Much larger swamps occur on the young coastal plain of the Atlantic from New Jersey to Florida.  The Dismal Swamp, for example, in Virginia and North Carolina is forty miles across.  It is covered with a dense growth of water-loving trees such as the cypress and black gum.  The center of the swamp is occupied by Lake Drummond, a shallow lake seven miles in diameter, with banks of pure-peat, and still narrowing from the encroachment of vegetation along its borders.

Salt lakes.  In arid climates a lake rarely receives sufficient inflow to enable it to rise to the basin rim and find an outlet.  Before this height is reached its surface becomes large enough to discharge by evaporation into the dry air the amount of water that is supplied by streams.  As such a lake has no outlet, the minerals in solution brought into it by its streams cannot escape from the basin.  The lake water becomes more and more heavily charged with such substances as common salt and the sulphates and carbonates of lime, of soda, and of potash, and these are thrown down from solution one after another as the point of saturation for each mineral is reached.  Carbonate of lime, the least soluble and often the most abundant mineral brought in, is the first to be precipitated.  As concentration goes on, gypsum, which is insoluble in a strong brine, is deposited, and afterwards common salt.  As the saltness of the lake varies with the seasons and with climatic changes, gypsum and salt are laid in alternate beds and are interleaved with sedimentary clays spread from the waste brought in by streams at times of flood.  Few forms of life can live in bodies of salt water so concentrated that chemical deposits take place, and hence the beds of salt, gypsum, and silt of such lakes are quite barren of the remains of life.  Similar deposits are precipitated by the concentration of sea water in lagoons and arms of the sea cut off from the ocean.

Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan.  These names are given to extinct lakes which once occupied large areas in the Great Basin, the former in Utah, the latter in northwestern Nevada.  Their records remain in old horizontal beach lines which they drew along their mountainous shores at the different levels at which they stood, and in the deposits of their beds.  At its highest stage Lake Bonneville, then one thousand feet deep, overflowed to the north and was a fresh-water lake.  As it shrank below the outlet it became more and more salty, and the Great Salt Lake, its withered residue, is now depositing salt along its shores.  In its strong brine lime carbonate is insoluble, and that brought in by streams is thrown down at once in the form of travertine.