1896.] ^^1 [Gushing, 



undertake such a reconnaissance. With that rare public spiritedness, 

 instant foresight and promptitude for which he is so distinguished, 

 your honored Vice-President, Dr. Pepper, fortliwith provided funds 

 and otherwise arranged for this preliminary survey by me. 



Thus, and through the kind offices of the late Hamilton Disston, Esq., 

 and Col. J. M. Kreamer and their associates, I succeeded in securing, from 

 the Clyde Steamship Company and from those courteous gentlemen of 

 Jacksonville, Col. J. K. Leslie and Major Joseph H. Durkee, passes all 

 the way from New York to Jacksonville, and, by way of the St. John's 

 river to Sanford, and thence by rail diagonally down through the pine 

 lands and the tropic lowlands of Florida, and found myself, within less 

 than a fortnight, at the little town of Punta Grorda, near the mouth of 

 Pease river, a deep tidal inlet, on the gulfward side of that State. 



First Hecoxnaissance. 



Description of the Ancient Keys or Artificial Shell Islands. 



I was not much delaj'ed in securing two men and a little fishing sloop, 

 such as it was, and in sailing forth one glorious evening late in May, 

 with intent to explore as many as possible of the islands and capes of 

 Charlotte harbor, Pine Island Sound, Caloosa Bay and the lower more 

 open coast as far as Marco, some ninety miles away to the southward. 



The bright waters of these connected bays and sounds formed a far- 

 reaching and anon wide-spreading, shallow inland sea. It was hemmed 

 in to the westward by a chain of long, narrow, nearly straight, palmetto 

 and forest-clad reefs or islands, just visible on the horizon ; but, as I 

 later learned, all of sand, save only for occasional capes or promontories 

 of shell that here and there jutted forth into the wide mangrove swamps 

 that everywhere closely invested their inner shores. The shores of the 

 opposite mainland and of Pine Island too — which, intervening, hid 

 them for miles — were even more widely skirted by these tangled tidal 

 swamps. 



All around, and apparently all over the many islets that darkly dotted 

 the shimmering expanse of this shoreland sea — somewhat as is shown in 

 Plate XXVI — grew also, straightway from the tide-line upward, these 

 clustering deep green mangroves, so closely and evenly that they seemed, 

 when seen from afar, like gigantic clumps of box in some inundated 

 olden garden. They grew so loftily, too, that from the level of the 

 channel near even the largest islets, naught of their inner contours 

 could be seen. 



The astonishment I felt, then, on penetrating into the interior of the 

 very first encountered of these thicket-bound islets, may be better im- 

 agined than described, when, after wading ankle deep in the slimy and 

 muddy shoals, and then alternately clambering and floundering for a 

 long distance among the wide-reaching interlocked roots of the man- 

 groves — held hip-high above the green weedy tide-wash by myriad 



PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXV. 153. 2 P. PRINTED MAY 25, 1897, 



