124 The Botanical Gazette. [May, 



bow which bends rather abruptly toward the ends. Its sur- 

 face is entirely naked and clear of trees and shrubs of any 

 kind with the sole exception of an occasional very much 

 dwarfed blueberry bush; and according to local tradition it 

 has always been so. The same authority, it may be added 

 in passing, says that it is growing in height; basing the state- 

 ment upon the observation that teams and people at the lower 

 end, which could formerly be seen from the upper, cannot 

 now be so seen, a point not likely to escape notice in a 

 sparsely-settled district where the doings of one's neighbors 

 are of so much moment. 



The bog is composed of nearly pure Sphagnum of the finest 

 kind, free from all roots and similar impurities and showin 

 not a trace of decay or anything resembling muck. Some few 

 other mosses and lichens occur on the surface, but appear to 

 form no part of the material below. The living material above 





merges gradually downwards into a clear, odorless, carbona- 

 ceous, semi-peat like material, which has been found to have 

 important economic properties dependent upon those quali- 

 ties. It is soaked with an abundance of water, clear and cold, 

 and hence totally unlike ordinary bog-water. Its clearness was 

 plain to the eye as it flowed from a squeezed handful of the 

 moss, its coldness to the senses, both by its feeling when a hand 

 was thrust into it, and also by the satisfactorily refrigerated 

 condition of the liquid portion of our luncheon which was 

 buried in it for a time to await our return. The bog does not 

 tremble under foot. It is bounded on one side only by high 

 land, and on the other it slopes down and merges into a flat 

 bog of the ordinary kind which is of great extent. The lat- 

 ter presents all the ordinary bog characters, dirty water, muck, 

 trembling places, and a growth of clumps of small spruces 

 and the ordinary ericaceous shrubs; in fact it is the common 

 every-day bog we all know. It is a novel and pleasing ex- 

 perience to walk from the dirty quaking affair up a slope to 

 one so clean and compact. 



My 



was of course 



triumphant and he gave me many details as to others, the 

 principal of which he has had the kindness to repeat in a let- 

 ter. His business during the past two years has taken him 

 over every pari .of this section of the country; and as he has been 

 specially on the look-out for the bogs, his observations are 

 valuable. In all he knows of sixteen bo S s of considerable 



