350 BOG-STUFF OF THE SAVANNAHS. 



consists of flats along the shores of the river, or of longi- 

 tudinal valleys between opposite hilly ridges, more or 

 less rocky, from between which the edges of softer beds 

 have probably been scooped out before the latest uplift- 

 ings of the whole land took place. Inland the country 

 consists, for a great distance, of alternate ridges and 

 valleys — a prolongation of the mountains of Vermont 

 and New Hampshire. 



In occasionally passing from one of these valleys to 

 another, we ascended and travelled for some distance 

 along the upland. Where the slates happened to be soft 

 and crumbly, the soil of these uplands was almost always 

 good ; while it was rocky, stony, or light, and of little 

 depth, where the slates were harder, or of a more meta- 

 morphic character. In the bottoms of the valleys, as in 

 this climate we should expect, bogs were frequent — 

 savannahs, as they are here called — of a deep black 

 earth, formed in the same way as our peat-bogs, but 

 different in the physical qualities of the material of which 

 they consist. The fibrous tenacity of our peat is wholly 

 wanting ; a spungy but crumbling black vegetable 

 mould is the almost universal material of the North 

 American bogs — unfit for the manufacture of peat, but 

 of great use to the farmer, and highly valued for the 

 preparation of fertilising composts. The absence of the 

 heaths and mosses, of which our bogs are formed, and 

 the roots of which long remain undecayed in the brown, 

 and even in the black peat, together with the greater 

 extremes of summer and winter temperature to which 

 the decaying matter is exposed in North iVmerica, are 

 probably the main causes to which the difference in the 

 physical qualities of the bog-stufi:' in Europe and America 

 are to be ascribed. Travellers in New England, who 

 are interested in agriculture, will be surprised to hear 

 this black bog-earth universally spoken of in conversa- 

 tion, and in agricultural books, under the name of imich. 



