228 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



is, during the dry season, cut out into large square pieces, 

 that serve mainly to cover the lowly huts, which the 

 dwellers in those regions bury half under ground, and then 

 raise a few feet by loosely arranged stones. There they 

 live, the most miserable of men upon earth, dark gloom 

 all around them, and deeper gloom yet within their cheer- 

 less, unlighted hovels. 



If the moor is deeper, ditches are dug to carry off the 

 dismal water, and then the lower peat is carried away 

 in large pieces to serve as fuel. Often, when it is too 

 moist, it has to be kneaded, pressed into form, and then 

 carefully to be arranged in large, well-aired sheds, to dry 

 and to settle. If water be allowed to stand on the ex- 

 cavated moor, the peat is renewed in a few years, and 

 may be cut again, though the period varies from twenty 

 to two hundred years in different portions of Europe. 



Vast regions of our globe are covered with these rem- 

 nants of once bright, blooming flowers. The table-lands 

 of the Cordilleras in South America, the boundless plains 

 of Siberia, one-tenth of all Ireland, a large portion of Ger- 

 many, part of Scotland, Jutland, and Norway even the 

 sides and valleys of the Alps abound with such moors. 

 The polar circles are not free from them ; there, also, 

 mosses and algae still grow, and so closely and thickly 

 that they form, as it were, but one great mass of woody 

 fibre. Their growth is peculiar ; they add every year new 

 shoots to the upper extremities, whilst the lower as con- 

 stantly die and change, when dry, into rich humus, but, 

 when kept moist, into peat. Thus the famous Tundra, 

 the giant-morass of Siberia, is an almost inexhaustible 



