THE NAUTILUS. 



VOL. XXIX. DECEMBER, 1915. No. 8 



AN OCCURRENCE OF PALUDESTRINA SALSA IN NEW JERSEY. 



BY BAYARD LONG. 



The rapid extermination of the native flora along the Ne\v 

 Jersey coast, through the so-called "improvements" in re;<.l 

 estate, has led me during a period of some years to endeavo 1 , 

 as opportunity arose, to make as complete a survey as possible 

 of the plants of Long Beach. (This is a long narrow island 

 lying midway in the ocean boundary of New Jersey. Beach 

 Haven, its best known summer resort, is probably the mont 

 familiar name associated with this twenty miles of coast.) 

 When grading was accomplished mostly by the destruction and 

 leveling of the sand dunes, much of the brackish marsh area 

 escaped serious disturbance, but with the introduction of the 

 suction-dredge even the salt marshes, with their flora and fauna, 

 soon disappear under the flooding sand. 



With this thought in mind, whenever I am collecting plants 

 in the vicinity of Tucker's, I make a point of visiting a certain 

 deep brackish pond-hole in the midst of the salt marshes. My 

 interest lies in the endeavor to find fruit on the Ruppia which 

 fills this pool. The several forms of this water-plant are dis- 

 tinguished mainly upon fruit characters, and the present colony 

 seems to consistently spend its energies vegetatively. 



In the autumn of 1914 in picking over handfuls of this 

 Ruppia in hopes of finding a fruiting strand or old fruit 

 entangled among the leaves, I found a small Amnicoloid snail 

 (the size of a Ruppia fruit). On hasty examination it some- 



