Florida is a strange region, yet most attractive. The traveller
regards its surface as mainly a monotonous level of forest and swamp,
with fruit and floral embellishments, but it in fact rises by an
almost insensible ascent from the coast towards the interior, where
there is a central summit ridge all along the peninsula of about three
hundred feet elevation, covered with pine woods. Most of the surface,
however, is but a few feet above the sea-level, these "flatlands," as
they are called, being grass-grown savannahs, pine woods, swamps and
cabbage-palm thickets. The southern part of the peninsula is the
region of the everglades, which have been formed by successive dykes
of coral, built by the industrious little insect long ago. The upper
part of this region is occupied by the extensive but shallow waters of
Lake Okeechobee, which merges insensibly into the everglades south and
east, the Seminoles calling this grass-grown and spongy region, which
is still the abode of some remnants of the tribe, Pa-ha-yo-kee,
meaning "much grass in water." These everglades are penetrated in all
directions by tortuous water channels of slight depth; and at frequent
intervals in the whole district there are wooded islands possessing
fertile soils and covered with dense tropical vegetation. These
islands are said to have been surrounded by the sea in bygone ages,
and they then stood in the same relation to the mainland as do the
present Southern Florida reefs and keys. Wide tracts of cypress swamp
separate the everglades from the Gulf of Mexico, while in Southern
Florida they approach within a few miles of the Atlantic Coast, being
separated by an intervening dyke of coral, crossed by frequent streams
of rapid current, for the everglades are far from being stagnant
swamps. There are also many other extensive swamps in the State.
The Florida seacoast is usually protected by sand beaches which are
quite hard, and are separated from the mainland by interior lagoons.
The mangrove and the coral, constantly growing, are ever encroaching,
however, on the sea-waters, and thus Florida seems to have been
constructed. The country is full of water courses, lakes and springs,
some of the latter being regarded as among the most remarkable in the
world, the famous Silver Spring near Ocala being estimated as
discharging three hundred millions of gallons daily. There are
countless springs along the coasts, and one of these bursts up in the
sea near St. Augustine, two miles off shore, with a torrent so
vigorous that the ocean waves break over the column of fresh water as
if it were a sunken reef. Scientific investigators are amazed at the
vast amounts of water everywhere visible and discharged from these
springs, and with only the narrow and low peninsula for a watershed,
the problem as to where the vast water supply comes from baffles
solution. Some of the Florida lakes are subject to remarkable
fluctuations of level, and one of them, Lake Jackson, ran suddenly dry
at the time of the Charleston earthquake in 1886, but after a few
weeks the water began returning, and it soon resumed its natural
proportions.