352 GEOLOGICAL SUEVEY OF THE TERRITORIES. 



These mosses absorb water from their leaves, their branches, their 

 stems, still more than from their roots ; they live, therefore, from the 

 humidity of the atmosphere when they cannot derive it from underlying 

 basins of water. They always grow in compact masses, sometimes 

 covering wide areas by their only vegetation. They gTow, too, upon 

 slopes, even steep ones, and thus in countries where the atmosphere 

 is charged with a large proportion of humidity, they ascend from the 

 base to the top of high mountains. It is the case in Ireland. The 

 cone of the Brocken, too, so well known in the German legends of 

 the Hartz Mountains, is not only surrounded at its base by deep peat- 

 bogs, but the peat covers, at many places, the slopes of the cone to the 

 tops of its rocks. Nobody would dare to attemi)t descending the cone 

 on these apparently smooth slopes of the mountain, formed by a mere 

 carpet of mosses which, passing from rock to rock, covers sink-holes 

 of great depth between them. In our country, the same phenomenon 

 is repeated in those naked places called glades, on the slopes of the 

 Alleghany or of the Adirondack Mountains. They are openings like 

 small prairies, in the middle of thick pine-forests. The fire has evi- 

 dently not touched these i)laces ; a small spring has developed the vege- 

 tation of the spongy mosses. They have, by and by, invaded a larger 

 space, preventing any other kind of vegetation but that of the bogs, 

 even covering the dead trees falling upon them, and there we have de- 

 posits of peat upon slopes of the same degree as that of the forests 

 around. 



It would take a volume to describe in some detail and explain a few 

 of the manifold appearances which the mere surface of a peat formation, 

 even of small extent, oifers for investigation. If one, for example, will 

 take the trouble to traverse a peat-bog, even where its surface is flat 

 and looks uniform, and where the dryness affords a somewhat solid 

 footing, he cannot but remark this : 



1st. The essential vegetable, the moss, (Sphagnum,) is not only spread- 

 ing and covering the plane surface, but its tufts ascend all over the 

 debris of wood, even the largest trees which have fallen u^jon the 

 ground, and cover them. And when the swamp is in some places over- 

 grown by bushes or conifers, as it is often the case, these mosses ascend 

 against the trunks or above the roots, forming tufts, hillocks, around 

 and uiDon them. 



2d. This kind of moss, even in its more upraised and apparently 

 dryest patches, is always full of water. Take a handful of it and 

 press it ; water will run out of it, not in mere drops, but in rills. This 

 moss has the softness of a sponge, and is a sponge. If you want a 

 proof of it, put this now well-compressed and apparently dry tuft in your 

 pocket, and when at home expose it upon a dry plate to the atmosphere 

 for one cloudy night, and in the morning, you may repeat the experi- 

 ment, squeeze the moss, and find it as much saturated with water as it 

 was when taken from the swamp. 



3d. The vegetation, though most generally, if not always, intermixed 

 with Sphagnum, is not continuous or uniform over extensive areas ; here 

 we find patches of mosses over which the cranberry and other creeping 

 small bushes are in full bloom; there a group of shrubs; farther, a 

 thick growth of tamaracks, in the north ; in the south, the bald cypress 

 and magnolia, or an impenetrable grove of canes ; then apparently bar- 

 ren surface covered by shallow water or a thin crust of black mud, in- 

 terspersed with tufts of hard sedges, rushes, &c. ; thus a continual 

 change caused by great diversity of a vegetation which, however, taken 

 in its whole, forms an exclusive and limited group. 



