1034 The American Naturalist. [ November, 
the same time. Through miles of narrow waterways we row or are 
rowed, waterways bordered by the green mangroves with oysters hang- 
ing from their boughs, oysters grating against the boat’s bottom here 
and there as the low tide made it difficult to pass through the canals cut 
in the oyster bars between the different lagoons, bays, reaches, bayous, 
lakes, channels, creeks, rivers, passes, as the lanes and sheets of brack- 
ish and salt water are variously termed, according to their special size 
and nature. 
On our way we stayed for a few minutes at the rookery, an island 
teeming with sea-birds and their nests. The latter were close together 
on the mangroves, under which we rowed, for it was high tide and the 
' roots were covered with salt water. We took some young cranes and 
pelicans out of their nests and returned them ungrudgingly thereto 
after they had bitten our fingers. So also I returned one of two eggs, 
the inhabitant of which, a juvenile pelican, was in a sufficiently ad- 
vanced stage of composition to squawk reproachfully at being shaken. 
We arrived at Collier’s, Marco, at sunset, and the sandflies and 
mosquitoes being in full charge, I did not examine the muck-bed until 
next morning, when, with the aid of a “ smudge,” the smoke of which 
was less objectionable than the sandflies, and a hat-net for the mosqui- 
toes, we proceeded to work. The basin is an oval about 150 feet long 
and 120 feet across (I write from memory), filled with peat muck, the 
bottom a hard shell bed that the sounding-wire, when pushed through 
the soil, struck each time in regular grade, giving, as far as I could tell 
from the cursory trials that I made, an even saucer-like pool, formerly 
filled with water, now with the peat muck deposits of centuries of 
disuse, the flat surface of which is covered with grass and trees, young 
and old, alive and dead. It is situated about 200 yards up from 
Collier’s on the same bank of the creek, i. e., the right bank. All the 
way up the creek rows of old oyster-shell banks or mounds are met with 
at right angles to the creek and to the road by the creek side. They 
have narrow openings, over which, at high tide there is, in one or two 
cases, still a trickle of water. At other times the road is dry over 
what used to be old canals or small side creeks, in which the canoes lay 
when the old world people sorted their drafts of fishes, opened their 
oysters or cooked their fish or 
That thesé operations were habitually carried out here there is too 
much evidence to doubt. 
On the morning after our arrival, I obtained the services of two of 
Mr. Collier’s employés to dig in the peat basin. The pits already made 
by Mr. Wilkins were half filled with water, which percolates into all 
