234 
M. L. FERNALD 
Only a very limited portion of Puritan New England and old 
French Canada, Acadia and Newfoundland is yet known to the bot- 
anist; and hundreds of unnamed alpine tablelands and canons yet 
remain to yield a wealth of endemic and relic species. Only about 
ten of the hundreds of river-estuaries have been even casually explored 
and each of these has yielded isolated and often endemic colonies of 
plants. Our sand plains are just being tapped and there are still 
areas of thousands of square miles in the Gaspe Peninsula and New- 
foundland where no man, either white or red, has yet set foot. But 
the most available source of discoveries for the future is in the 
little land-locked or kettle-hole ponds which fleck southern New 
England, Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands and Newfoundland like 
innumerable bits of mirror scattered over a lawn. There are literally 
thousands and thousands of these tiny ponds and pools without outlets. 
Many are on the maps but the majority of them have been thought 
unworthy either recognition on the government maps or the dignity 
of a name. Perhaps seventy-five out of the tens of thousands of these 
small ponds and pools have been visited by botanists and everywhere, 
whether in Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts or in the tundra 
of Newfoundland, the experience is the same: the number of remark- 
able species discovered in a given area seems limited only by the num- 
ber of pools visited. I was recently asked by a famous expert on peat- 
bogs of the Central States what sedge it is which makes up the peat of 
southeastern Massachusetts. My answer, that the sedge would differ 
with the different ponds was hardly what he expected but, with due 
allowance for occasional repetitions and recombinations, the state- 
ment is quite true. One pool may be choked by Scirpus Torreyi; 
the next given over to Eleocharis Rohhinsii; a few rods beyond another 
full of Juncus militaris; then another filled with Scirpus subterminalis, 
while the next is crowded with a rank growth of Rynchospora macros- 
tachya. Such is the everyday experience. But the most baffling 
feature of these numberless pools and pondholes, a condition dis- 
covered only two years ago, is the fact that the borders of many of 
them are inhabited by two entirely distinct floras. During autumns 
following a rainy summer the water-table is high and the shore of the 
pond is a wet peat-bog; during seasons with a long summer drouth the 
shore is a dry sand-beach. One illustration of this feature will serve. 
The most visited and best known of these ponds is Winter Pond in 
Middlesex County, Massachusetts, which for three fourths of a century 
