440 BICKNELL: FERNS AND FLOWERING PLANTS OF NANTUCKET 
useful to the future explorer to speak of certain parts of the island 
where, especially, careful work remains to be done. In the 
southwestern quarter that not extensive tract known as ‘‘The 
Woods” which, although treeless, must at some unrecorded period 
have justified its name, has probably not been visited in every 
season, and Trot’s swamp and the maze of thickets, wet and dry, 
in Squam, as well as parts of Polpis, are places which not every _ 
collector may have cared to penetrate. At Coskaty there is a 
thickly wooded tract where it is probable few botanists have 
ever been. Only once and too hurriedly have I gone amid the 
thick undergrowth of this piece of timber and its complete ex- 
ploration has remained an object unattained. Nor has my hope 
yet been realized of sometime traversing the long sand strip be- - 
tween Coskaty and Great Point. 
Reading again the pages of Mrs. Owen’s catalogue through its 
perspective of more than thirty years, we are reminded anew of the 
- singular rarity on Nantucket of many of its most interesting 
plants, and of their close seclusion in those chosen spots that have 
given them protection. Some of these plants, many of them, 
indeed, that were discovered by Mrs. Owen, or announced through 
her by the active group of collectors which she inspired, have 
rarely been encountered since. And as many as fifteen or twenty 
species then reported, which we have no reason to believe are not 
growing somewhere on Nantucket today, remain to be redis- 
covered by those whose pleasure it shall be to continue the study 
of the island’s botany so long ago begun. 

