— 220 — 



on black mud and forming a rather high, shady forest below the 

 foliage of which was only seen, as far as eye could penetrate, 

 aerial root close to aerial root. The mud was almost without 

 vegetation, here and there a Herpestis Monnieria Kth. was seen 

 creeping, or specimens of the tall fern Acrostichum aureum L. 

 {Chrysodium vulgare) were growing" ^). 



With this picture still fresh in my memory, it is easily under- 

 stood that at first I could not make out where I was, when in 

 January 1906 I visited the same locality together with Mr. Raun- 

 kiser. Already at a distance from the more elevated inland the 

 appearance of the lagoon had astonished me. While earlier, as 

 above mentioned, the lagoon seen from the heights had looked 



Fig. 13. Krausse's lagoon seen at a short distance from the plantation Blessing. 



(F. B. phot.) 



splendid Avith its numerous wood-grown islands, it now looked most 

 like a large, pale, gray plain with scarcely any vegetation at all. 

 The above photograph (Fig. 13) shows the lagoon in 1906; 

 it has been taken at almost the same place as the above men- 

 tioned (pi. 5) in my earlier paper. One could form some notion 

 of the change which had taken place on comparing the two photo- 

 graphs. Not a trace of the above mentioned mangrove forest at 

 "Anguilia" was left, all had vanished. Directly below the more 

 elevated land a clayish flat without almost any vegetation appeared. 



^) In connection with this it may also be of interest to quote what Eggers 

 (1878, p. 119) writes of this lagoon in his excellent description of "The 

 nature of the Danish West Indian Islands": "In larger lagoons e.g. the 

 above mentioned Krausse's lagoon on St. Croix, the mangrove-vegetation 

 is often forming beautiful parts resembling a quiet lake in woody coun- 

 tries, often with small green islands scattered here and there over the 

 face of the water, where the leafy crowns are hanging quite down to the 

 surface of the water" and (p. 20) in the same paper Eggers describes 

 Krausse's lagoon as "densely overgrown with mangrove wood'". 



