100 JOURNAL OF THE MITCHELL SOCIETY | June 
up of about a dozen larger islands, which are mostly bounded by the 
Everglades on two sides and separated from each other by narrow 
channel-like intersecting prairies. The Long Key group has a much 
smaller area than the Biscayne pineland. It consists of about five 
larger islands and a few smaller ones. Both groups are of limestone, 
and they are slightly elevated above the Everglades. The rock is 
rather porous and the softer spots of the almost universally exposed 
surface have been eroded, mostly by leaching out, so as to form a 
surface honeycombed with all sizes of cavities having very ragged 
and sharp edges. These limestone islands are almost completely for- 
ested with the Caribean-pine (Pinus caribaea) which grows nearly 
everywhere on the exposed rock. However, the pine-woods, or pine- 
lands, are interrupted here and there by hammocks or areas of hard- 
wood shrubs and trees, some areas small and some much larger, al- 
though all taken together these comprise but a very small percentage 
of the region under consideration. The hammocks may be divided 
into two groups; first, the high pineland hammocks which are islands 
or colonies of hardwood trees in the pine-woods. They are dry except 
for the water contained in deep lime-sinks and in the humid air. 
They number about a score. Second, are the low pineland ha‘n- 
mocks, indefinite in number and situated along the boundary line of 
the pinelands and the Everglades proper and prairies. These are 
usually high and dry towards the pine-woods and low and wet along 
the Everglades or prairies. 
_ The ratio of pineland ferns to hammock ferns seems astonishingly 
small. There are only three kinds of ferns that may be considered 
naturally pineland plants. Even two of these ferns will spring up in 
clearings in hammocks which have been partly destroyed either by 
nature or by man. The other forty-eight species are hammock plants. 
Their habit ranges from the stiffest to the most graceful and their 
structure from the coarsest to the most delicate. The pineland species 
are strictly terrestrial in habit. The hammock kinds are to a great 
extent epiphytie. 
The hammocks of the Biscayne pineland are rich repositories of 
ferns, The trees are nearly all evergreen. More abundant are: 
pigeon-plum (Coccolobis), devil’s claws (Pisonia), blolly (Torrubia), 
cherry (Laurocerasus), wild-tamarind (Lysiloma), Jamaica-dogwoo 
(Ichthyomethia), coral-bean (Erythrina), toreh-wood (Amyris), bit- 
terwood (Simarouba), gumbo-limbo (Elaphrium), Guiana-plum 
