1912] Sinnott,— Pond Flora of Cape Cod 33 
comparative inaccessibility, makes them a fascinating collecting- 
ground. Wakeby Lake (really in Mashpee) with the Cotuit Ponds 
and Great Nine-Mile Pond, in Barnstable, are all partially drained and 
have narrow gravelly beaches for the most part, which are often un- 
interesting, though in certain spots there is excellent collecting. 
Perhaps the richest flora of all, however, is found on the “Mary 
Dunn" Ponds near the eastern border of Barnstable township. 
There are a score or more of these, of all sizes and in all stages of filling, 
and a number of plants grow here which the writer has found nowhere 
else on the Cape. In Yarmouth, also, there are many interesting 
collecting-places, notably Dennis, Miller, Greenough and other 
smaller ponds in the northern part of the town and Sandy, Basslot, 
Flax and others nearer the south shore. Of course the ponds of the 
lower Cape, such as those about Pleasant Lake in Brewster and near 
the villages of Eastham and Wellfleet, have a large and varied flora, 
as have the ponds in the Falmouth region, to the west, but many plants 
are rare or absent there which occur commonly in the Barnstable 
area. 
The often sporadic and local distribution of many Cape plants 
would conform to what one might naturally expect of the behavior 
of a previously more extended coastal plain flora which is gradually 
dying out, and, from other evidence, it seems very possible that 
something like this is happening. On the other hand, the fact that 
vegetation both to the eastward and to the westward of the above- 
mentioned central region is progressively less and less rich in coastal- 
plain plants makes it reasonable to suppose that we have here a center 
of distribution for these things, which have come north not along the 
southern coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island, probably, for they 
are rare or absent there, but through Long Island, across to Martha’s 
Vineyard and Nantucket and thence across Vineyard Sound to the 
mainland of Cape Cod. Their distribution here perhaps marks out 
roughly the position of an arm of the ancient coastal plain. The 
whole question is of great interest in connection with Professor 
Fernald’s discovery of a large coastal plain flora in Nova Scotia and 
Newfoundland, but more data must be gathered before any very 
definite conclusions can be drawn in regard to the origin of the flora 
of Cape Cod. 
The foregoing paper does not pretend to give a complete account 
of the pond vegetation of Cape Cod, but the writer has attempted to 
