1897.]
disturbed by storms. But this is not so. I do not know of another
such uncertain sheet of water. The wind seems to eddy in the
open space of the lake, and this, together with the fact that there
is a line of thickly set, submerged cypress knees and stumps ex
tending from the shore about one hundred feet around the entire
circumference, makes Take Drummond a most treacherous sheet
of water. Any boat driven to the shore in stormy weather is
certain to be lifted up and dashed to pieces upon these stumps, and
once thrown from his boat one would fare badly enough. On
reaching the shore it would be necessary to work through a mass
of brambles and thickets well-nigh impassable.
The significance of these submerged stumps has not, so far as I
can say, been discussed. There certainly must have been trees
where they now are a hundred or more years ago. It has been
stated by Shaler, who does not seem to have been aware of the
existence of the submerged shore, although correctly concluding
that the area as a whole was subsidiug, that the digging of canals
and the throwing up of banks penned in the waters to the west.
That this change affected the level of the lake sufficiently to de
stroy, around its entire circumference, a broad band of vegetation
flourishing in the moistest of conditions, I question, especially as
there is a very strong current in a canal leading out from the lake
into the main canal. The conclusion that the shore line of the lake
is still being encroached upon by vegetation, as it has undoubtedly
been in the past, I saw no evidences of. In any case we have
here a fine example of the rapid changes in vegetation caused by
only slight changes in water level —a change fully paralleled from
the zoological side by the change from brack water to fresh in the
Curribuck Sound to the west of the swamp, caused by the closing
up of the old Curribuck inlet in the early part of the century by
beach drift. At the time this took place there was an immediate
destruction of fully one hundred square miles of oyster beds, and
a change from salt water to fresh water fishes, as well as such
changes in plant life as brought countless thousands of red-heads
and canvas ducks where they had been infrequent before.
With respect to the origin of Take Drummond an excavation
just completed one-half mile east of the lake gives open testi
mony to its being a “ peat enclosed lake.” For the first eight to
ten feet there is some peat with large roots and tree trunks, which
is followed by a stratum of clean peat, ending in quicksands con-
The Dismal Swamp .