214 Ohio 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 ba}^ 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 

 it but once wet it drew up much more moisture than the coarse 

 sand and retained it longer as shown by the tables. 



