glesey and Man, in Somersetshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, 

 Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, and indeed in almost every county of 

 England, has this substance been found. 



In the account given by Captain John Perry, of the stopping of 

 Dagcnharn Breach*, that able engineer particularly describes what 

 he terms the moor-log. This, he says, was composed of vegetable 

 matter heaped together, but seemed chiefly to be composed of 

 brush wood, among which there appeared to be a considerable 

 quantity of hazel trees; hazel nuts themselves were also found in 

 this mass, and were very fair to look at, but were easily crushed, 

 the kernel having entirely perished. In the mass were also con- 

 tained the trunks of several trees, of which, he thinks, the trunks of 

 the yew trees, some of which were about fourteen or sixteen inches 

 in diameter, were the least decayed. The willow trees, which were 

 two feet and upwards in diameter, retained a whitish colour like 

 touchwood, and were even softer than the adjoining earth or moor- 

 log. The moor-log appeared at about three and a half or four feet 

 under the marsh ground, and differed in thickness, in different parts. 

 Up the Thames, at Deptford, it was six feet in thickness. In Wool- 

 wich Reach, where Captain Bronsden had then been repairing his 

 wharfs, over against the ballast wharf, it was between seven or 

 eight feet thick. In Plumsted Levels, just against Barking Creek, 

 its thickness was full nine feet ; its thickness, as well as its breadth, 

 gradually increasing down the river, on both sides. None of it, he 

 says, was to be seen where the course of the river, cuts into the 

 high-land, as at Woolwich, Erith, and Purfleet. Beneath the moor- 

 log was a stratum of blue clay, and under this gravel and sand, 

 Stags' horns were likewise found in different places, a little above 

 the vein of moor-log. 



The description of the peat at Newbury, in Berkshire, will serve 



* An Account of the Stopping of Dagenham Breach, by Captain John Perry, 

 1731. p. 72. 



