GENERAL FEATURES
 Under this head the various geographical features of central Florida will be discussed by topics, and each subdivided by regions as far as is possible or desirable. This naturally involves some reiteration of facts already brought out in the regional descriptions, but the two treatments supplement each other just as the ground plan and elevation of a building do, and this second part is best adapted to illustrating general principles. It will also be useful to persons who are interested primarily in one thing, such as mimeral resources, water, soil, climate, timber, population or agriculture, and do not care to look through ten regional descriptions to pick out the desired information.
 The treatment begins with the structure of the earth's crust, which as far as we know has not changed materially for ages, and proceeds to topography, which changes a little more rapidlythough almost imperceptibly in a human lifetime-to soil and climate, to vegetation-which is changing slowly all the time even where man does not interfere with it-and finally to such very changeable features as population and agriculture. Soil, which is the top of the earth's crust, might perhaps most logically be treated immediately after stratigraphy, but in the area under consideration its character seems to depend as much on topography as on the nature of the underlying rocks, so topography is taken up first.
 A complete account would treat every topic historically as well as geographically ; but the changes in stratigraphy, soil, topography and climate are so slow, and exact information about them so meager, that it is hardly worth while to speculate about them at all in a work of this kind. Vegetation changes more rapidly, and in the last 25 years there have been published hundreds of pages oq the supposed trends of development, or "succession," of vegetation in various parts of the country, particularly the Middle West. But in this report vegetation -is regarded as essentially' static, except for the depredations of civilized man and some comparatively short cycles of succession after fire in pine lands, scrub, hammocks, etc., which will be alluded to at the proper places.
 Population and agriculture have developed from almost nothing to their present stage in less than ioo years, and we have abundant 154