406 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [DECEMBER 
width from a quarter of a mile to a mile and a half, and in height from 
nearly sea level, in the case of certain salt marshes, to perhaps thirty 
feet in the case of some of the highest of the wind-blown dunes, The 
conditions prevailing on the higher parts of these banks are quite 
peculiar, for though the shifting sandy soil holds very little water, the 
air is very damp, since during the growing season the prevailing wind 
is a strong sea breeze saturated with moisture from the warm water of 
the Gulf Stream. Thus is to be accounted for, perhaps, the frequent 
occurrence here of many plants not usually found in so dry a soil, and 
the striking abundance of epiphytic lichens, liverworts, mosses, and 
ferns. 
In the following pages are noted some of the interesting features 
of the flora of Bogue Bank and Shackleford Bank, observed during a 
three weeks’ stay at the U. S. Fish Commission Laboratory at Beaufort, 
in June 1899. 
The effect of physiographic agencies on the two banks above men- 
tioned is at the present time quite different. Bogue Bank, at the point 
studied, seems to have reached a stage of development where it is com- 
paratively stable. It has an outer border, or sea wall as it were, of high 
dunes covered with Andropogon maritimus, and firmly bound by its long 
tough rhizomes into barriers very resistant to the destructive advances 
of both the sea and the wind. On these dunes, growing with the 
Andropogon and within easy reach of the spray, are found scattered 
scrubby specimens of Juniperus Virginiana and large patches of //ex 
Cassine, both overrun with Ampelopsis quinguefolia, Rhus Toxicodendron, 
Smilax Bona-nox, and Melothria pendula. Scattered among them are 
found Chenopodium Botrys, Diodia teres, Cinothera humifusa, and 
Solidago sempervirens. 
As we go inward and downward from the outer crest of the dunes 
the forms mentioned give way to, or become mixed with, a very large 
number of other forms, making a flora much like that immediately to 
be described for Shackleford Bank. 
On the latter bank, instead of the outer border of comparatively 
stable dunes, we find a shifting waste of wind-blown sand, stretching 
in a quarter of a mile or more from the water’s edge, and reaching its 
greatest height at its inner border, where it is encroaching upon a? 
rapidly burying what remains of the binds that once covered most 
of the bank. 
For a hundred yards in from the water the only plants seen are the 
