MEMORIAL OF CHARLES A. DAVIS 29 



From the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, working with Russell, he 

 writes : 



"Camp No. 9, near Waucedah, Michigan, July 23, 1905. 



"We are certainly getting our share of 'regen,' as our German host put it 

 last night, but manage to keep moving. 



"I have found several interesting places since I saw you : one, the bog at 

 Nathan, which I went to the day after I saw you, was a real spruce bog witJi 

 abundant sphagnum, but not to the margin of the open waters. The other was 

 a small lake near Merrymans Lake (sections 33 and 34, townships 37 and 38 

 north, range 28 west). This was of rather an unusual type and unexpected in 

 the Upper Peninsula, since the plant making the advance off from shore was 

 Decodon verticillatus, swamp loosestrife, supposed to be found only in the C. 

 and S. peats of the Lower Peninsula, but certainly here and doing business. 

 It grows as a perennial, in clumps or stools, but dies back to the water's level 

 or about there each fall. It makes long, slender branches, which grow several 

 feet long and droop at the tips, and when they reach water take root and send 

 up shoots, establishing new plants one or more feet away from the old ones, 

 and since the connection is only maintained a single year the new plant is 

 independent by the fall of the year it starts. The stools eventually become a 

 foot or more across and on them other plants find satisfactory foothold to 

 work out over the water. The substratum in this little lake was undoubtedly 

 formed by some of the few-celled algce, which made a soft, very light colored 

 peat (?) perfectly distinct from any of the other types of macerated vegetable 

 material occurring in the bogs south. 



"Russell says this region we are going into around Iron Moimtain has many 

 lakes in it, and I think it would be well for me to stay with him for a while 

 longer, at least until I exhaust the possibilities of this region, for so far the 

 mature swamps show nothing new, although there are some plants wanting 

 which occur below and a few here which are not found there." 



"Ann Arbok, Michigan, Novemher 6, 1905. 



"I wish you would let me know just what sort of report on my work last 

 summer you want. I have been working on the utilization and technical side 

 of the peat question and am trying to make a well balanced paper of that, and 

 I have also a partial revision of my thesis planned out and some of the worl? 

 on it done and some of the illustrations done, too. 



"One of the interesting things which I have found in working over some of 

 the algal material about which I told you is that there are a large number of 

 conifer pollen grains, and these retain their structure perfectly and are easily 

 recognizable after all structure has disappeared from the rest of the material, 

 which is almost wholly made up of unicellular algae. Of course, diatoms are 

 present and are not destroyed in the general breaking down. This interesting 

 find naturally suggests that some of the cannel coals which have been de- 

 scribed as composed of pollen, or its equivalent, from the carboniferous flora 

 may have been principally algae, and the pollen grains may have been all that 

 is left of the material, the structure of the algse entirely disappearing. It was 

 Huxley, wasn't it, who described the pollen coal?" 



