104 College of Forestry 
See Hig. 10. I have not determined by borings the depth of 
filling by cat-tail vegetation, but the muck in certain places 
traversed was several feet thick and, in cases, the filling had 
passed beyond the reed marsh to the meadow marsh and even 
the swamp shrub stage. See Fig 11. 
Montezuma Marsh is of course the great show feature of 
New York in this connection. Here the young emerging 
land consists of peat and muck and marl beds built up by 
hydrophytic vegetation, latterly largely by eat-tail, upon a 
deep, glacial fill of sand and gravel laid down across the 
north end of the Cayuga Lake basin. Barge canal excava- 
tions and borings showed in a record of nine miles of marsh, 
four or five feet of muck, thin strips of marl, blue clay, then 
sand down to one hundred or even two hundred feet. 
The efficiency of cat-tail as a growth form for this sort 
of environment is particularly obvious in these marshes. Its 
rapid and extended development of rhizomes gives it the 
capacity to cover ground rapidly and to the exclusion of other 
forms—in its earlier development — and meantime, to 
weave as one may say, a firm mat which resists wave action 
which here is right severe in high water stages because of the 
high winds which have clear sweep across the marsh. Fig. 
12 shows a view of a bit of the marsh taken during an 
early and unusually dry spring at a low-water stage. The 
curious ridge and furrow effect appears to be correlated with 
wave action. Note here that royal fern is associated with 
eat-tail in forming these ridges — literally rows of small 
tussocks. Now the bulk of vegetation in such a case is right 
large, and of course all the aerial parts, together with wind- 
swept or flood-carried or other debris caught in the mass, 
become each winter beaten down to form a new, if finally 
thin, addition to the slowly rising bed of organic remains 
topped by and knit into some firmness by the perennial 
root stalks and roots of the living plants. Also, of course, as 
the whole mass rises, this living mat dies away below and thus 
adds to the total depth of peaty stuff. You will observe also 
that in this tvpe of vegetation, in contrast with the delicate 
“collapsible ” structures of aquatics, the plant has a firmer 
