184 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Thermophone recently invented.' but it wîis impossible to force the temper- 

 iiture coil clown to any depth, though one could, no doubt, be special!}' 

 <;onstructed for the purpose. 



It is impossible to learn much about the internal structure of the 

 bogs, since they are hardly at all worked, and one must depend upon the 

 shallow holes he can dig, upon the soundings he can make with iron rods, 

 and upon the very few ditches which have been dug. In the Lepreau 

 bog a single ditch (at A, Fig. 2) has been dug, some 8 feet deep and 50 

 feet long, making a section through the margin to the high part. At the 

 Spruce Lake bog a much larger ditch, 12 feet deep, has been carried out 

 50 5nirds into the bog. The ditches and soundings show that these bogs 

 are composed of pure Sphagnum, penetrated everywhere by the slender 

 roots iind stems of the woody ]ierennials, and with some culms of sedges. 

 At any depth the moss can be torn out by handfulls, and though it 

 becomes darker and somewhat more compact towards the bottom, it does 

 not form except on the very bottom, true compact peat.- it is entirely the 

 kind known to European students as " Moostorf " (Fischer-Benzon). 

 From top to bottom it shows little other differentiation , though here and 

 there occur thin black streaks, said bj' the workmen to be burnt places, 

 but probably due to some other cause. There are no stumps present, 

 except a single layer on the bottom, which seems to be everywhere present, 

 and this testimony of the ditches is conHrmed by the soundings. On the 

 higher parts of the bog the rod meets no stumps nor bottom ; but in other 

 places, where the rod strikes wood, it is necessary onl}' to move it a short 

 distance and push it deeper to lind the bottom, which is usually of chi)', 

 thovigh sometimes of bleached gravel, which, no doubt, has day beneath 

 it. It seems plain that the raised bog has in it no layers of stumps, except 

 that which rests directly on the ground. What lies in the tleeper parts I 

 have no means of knowing. 



No foreign bodies of ai\y sort — bones, works of man, etc. — have yet 

 been found in the bogs. 



1 Made by E. S. Ritchie & Sons, Brookliiie, Masis. Uescribed in Tcchnolot/y 

 Quarterly for Jnly, 1895. It.s use in New Brunswick is described in Bulletin of the 

 Natural History Society of New Brunswick, No. 14, 1896, 47-52. 



2 1 have examined niiscroscopioally samples of moss from dilt'cieiit levels in the 

 <iitch at the Spruce Lake bog, with this result : From all levels down to 6 feet there 

 was no marked change in structure ; it became darker brown with the descent, but 

 the cell walls were distinct, with little or no distortion. My specimen, from 7 feet, 

 is missing, but in that from 8 feet there is a change not easy to describe. The greater 

 part of the cells are still distinct, but many of them have rolled and clotted together. 

 This clotting is clearly a step towards peat formation, for in a specimen of commer- 

 cial peat from Germany all of the cells showed a clott ng, and it was plain, too, in a 

 specimen taken from a Hat bog a foot or two under the surface. 



The nature of the peating process is well known. It is not at all a process of 

 decay by action of micro-organisms, but the result of a slow chemical alteration of 

 cellulose lignin, etc., into a series of ulmin and humin substances. The subject 

 has been studied particularly by Fnih {la). 



