94 PLYMOUTH BEACH. [CHAP. VII. 



swamp bordered by red cedars ; at another a small lake, then 

 hills of barren sand, then a wood where the sumach and oak, 

 with red and yellow fading leaves, were mixed with pines ; then 

 suddenly a bare rock of granite or gneiss rises up, with one side 

 quite perpendicular, fifteen or twenty-five feet high, and covered 

 on its summit with birch, fir, and oak. 



We admired the fine avenues of drooping elms in the streets 

 of Plymouth as we entered, and went to a small old-fashioned 

 inn called the Pilgrim House, where I hired a carriage, in which 

 the landlord drove us at once to see the bay and visit Plymouth 

 beach. This singular bar of sand, three miles long, runs across 

 part of the bay directly opposite the town, and, two miles distant 

 from it, serving as a breakwater to the port ; in spite of which the 

 sea has been making great inroads, and might have swept away all 

 the wharves but for this protection. As the bar was fast wasting 

 away, the Federal Government employed engineers to erect a wood 

 en framework, secured with piles, a mile long, which has been filled 

 with stones, and which has caused an accu mulation of sand to take 

 place. This beach reminded me of the bar of Hurst Castle, in Hamp 

 shire ; and in both cases a stream enters the bay where the beach 

 joins the land. It is well known that the Plymouth bar was a 

 narrow neck of land eighty years ago ; and one of the inhabitants 

 told me that when a boy he had gathered nuts, wild grapes, and 

 plums there. Even fifty years ago some stumps of trees were 

 still remaining, whereas nothing now can be seen but a swamp, 

 a sea-beach, and some shoals adjoining them. Here I spent an 

 hour with my wife collecting shells, and we found eighteen species, 

 twelve peculiar to America, and six common to Europe ; namely, 

 Buccinum undatum, Purpura lapillus, Mya arenaria, Cyp- 

 rina islandica, Modiola papuana, and Mytilus edulis, all spe 

 cies which have a high northern range, and which, the geologist 

 will remark, are found fossil in the drift or glacial deposits both 

 of North America and Europe, and have doubtless continued to 

 inhabit both hemispheres from that era. South of Cape Cod the 

 mollusca are so different from the assemblage inhabiting the sea 

 north of that cape, that we may consider it as the limit of two 

 provinces of marine testacea. 



