ne: Out1o STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
of Rye Beach and too young to bear. Aside from cottonwoods, 
willows and one of the buttonwoods I noticed but a single tree 
more than about twenty-five feet tall. Of plants as common in 
the dune section of Cedar Point as the cactus, bearberry and sea 
sand-reed I saw not one on the bar. 
Between the crest and the vicinity of the marsh only a few 
of the plants in the preceding list are met except at rare intervals, 
a waste of beard-grass and panic-grass with here and there a 
cottonwood or willow being all that meets the eye. Throughout 
the entire length of the bar and also in much of the dune section 
the vegetation is scanty except in a narrow belt along the bay 
shore. Here the wind that blows across the sand transporting 
the finer grains has its velocity checked by the marsh vegetation 
and so drops its load. Moreover the bar slopes so gradually 
from the crest that a strip several yards wide near the bay is but 
a few inches above water level. 
As water may be found anywhere by digging down to lake 
level, the sand near this level is kept continually moist by cap- 
illary action, but several feet above it the sand at the surface 
often becomes quite dry. Even at the same height above the 
water the fine sand contains much more water than the coarse 
and so is better suited to meet the needs of plants. To test the 
two sorts, sand was taken from among the bushes near the bay 
and from a point a few rods nearer the lake where the vegetation 
was scanty. The former was much the finer. The following 
experiments were tried with them. Hollow cylinders of glass 
and iron with cloth tied over the bottom were filled with sand 
and made to stand upright in shallow water so that the water 
was drawn up through the sand by capillary action. The fine 
sand contained a small amount of organic matter and when 
thoroughly dry was not readily wet even by water poured upon 
1t but once wet it drew up much more moisture than the coarse 
sand and retained it longer as shown by the tables. 
