PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT. 
mangrove bushes reaching a uniform height of three or four feet, 
and these are entirely absent from the Everglades. 
The peat resources of the coast prairie have not been investi¬ 
gated, but are probably insignificant. 
THE KEYS. 
The Keys, a curved line of narrow rocky islands extending 
from Soldier Key (just south of Cape Florida or Key Biscayne) 
to Key West, long ago attracted the attention of geologists and 
other naturalists, and a good deal of more or less accurate infor¬ 
mation about them has been published. It does not seem to have 
been generally known until a few years ago, though, that they 
can be divided into two distinct groups.* 
Those lying northeast of Bahia Honda channel (sometimes 
distinguished as the upper Keys) are generally long and narrow in 
a direction parallel to the general trend of the coast line, and 
composed of a limestone in which large fossil corals are extreme¬ 
ly abundant. Fresh water, pines, saw-grass, saw-palmetto, and 
even the cabbage palmetto seem to be absent from these keys, and 
the vegetation is chiefly made up of a large variety of tropical hard¬ 
woods and palms, growing in dense hammocks. 
I have not yet visited the lower keys, but a glance at the map 
suffices to show that they are larger and more irregularly shaped 
than the upper ones, and from the accounts of Mr. Sanford and 
several people that I have talked with they must resemble the 
Miami limestone region in many ways. The highest recorded eleva¬ 
tion on any of the keys, according to Sanford, is 18 feet, and the 
greater part of their area is considerably less than half as high as 
that. 
One might travel the whole length of the Keys without noticing 
any peat, but there seems to be a good deal of it in certain chan¬ 
nels and coves protected from the waves. It is formed chiefly by 
the mangrove, and is said to occur on both the upper and lower 
keys. An analysis of mangrove peat from the upper keys can be 
found farther on, under miscellaneous No. 7. 
*See Sanford, 2nd Ann. Rep. Fla. Geol. Surv., et seq. 1909. 
