306 FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY-THIRD ANNUAL REPORT.
UTILIZATION OF PEAT.
Peat can be and has been put to a remarkable variety of uses. ranging all the way from its use in place as a soil for growing crops in, to the extraction of ammonia, alcohol, and other products from it by complicated chemical processes. Some of its uses are based on its physical properties, some on chemical properties, and some on both. New ways of using it are frequently discovered. but those which have. not passed beyond the experimental stage hardly need to be mentioned here. The more important uses to which peat is put after being removed from the place where it is formed may be classified as follows:
Based on physical properties
Non-conductor of heat or sound Fiber for paper, pasteboard, etc.
Blocks for paving and building purposes.
Based on chemical properties
Preservative
Source of dye, ammonia, alcohol, etc.
Fuel
Air-dried
Pressed
Coke Gas
Based on both physical and chemical properties
Absorbent and disinfectant
Fertilizer
Fertilizer filler.
All these uses have been discussed at considerable length in several recent state and government publications, particularly those on the peat of Maine, New York, New Jersey and Michigan (see bibliography), which can be obtained without much trouble by any one who is sufficiently interested; and it is hardly worth while to repeat much of what has already been said on the subject. The uses of peat which are likely to be of most interest to the people of Florida at the present time or in the near future are as fiber, fuel, fertilizer filler, and agricultural soil.
Peat has not been used very extensively for fiber in this country as yet, but there are in Florida, especially in the saw-grass marshes. vast quantities of coarse fibrous peat which probably cannot readily be pressed into briquettes for fuel or ground up for fertilizer filler, but ought to be well adapted for non-conducting material or the manufacture of pasteboard and similar substances.
"The simplest use of peat as fuel consists in merely digging it out in lumps or blocks with a spade and exposing it to sun and wind