190 
CAPE COD. 
lages were formerly destroyed in this way. Some of 
the ridges of beach-grass which we saw were planted 
by government many years ago, to preserve the har¬ 
bor of Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. 
I talked with some who had been employed in the plant¬ 
ing. In the Description of the Eastern Coast,” which 
I have already referred to, it is said: “ Beach-grass 
during the spring and summer grows about two feet 
and a half. If surrounded by naked beach, the storms 
of autumn and winter heap up the sand on all sides, 
and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant. In 
the ensuing spring the grass sprouts anew; is again 
covered with sand in the winter; and thus a hill or 
ridge continues to ascend as long as there is a sufficient 
base to support it, or till the circumscribing sand, being 
also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the 
force of the winds.” Sand-hills formed in this way are 
sometimes one hundred feet high and of every variety 
of form, like snow-drifts, or Arab tents, and are con¬ 
tinually shifting. The grass roots itself very firmly. 
When I endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off 
ten inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been 
the surface the year before, as appeared by the numer¬ 
ous ofishoots there, it being a straight, hard, round 
shoot, showing by its length how much the sand had 
accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead 
stubs of a previous season were pulled up with it from 
still deeper in the sand, with their own more decayed 
shoot attached, — so that the age of a sand-hill, and its 
rate of increase for several years, is pretty accurately 
recorded in this way. 
Old Gerard, the English herbalist, says, p, 1250: ^'I 
find mention in Stowe’s Chronicle, in Anno 1555, of a 
