LEPIDOPTERA OF NORTH AMERICA. 269 



palmettoes, their fronds all broken with the winds, are all 

 that relieve the monotony of the scene. And is this Florida ? 

 exclaims the traveller, who for the first time catches sight of 

 her shores, his head filled with imaginings drawn from her 

 name, and Bartram's strained description. Can this be Flo- 

 rida ? Was it here that Ponce de Leon sought the fountain 

 that, like the cauldron of Medea, was to bring back youth ? 

 Yes, this is East Florida, and the fountain of perpetual youth 

 is to be found in its delicious atmosphere, which revives the 

 invalid, even on these barren sands. 



As you enter the river, however, you perceive two small 

 islands in its channel, clothed with live-oaks, and fringed 

 with lofty palmettoes, and beyond them, on the south side of 

 the river, the steep wood-covered slope of St. John's Bluff, 

 above which the river mostly runs between low wooded 

 banks, with here and there other bluffs of small elevation. 

 The highest, perhaps, of these bluffs, is St. John's, yet even 

 that is not more than about eighty feet high. On the east 

 it rises abruptly fi-om the salt marshes, and is clothed with 

 thick underwood, mingled with taller trees ; at the foot, is a 

 small creek fringed on one side with bushes of a species of 

 Lycium, and tall Yucccb. The northern side is nearly per- 

 pendicular, for the tide washes it away at its base, and the 

 sea-breeze, if, perchance, it blow stronger than common, 

 scatters far and wide the sands of which it is composed. The 

 vegetation on the summit, by slightly holding the earth toge- 

 ther there, makes that part the last to fall : but during my 

 stay, I was witness to the disappearance of more than one 

 large tree from the undermining of its roots by the winds and 

 waves. As is common in this part of the St. John's, beds of 

 oyster- shells occur at various elevations ; they appear to be- 

 long to the same species as the delicious ones which are as 

 abundant at the mouth of the river in a living, as these in a 

 dead, I can hardly say fossil, state, for they look just like the 

 scattered shells we see in the roads and fields around our 

 own habitations. On the summit of the bluff, especially 

 near to the river, are a great many Indian mounds, the burial- 

 places of a race, in all probability extinct before the white 

 man set foot here. As the face of the bluff crumbles away, 

 it exposes fragments of pottery, and sometimes bones, arrow- 

 heads, and stone battle-axes from these tombs. The pottery 

 is always in small fragments, rarely more than a few inches 

 wide. These appear to be portions of large round vases, 

 perhaps two feet in diameter. They are sometimes plain, 

 sometimes reticulated on the outside with raised lines, and 

 have evidently been subjected to intense heat. 



