SECOND ANNUAL REPORT—SOUTHERN FLORIDA. 
189 
everglades. 
It is difficult for a person who has not seen the Everglades to form 
an approximately exact idea of that far-extending expanse of sedges, 
with its stretches of shallow water, its scattered clumps of bushes and 
its many islands. Photographs fail to convey the impressions of dis¬ 
tance, of remoteness, and of virgin wildness which strike the visitor 
who looks out across that expanse for the first time. 
The Everglades occupy the greater portion of southern Florida. • 
They reach from Lake Okeechobee on the north to the vicinity of 
Whitewater Bay on the south and may have a maximum width of fifty 
miles. Their exact extent is undetermined as they have not been sur¬ 
veyed but is estimated at 5,000 square miles. The relief of the drier land 
is slight and the actual dividing line between saw-grass morass and 
cypress swamp, prairie, pineland or coastal swamp is extremely intri¬ 
cate. A difference of two feet in water level means the difference be¬ 
tween shallow lake and dry land for hundreds of square miles. Hence, 
the relation between land and water shown on a particular map is not 
necessarily to be taken as absolute or even general; it may show in an 
approximate way the relations as determined in the month or months 
and year of the survey. 
On the north the main body of the Everglades reaches to the south¬ 
ern and southwestern sides of Lake Okeechobee. Arms extend far¬ 
ther north but much of the eastern and most of the northern-shore of 
the lake is bordered by cypress swamps, some of these containing the 
tallest and cleanest, cypress to be found in Florida. 
East of the Lake the Everglades fade away irregularly in the Alla- 
pattah flats, a region largely under water, at the end of each rainy 
season, where are interwinding strips of saw-grasS swamp and grassy 
prairies, occasional patches of cypress and, more rarely, a hammock of 
hard wood growing on a slight rise in the almost dead level of the 
surface. Farther south the Everglades are bordered'by prairie and 
cypress swamps, and at a few places reach nearly to the coast. The 
line of rocky pineclad islands that extends southwestward from the 
main body of the Biscayne pineland nearly to Whitewater Bay has a 
fringe of prairie, but there is a saw-grass strait east of the islands, and 
to the south are wide expanses of saw-grass, dotted with keys, that 
disappear seaward among thickets of dwarf cypress or mangrove. On 
the west the Everglades from Whitewater Bay to Lostmans River 
reach to the mangrove swamps that fringe the coast. North of Lost- 
mans River an arm of the Everglades that runs up between the man¬ 
grove swamp and the prairie bordering the pine islands gradually dis¬ 
appears before getting as far as Allens River. Cypress swamp and 
