4 
Tansley and Fritsch. 
Part I.— The Sand Formations. 
As the coast of Ceylon is approached from the sea a line of 
dark trees is seen fringing the low flat shore. The naive traveller, 
having read of mangrove swamps on tropical coasts, might, from a 
distance, take these trees for mangroves. As a matter of fact they are 
nothing but endless plantations of coconuts which fringe the sandy 
Ceylon coast for miles at a stretch. The mangroves flourish only on a 
muddy soil and in comparatively quiet water, and in Ceylon are not 
found on the actual seashore at all, but are confined to the muddy 
shores of the estuaries (often extending for several miles inland 
along the river banks), and big salt lagoons connected with the sea 
by comparatively narrow mouths. In this respect the Ceylon coast 
forms a striking contrast to the west coast of the Malay Peninsula,, 
where high woods of magnificent mangroves ( Rhizophora and 
Brnguiera ) line the muddy shores of the protected narrow seas 
(Straits of Malacca) for miles. 
Very nearly the whole of the coast-line of Ceylon under consi¬ 
deration is flat and sandy, and much of it is protected from the 
main force of the waves by a fringing coral reef. The rise of the 
tide is very little, probably never amounting to more than six feet, 
and often less, so that although the slope of the beach is usually slight^ 
the distance between tide-marks is never great. As on all sandy 
coasts the zone between tide-marks is bare. Close above high 
tide-mark begins the Pes-caprae-iormiaiion , the typical herbaceous 
formation of sandy tropical coasts. Behind this comes the tree- 
belt. If the shore slopes up very sharply from high-tide mark, the 
tree-vegetation sometimes occurs immediately on the top of the 
bank, excluding the Pes-caprae zone altogether or leaving only a very 
narrow belt of it, as at Ambalangodda. Schimper writes 1 as if this 
were the normal case and the Pes-capme vegetation were found 
mainly on sand-dunes; but on the Ceylon coast dunes are not well- 
developed and the Pes-caprae zone, varying from a few feet to 
perhaps fifty yards in breadth and occupying a very gently sloping 
sandy shore, is practically constant. The natural tree-zone 
{Barringtonia- formation or Beach-jungle) is poorly represented, 
for the simple reason that along the densely populated Ceylon 
coast most of it has been cut down and coco-nuts planted 
in its place. A few trees and shrubs of the Barringtonia- formation 
remain fringing the coco-nut-plantations. The coco-nut is of course 
itself a typical beach jungle tree, long ago planted all over the 
1 l.c., p. 77, and Pflanzengeographie, p. 416. 
