deep, resting on a sandy bottom. In the middle it is doubtless deeper. A sample from about a foot and a half below the surface (locality 42) was coarse, brown, fibrous, and not much decomposed, containing many living roots of herbs, as if the peat was accumulating pretty rapidly.
THE EVERGLADES.
(PLATE 13. )
On April 12, 19o9, I went up New River, in Dade County, to its head, about six miles from the railroad station at Fort Lauderdale, and then northwestward in one of the Everglades canals to the dredge, which at that time had reached a point about seven miles from the head of the river or edge of the 'Glades. From the top of this drede about 25 feet above the water, a splendid view of the very heart of the Everglades could be had. Not a tree was in sight, at least to the westward and northward, and the whole landscape consisted of a vast saw-grass marsh with scattered bushes, not aggregated in clumps as in the south coast prairie or the peat prairie already described. The western horizon appeared as a perfect straight line. (A photograph taken by Mr. Gunter near the same place is published elsewhere in this volume.) At this time the marshes were flooded, as a result of a very heavy rain the day before (over 4 inches having fallen at Miami on the i ith), but a few days earlier one might perhaps have been able to walk about in this part of the Everglades without much difficulty.
The plants observed in the vicinity of the dredge are as follows:
SHRUBS
Myrica cerifera (myrtle) flex Cassin e (swamp holly)
Cephalan thus occidentalis (button
bush)
HERBS
Cladium effusum (saw-grass) Osmunda regalis (a fern)
Oxypolis filiformis Peltandra Virginica
I-Iymenocallis sp.? (spider-lily) Nymphaea macro phylla (bonnets)
Rhynchospora corniculata

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