PLANT-MUMMIES. 233 



heath, broken only here and there by a dying bush, or 

 a lowly hillock, reigns alone and triumphant. 



Even the sea has its moors and its bogs. When the 

 tide recedes from the coasts of France and England, vast 

 hidden morasses become visible. For miles and miles 

 they stretch into the sea, these wide oceanic meadows. 

 Engulfed plains, sunken marshes, where thousands of years 

 ago a joyous world lived and loved, are now the home 

 of fishes and muscles. Often a tempest brings large tracts 

 of this watery peat to the shore, or a fisherman drags 

 huge pieces of bog from the deep. 



Stranger still is it, when the air enclosed in the fine, firm 

 texture of matted roots and fibres, buoys a bog and raises 

 it high up into the air. Then large pieces are torn from 

 their ancient resting places, and are carried about like 

 floating islands, at the mercy of winds, until the waves 

 rend them into fragments, or the water they imbibe makes 

 them too heavy, so that they sink once more down to 

 their proper home. Such islands of peat have been found 

 large enough to afford pasture for a hundred head of 

 cattle; but a few years destroy their form, and they dis- 

 appear without leaving a trace behind them. Near St. 

 Omer, in France, these islands are left to roam freely, 

 during summer wherever they list, but in winter they are 

 tied fast to the shore. Still others bear trees, even on 

 their surface ; and both Russia and Chili have such strange 

 vagrants, formed of sea-grass, even in clear, transparent 

 water. 



Rarely only, the moor despises the slow progress of un- 

 dermining and silently engulfing living nature, and breaks, 



