752 
Peat and its Products. 
with an equal weight of coal, is driven off to a great extent by chopping the 
peat into fine pieces, and thereby exposing a large surface to evaporation. 
The ash varies in amount from less than TOO to more than 65 per cent, and 
consists of sand, clay, ferric oxide, sulphuric acid, and minute proportions of 
lime, soda, potash, and magnesia. 
Professor T. Rupert Jones, F.R.S., classifies peat 1 2 as (1) 
peat bogs and turf moors on such levels as flat mountain tops 
and wide hill moors, (2) peat bogs of valleys. 
1. Examples of this group are afforded in the Scotch Highlands, where 
the general “ turf” of the higher surfaces parses into “peat” in the hollows. 
View of Scottish peat moss opened for digging fuel. 3 
Another case is that of the Bog of Allen, occupying an area of 238,500 acres, 
with an average depth of 25 feet, in the hollows of the great limestone flats 
in the middle of Ireland, in which country “turf” (peat) is said to cover 
2,830,000 acres, or nearly one-seventh of the entire area. 
2. Valley peat is met with in various kinds of localities : — (1) At the 
beads of valleys, as illustrated by Chatmoss, on a northern affluent of the 
Mersey, in Lancashire ; the peaty lake near Kildale, in Yorkshire; (2) at 
the salient angles within river-curves, and in deserted beds of rivers ; (3) in 
plains and lakes of expanded valleys ; (4) in river deltas, as the peat de- 
posit near West Hartlepool, and the alluvial flats in Sussex ; (5) maritime 
peat marshes, where certain valleys and plains (which are but broad valleys) 
open to the sea, as illustrated by the Fenlands of England, especially the 
1 On the Nature and Origin of Peat and Peat Bogs. Proceedings of the 
Geologists’ Association. Vol. VI , No. 5, January, 1880. 
2 This illustration is reproduced by permission of the publishers, Messrs. 
Macmillan & Co., from Sir Archibald Geikie’s Text-hooli of Geology , p. 459. 
