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by the medium of water, preserves the fog or moss which grows 

 among the decayed trees, and converts it into peat-moss; as well as 

 that which attributes its origin to a certain state of preservation of 

 the sphagnum palustre and some kinds of confervce, the Doctor offers 

 an hypothesis of his own. 



Can it be, he asks, that peat-moss, as we find it in its natural 

 state, is, of itself, a vegetable production, not a conjeries of dead 

 plants preserved by some mystical influence, as has been generally 

 supposed, but actually alive, and in the highest degree of perfection 

 of which it ever is susceptible ? 



After considering this question with the greatest attention I am 

 capable of bestowing upon it, I feel myself strongly inclined, the 

 Doctor says, to answer in the affirmative, notwithstanding the re- 

 luctance I felt at first to give into that opinion, on account of the 

 singular appearance of this substance. In its analysis, recent qua- 

 lities, decomposition, and final decay, every circumstance tends to 

 point it out as a recent vegetable substance possessing certain pro- 

 perties of fresh vegetables, particularly inflammability in a high 

 degree of perfection. Its appearance is indeed very unlike to those 

 vegetable substances we have been used to observe, and more 

 nearly resembles a mass of putrid vegetable matters than a real 

 living substance. But were, the Doctor observes, appearances alone 

 to be trusted in matters of this kind, many vegetables would have 

 been degraded from that class. The sponge, growing in large irre- 

 gular masses, more resembles an aquatic excrescence, than a regular 

 organized vegetable production. The truffle, which buries itself in. 

 the earth, and never appears at all above ground, would seem to 

 rank rather in the fossil than in the vegetable kingdom. Several 

 kinds of fungi, which spring out from wounded trees in irregular 

 lumps, have infinitely more the appearance of a gummy concre- 

 tion, hardened by the air, than of an organized vegetable. The 

 lichen, which spreads itself upon the surface of humble plants, bears 



