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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 in to 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 equatic 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 concretion 
hardened by the air, than of an organized vegetable. The lichen, 
which spreads itself upon the surface of humble plants, bears such 
