wilderness surrounding the Pilgrim settlements at Plymouth, and 
as in the Plymouth wilderness, they are dotted with clear sand- 
rimmed ponds. For the largest of these (Lake Ronkonkoma) 
“the Indians had a most superstitious reverence.” + Bailey, in 
describing the cranberry-growing region of Plymouth County, so 
clearly depicts an area similar to that of eastern Long Island that 
I have included here a part of his description. 
“This Cape Cod region is but a part of the sandy waste which 
stretches southward and westward through Nantucket, along the 
north shore of the Sound and throughout a large part of Long 
Island; and essentially the same formation is continued along the 
Jersey seaboard. Here the sea-coast vegetation meets the thickets 
of alder and bayberry and sweet fern, with their dashes of wild 
roses and viburnums. And in sheltered ponds the sweet water- 
lily grows with rushes and pondweeds in the most delightful 
abandon. In the warm and sandy glades two kinds of dwarf oak 
grow in profusion, bearing their multitude of acorns upon bushes 
scarcely as high as one’s head... . But while we are busy with 
our expectations, we are plunging into a wilderness,—not a second 
growth, half-civilized forest, but a primitive waste of sand and 
pitch-pines and oaks!” 
The Long Island pine barrens extend eastwardly to the wind- 
swept Shinnecock Hills which “ assume some permanence of form, 
an 
held together by a coarse, wiry grass, but sustaining only the 
stunted bayberry, the beach plum, and the dwarfed red cedar,” ® 
and James Truslow Adams, has unearthed some older descrip- 
oe 
tions of these hills “ composed almost entirely of fine sand, 
drifted hither and thither by the winds . . . perfectly naked ex- 
cept extensive patches of whortle berry, bay berry and other small 
shrubs. A succession of . . . sand hills, like the ground men- 
tioned in the gcse 2U0n of Cape Cod, . . . exhibit a desolate and 
melancholy aspect 
At the very eastern extremity of the Island, a little more than a 
hundred miles from the early Dutch settlements, an isolated prom- 
1 Flint, p. 24. 
2 Bailey, L. H. Evolution of Our Native Fruits, p. 414-424. 1911, Also 
in en le n, October, 1890. 
“Flint, p. 2 
Werte oe Southampton. Bridgehampton. 1918. 
