PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT.

judgment by means of the oak, hickory, beech and maple forests of the northern and middle states, the sweet gum and white oak bottoms of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the hammock veg, etation of Florida, etc. (Examination of a land-office map of Flurida will show that the old Spanish grants, especially those away from navigable waters, nearly all include a large proportion of hamni"-,ck land). As the population increased there soon came a time when there was not enough very rich soil to go around, and poorer and poorer soils gradually had to be brought under cultivation. The improvement of agricultural methods and transportation facilities, the selection of more prolific varieties of plants, or, if nothing else, the price of farm produce, always keeps pace with the extension of the cultivated area, however, so that the farmer who cultivates the poorest soil can always make both ends meet in the long run. (Ac' cording to political economy this is bound to be the case, for obviously no one would continue very long at farming or any other business if he lost money by it; and there are always just enough successful farmers to feed and clothe the world.)
The purpose of the preceding paragraph is mercy to show that no one need imagine that our peat deposits and other swamps are newly-discovered mines of agricultural wealth, capable of enriching all who succeed in getting a slice of them. Our forefathers knew good land when they saw it, and any land which they left uncultivated simply was not worth cultivating when the population was sparse. Comparisons are sometimes made (by promoters) between our Everglades and the valley of the Nile, but these are very misleading, for the two regions have little in common except latitude and water, and the water differs greatly in amount, movements, fluctuations, and substances suspended or dissolved in it; characters which I have already shown to be of fundamental imiportance in classifying swamps. (Equally misleading is the term "delta" often applied to the country between Sanford and Lake Jessup.)
There is, however, another factor to be considered in connection with these and other agricultural problems, namely, fertilizers. The use of commercial fertilizers, which has grown rapi(1ly in the last few decades, has made the original fertility of soil less important than formerly, and enabled the farmer on new poor sandy land to raise just as good crops as the one on old rich clay land. This being the case, not so much attention is now paid to the chemical nature of the soil, and ease of cultivation is the prime requisite.
At the present time almost any soil which is not too hillyr or too. rocky or too wet or too remote from markets, or impregnated witl i

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