THE NAUTILUS. 67 



and on my return go through the same operation. I set my 

 wits to work to contrive a bridge from the timbers which were 

 thickly scattered about by a former hurricane. I laid a track 

 of plank, got a piece of an oar and a broken gaff out of which I 

 made a couple of rollers. Then I strained and lifted onto these 

 a twenty-foot timber, six by twelve, which had done duty in 

 some old railroad bridge, and rolled it down into the water. I 

 shoved the far end of it into a little cove on the opposite eide, 

 staked the near end to keep it from drifting away and triumph- 

 antly walked across it, saying to myself, ' ' When a man uses 

 his brains he can save himself a lot of discomfort." In front 

 of me grew perhaps a half acre of saltwort (Batis maritima), a 

 dense, half-erect shrub with very succulent leaves, and I strode 

 through this on my way to the sandy shore beyond. Suddenly 

 I bogged down, going over my knees into water and mud that 

 the deceptive shrub had entirely concealed, and after flounder- 

 ing across a couple of rods of this loblolly I crawled out on the 

 opposite side completely bedraggled and disgusted. I reached 

 the sandy shore and a little farther on the hammock. This 

 piece of forest is doubtless classic ground. In the first half of 

 the nineteenth century there lived in Key West a Dr. John 

 Blodgett, who practiced medicine and carried on a drug store. 

 He became greatly interested in the botany of the keys and 

 made collecting trips among them. He discovered two Clusias, 

 tropical strangling trees, and a Cupania, a member of the soap- 

 berry family on Big Pine, and as this hammock was very ac- 

 cessible to any one coming from Key West he no doubt col- 

 lected in it and in all probability discovered these trees in it. I 

 have searched the forests of Big Pine, and Dr. John K. Small 

 of the New York Botanical Garden has done likewise, but no 

 vestige of any of them has been found, and they are probably 

 extinct so far as our flora is concerned. Henry Hemphill, per- 

 haps the best conchological collector of his time, worked, I be- 

 lieve, on this key (perhaps in this hammock) and the adjoining 

 No Name and found beautiful Liguus solidus in variety. 



Without a doubt these snails have lived in this hammock 

 until lately, perhaps until the dreadfully disastrous hurricane 

 of September, 1919. I visited it a couple of months later and 



