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Show DRINKING SWAMP WATER. The thought of drinking water from j a swamp has very little appeal, and it I is hard to believe that water from i such a source should be sought even Jat much inconvenience becnuse of its I "keeping" qualities. Yet such is the I case. In a press bulletin sent out by the United States geological surrey i there is an article on the Dismal swamp of Virginia and North Carolina Caro-lina that contains so much of interest wc fell like passing a part of .it to i readers of The Standard The article ' says in part: J Few regions in America arc i more adorned by nature or more interesting to the tourist and scientist sci-entist than the Dismal swamp of Virginia . and North Carolina. : Though the entire region may present pre-sent a dismal appearance in winter win-ter and some parts of it in all sea-sous, sea-sous, the swamp is annually visited visit-ed by many pleasure seekers and j has long been a place of study and i absorbing interest to the geolo-1 geolo-1 gist, the botanlsl, and tho zoologist. zoolo-gist. It lies in the coastal plain of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Most of the surface consists of recently formed peat, the residuum resulting result-ing from the arrested decomposi- lion of- vegetation, but the underlying under-lying rocks are older and record events that occurred thousands of , years ago, in the pleistocene epoch: The peat ranges in depth from one to twenty feet. Contrary Con-trary to popular belief this peat has antiseptic and preservative properties, and consequently much of the surface water is pure. Thnnpli Tin romninc nf nvimitivA man or of extinct animals like those uncovered in the bogs of Ireland have been found in the Dismal swamp, the peat contains many well-preserved trunks, of cypress cy-press trees that lived long before ' America was settled by our ancestors. an-cestors. - The region may be readily reached from Norfolk by canals, .whose banks, - shaded by stately . tregs and graceful vines, afford an over-changing scene from the deck of the little steamer that daily-plies daily-plies their waters. When the swamp was young it was entirely covered by water, but much of the water has drained off through these canals, and large areas are now dry. in the center Is a pic- turcsquo body of water called Lake Drummond, the origin of which is a mooted question. According Ac-cording to the most plausible hypothesis hy-pothesis that has beon advanced, it is the remnant of a large body of deep water which once covered cov-ered the entire region. Tho water in this lake, because of Its remarkable remark-able keeping property, was used in earlier years for drinking on trans-Atlantic voyages. It is amber-colored and, Is known locally as "Juniper water." As this namo implies, the peculiar color has H)een ascribed to the bark of the white cedar (Jun'per), which abounds in the swamp. It seems more likely," however, that this color is given to the water by Its finely divided vegetal content or by the dye extracted from the brown peat. |
