Opposite Newfoundland, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ireland is hardly less remarkable for the enormous development of its peat-mosses or bogs. These tracts of saturated vegetation, in which _Sphagnum palustre_ predominates, comprehend nearly two and a half millions of acres--the seventh part of the whole island. The inhabitants continue to extract from them, every year, immense quantities of fuel. The spaces left by the spade in the vegetable mass are gradually filled up again by new layers. After a certain number of years, which vary according to the abundance of rain, the depth of the bed of water, the force of vegetation, and the slope of the soil, the turf “quarry” is formed anew. In Ireland it generally takes about ten years to entirely fill up again the trenches, measuring from nine to thirteen feet in depth, which are made in the bogs on the plains, when a fresh digging of turf may be commenced. In Holland, crops of this fuel may be gathered, on an average, every thirty years. In other peat-moss districts the period of regeneration last forty, fifty, and even a hundred years. In France, on the borders of the Seugne (Charente-Inférieure), it has been ascertained that ditches five feet deep and nearly seven feet wide are completely obstructed by vegetation after the lapse of twenty years. As for the beds of peat which carpet the sides of mountains, they take centuries to form afresh. In Ireland, the Low Countries, the north of Germany and Russia, heaps of trunks of former forest-trees--oaks, beech, alder, and other trees--are frequently discovered, which by their decay have made way for the peat-mosses. The _Sphagnum_, too, often takes possession of ground of which man had previously made himself master, and in many places roads, remains of buildings, and other vestiges of human labor are found below the modern bed of vegetation by which they are now covered. Certain peat-bogs in Denmark and Sweden may be considered, on account of the curiosities which have been found in them, as perfect natural museums, in which the relics of the civilization of ancient nations have been preserved for the _savants_ of our own day.