1912] Owen,— Tillaea in Nantucket 203 
growths, is washed ashore by the ripple of the wind-stirred waves. 
When-drawn out of the water it hangs limp from the stick, a pale olive- 
colored mass; no flower or fruit visible to the naked eye. The land 
form is beautiful, but this — vegetation can hardly be more unlovely. 
The land form answers, point by point, Dr. Gray’s description in 
every edition of his Manual, while this differs point by point. 
But my concern is to find my lost station and to rediscover Oakes’s 
locality, for which our only guide is his statement that it was “the 
dried-up edge of small ponds." Now he never would have called 
Hummock, two miles long, a small pond; besides, that accurate 
botanist used the plural number — he found it in more than one spot. 
Along the south coast of the island there is a row of shallow ponds, 
one or two about half a mile long, the others of varying smaller size. 
Some of them are entirely dry now, though they keep their place on 
the map, but in 1829 they probably all had water in their beds. Now 
to give a guess at Mr. Oakes's walks, I should say that his collector's 
instinct would have led him speedily to the “Head of Hummock " 
which is not far from town, and, finding the vegetation rich there, he 
would have kept along the east shore of the pond, and as he got towards 
the southern end, he would have seen Reedy Pond and from that have 
been lured along first to Great Mioxes and then to Little Mioxes. 
These answer his description; they are small, and might be partly 
dried up at any time, that condition depending on the character of 
the season for much or little rain. Miacomet, a pond about a mile 
long, is about as far from town, but if he walked out to that and went 
down its east side, he might naturally have turned from its lower end 
along the south shore of the island and have come to Weeweeder, a 
small pond, and the first of the row just mentioned. They follow, 
one after another, at such short distances, that he would have been 
likely to keep on till he had searched them all. "These are Nobadeer, 
Madequecham, Toopcha and Forked, and to my mind, these after the 
three before mentioned, are the most likely places on the whole island. 
Moreover, these are the only ponds that I ever knew, which answered 
Mr. Oakes's description of his locality. The aquatic form is certainly 
not what Oakes found, and it was doubtless as unknown to him as it 
was to Dr. Gray after him, so his station is still undiscovered, and 
mine is lost for the present. But I solemnly advise collectors to keep 
away from these ponds from Reedy to the Forked Ponds. The life 
savers who patrol the coast report that recently quicksands have been 
