PRELIMINARY REPORT ON TEAT. 
311 
judgment by means of the oak, hickory, beech and maple forests 
of the northern and middle states, the sweet gum and white oak 
bottoms of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the hammock vegeta¬ 
tion of Florida, etc. (Examination of a land-office map of Florida 
will show that the old Spanish grants, especially those away from 
navigable waters, nearly all include a large proportion of hammock 
land). As the population increased there soon came a time when 
there was not enough very rich soil to go around, and poorer and 
poorer soils gradually had to be brought under cultivation. The 
improvement of agricultural methods and transportation facilities, 
the selection of more prolific varieties of plants, or, if nothing else, 
the price of farm produce, always keeps pace with the‘extension of 
the cultivated area, however, so that the farmer who cultivates the 
poorest soil can always make both ends meet in the long run. (Ac¬ 
cording to political economy this is bound to be the case, for 
obviously no one would continue very long at farming or any other 
business if he lost money by it; and there are always just enough 
successful farmers to feed and clothe the world.) 
The purpose of the preceding paragraph is merely to show that 
no one need imagine that our peat deposits and other swamps are 
newly-discovered mines of agricultural wealth, capable of enrich¬ 
ing all who succeed in getting a slice of them. Our forefathers 
knew good land when they saw it, and any land which they left 
uncultivated simply was not worth cultivating when the popula¬ 
tion was sparse. Comparisons are sometimes made (hy promoters) 
between our Everglades and the valley of the Nile, but these are 
very misleading, for the two regions have little in common except 
latitude and water, and the water differs greatly in amount, move¬ 
ments, fluctuations, and substances suspended or dissolved in it; 
characters which I have already shown to be of fundamental im¬ 
portance in classifying swamps. (Equally misleading is the term 
“delta” often applied to the country between Sanford and Lake 
Jessup.) 
There is, however, another factor to be considered in connection 
with these and other agricultural problems, namely, fertilizers. 
The use of commercial fertilizers, which has grown rapidly in the 
last few decades, has made the original fertility of soil less im¬ 
portant than formerly, and enabled the farmer on new poor sandy 
land to raise just as good crops as the one on old rich clay land. 
This being the case, not so much attention is now paid to the chemi¬ 
cal nature of the soil, and ease of cultivation is the prime re¬ 
quisite. 
At the present time almost any soil which is not too hilly or too 
rocky or too wet or too remote from markets, or impregnated with 
