230 
FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY—THIRD ANNUAL REPORT. 
CLASSIFICATION OF FLORIDA FEAT DEPOSITS. 
Florida undoubtedly has a greater variety of swamps, bogs, 
marshes, and other places where peat accumulates, than any other 
state or equal area in North America (if not in the world), and it 
is an extremely difficult matter to classify them. They are re¬ 
lated to each other in so many different ways that it is almost 
impossible to decide what characters should be used for primary 
subdivisions and what for secondary ones. The problem is still 
further complicated by the fact that many if not most of them have 
their vegetation arranged in zones (which usually correspond ap¬ 
proximately to the depth of the solid ground below the surface of 
the water or peat). While in any one deposit the zones might be 
pretty sharply defined, no two are exactly alike in this respect, and 
another deposit of essentially the same character might have quite 
a different series of vegetation zones, owing to slight differences in 
size, or depth, or age, or some more obscure factor, or merely to the 
fact that certain plants happened to get established in one bog and 
not in another of the same kind. 
In the present classification attention is first directed to the 
nature of the water, i. e., to the substances dissolved or 
suspended in it. The surface waters of Florida can be divided into 
four principal classes, namely, salt, muddy, calcareous and swamp 
water. These of course intergrade more or less, but this does not 
cause much confusion, for wherever two of these kinds of water 
come together it nearly always happens that they are so unequal 
in volume that one is soon swallowed up, as it were, by the other. 
Swamp water, which characterizes most of our peat deposits, 
can be further classified as flowing, seeping and stagnant, and the 
stagnant water according to its depth and fluctuations, and the 
amount of vegetation in it. 
A few peat deposits which do not seem to fit very well into any 
particular class will be treated by themselves, as exceptions. 
The swamps, bogs, etc., described in the succeeding pages may 
be classified about as follows. Those enclosed in brackets are 
only briefly mentioned, without their vegetation being described. 
