PRELIMINARY REPORT ON PEAT. 
277 
As one can easily imagine from the illustration, the shrubs are 
chiefly confined to the timber and the herbs to the open prairie. As 
far out as I could conveniently go in the largest of these prairies 
(which was very boggy) on INI ay 24, 1910, the peat was about five 
feet deep, resting on a sandy bottom. In the middle it is doubtless 
deeper. A sample from about a foot and a half below the surface 
(locality 42) was coarse, brown, fibrous, and not much decomposed, 
containing many living roots of herbs, as if the peat was accumu¬ 
lating pretty rapidly. 
THE EVERGLADES. 
(plate 13.1) 
On April 12, 1909, I went up New River, in Dade County, to 
its head, about six miles from the railroad station at Fort Lauder¬ 
dale, and then northwestward in one of the Everglades canals to the 
dredge, which at that time had reached a point about seven miles 
from the head of the river or edge of the ’Glades. From the top 
of this dredge, about 25 feet above the water, a splendid view of the 
very heart of the Everglades could be had. Not a tree was in sight, 
at least to the westward and northward, and the whole landscape 
consisted of a vast saw-grass marsh with scattered bushes, not ag¬ 
gregated in clumps as in the south coast prairie or the peat prairie 
already described. The western horizon appeared as a perfect 
straight line. (A photograph taken by Air. Gunter near the 
same place is published elsewhere in this volume.) At this 
time the marshes were flooded, as a result of a very heavy rain the 
day before (over 4 inches having fallen at Aliami on the nth), but 
a few days earlier one might perhaps have been able to walk about 
in this part of the Everglades without much difficulty. 
The plants observed in the vicinity of the dredge are as follows: 
1 
SHRUBS 
Myrica cerifera (myrtle) Ilex C as sine (swamp holly) 
Cephalanthus occidentals (button 
bush ) 
HERBS 
Cladium effusum (saw-grass) Osmunda regalis (a fern) 
Oxypolis filiformis Peltandra Virginica 
hiymenocalks sp.f (spider-lily) Nymphaea macrophylla (bonnets) 
Rhynchospora corniculata 
