76 FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY I3TH ANNUAL REPORT 



make rather dry reading, but besides their brevity, they, have the 

 great advantage of ehminating personal opinions, which have been 

 rather too prominent in much that has been v^ritten about Florida 

 heretofore. The source of most of our statistics is the state and 

 federal censuses, and these of course are not and never can be 

 absolutely accurate, but their errors (except in completeness of en- 

 umeration) are just about as likely to be in one direction as another, 

 thus balancing each other to a considerable extent when sufficiently 

 large numbers are used. And as they represent the work of a multi- 

 tude of enumerators, no individual investigator can hope to ap- 

 proach them in completeness, or to detect errors (other than typo- 

 graphical, etc.) in them by merely going over the same ground once 

 or twice. ' 



The aim of this report is to answer as many as is possible in 200 

 pages or so of the questions that al prospective settler or investor 

 might ask. There is already a vast amount of literature about this 

 and other parts of Florida, in books and magazines and in hand- 

 somely illustrated circulars issued by boards of trade, railroads, 

 real estate companies, etc., but most of that is devoted to some limit- 

 ed area, which is usually painted in the most glowing colors, se 

 that it may not help the reader much in getting at the whole truth. 

 Every region on earth has its advantages and disadvantages, and 

 the well-nigh universal policy of minimizing or ignoring the latter 

 in the effort to attract settlers is rather short-sighted, for if a new- 

 comer finds conditions too different from what he had been led to 

 expect he is liable to give up in despair and give the region a bad 

 name. 



The information in scientific works, soil surveys, census reports, 

 etc., is much more likely to be accurate and impartial than that de- 

 signed merely to entertain the reading public, increase the business 

 of railroads, etc., but it is relatively inaccessible, and not easy for 

 the average unscientific person to digest and interpret. And in spite 

 of all that has been published about Florida, it would be difficult 

 to find in previous works any definite statement about the prevail- 

 insf soil types, commonest plants, density of population, percentaere 

 of illiteracy, leading religious denominations and foreign nationali- 

 ties, percentage of white and colored farmers, owners and tenants, 

 averasre size of farms, value of farm land and buildings, number of 

 animals of various kinds per farm, cost of labor and fertilizers, 

 leading crops and average yield of each, etc., for any of the region? 



