GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE TEKRITOEIES. 351 



for deatli. They have no life but vegetable life, which, in its luxuriance, 

 is generally enveloped in a kind of repulsive gloom. At some open plai- 

 ces the surface is covered by mere heaps of mosses, where deep-sinking 

 footing makes each pace not only uncertain but startling and alarming 

 as dangerous. At others the bogs are thickly interspersed by hillocks, 

 which, formed on the roots of trees and bushes, hidden under a thick 

 carpet of mosses, offer not only an insecure footing, but are separated by 

 gulches full of stagnant, black, muddy water, where the prospect of 

 a plunge is not pleasant indeed. At other places still -the bogs are so 

 thickly overgrown by trees and bushes that one has to use the hatchet 

 to penetrate them. Through a narrow path, edged in that way by 

 two walls of verdure, the perspective is so limited that every kind of 

 research becomes nearly impossible. Or, also, the trees and bushes, 

 some standing, some inclined or iirostrated in every direction, form over 

 the surface a kind of net, whose meshes are hidden by the vegetation of 

 the mosses, of the ferns, «&c. Those who have tried to cross a cedar- 

 swamp will never try again the same mode of shortening their journey. 

 It is the most difiQcuit task to pierce through a few rods of such a swamp, 

 either in walking along the prostrated, half-covered trunks, by fear of 

 tumbling down iuto the dark intervals, or in searching a passage upon 

 the surface by climbing and passing across the trunks or piercing under 

 them through the wet curtains of rank vegetation pending from their 

 sides. Moreover, many peat-bogs are not only of dangerous, but of im- 

 possible access. In the north of Europe, and in the south of our coun- 

 try, as, for example, in the swamps near the shores of the sea from New 

 Jersey to Texas, the bog-vegetation often begins at the surface of the 

 water, extends over wide areas, covering abysses of water and mud of 

 various depths. At some places the vegetable carpet is strong enough, 

 to bear trees of large size ; even railroads have been built upon such 

 kind of floating laud ; at others the too thin carpet is split and rent by 

 a little weight. When the natijralist is trying to visit such swamps, he 

 does it at the peril of his life. Peat-bogs of this kind in Ireland, as in 

 Denmark and Sweden, too, are crossed only by narrow paths indicated 

 by poles. On dark nights, and in trying to follow them, many a wan- 

 derer, missing the way, has never been seen again. Some of these bogs 

 are of such dangerous access that they are never spoken of by the inhab- 

 itants of the country but with a kind of dread. In Denmark, according 

 to legendary records, a run upon the death-swamp was the penalty 

 inflicted on great criminals, who rarely or e'er traversed the bog, being 

 generally ingulfed in the attempt. Though we may doubt the truth of 

 this legend, it is, however, positive that a great quantity of implements, 

 of weapons, of ornaments, even skulls, skeletons of inhabitants of for- 

 mer races, are found in bogs now emptied by hydraulic enginery and 

 worked to the depth of 75 feet or more, in the north of Europe. The 

 museum of Copenhagen has a number of large rooms filled merely by 

 remains of this kind. And these are not the only forbidding features 

 of the peat-bogs of our time, not all the visible phenomena which should 

 demand investigation and study to enable a naturalist to understand 

 some of the more marked characters of the formation of combustible 

 deposits. 



The peat results from the heaping of vegetables growing at the 

 surface of the bogs ; but as water is necessary for the preservation and 

 transformation of the vegetable matter, and as peat does not grow 

 always in basins, but often far above the reach of any water-level, 

 where and how is the water procured ? By the agency of a mere 

 kind of moss, tlie Sphagnum, which acts like a vegetable sponge. 



