Between the dunes and Provincetown there are a number of ponds, marshy areas, and woodlands, including some good-sized stands of beech and oak. These woods must have been considerably more extensive at one time. In the dunes that now hang over them there are remnants, tree trunks, and stubs protruding through the sand; and there is at least one part of the dunes that seems to show evidence of a wood fire that took up a big area, though when it occurred is not clear to me. Thoreau wrote about the dead stubs of submerged forests projecting above the surface of the sand in the “desert,” as he called it, and of numerous little pools in the sand filled with fresh water “... all that was left, probably of a pond or swamp.” He may have exaggerated these pools as an indication of former ponds or marshland. They are located a little above the water level which extends everywhere under the dunes, and so are likely to be found at the bottom of the dune troughs, or hollows between the dunes. Some of these pools, or fairly long and narrow stretches of shallow water, may stay in much the same place over a long period of time if the levels where they are located are at least partially held down by vegetation. They are filled up by rain water during fall and spring and then dry out during the summer months, but where the dunes migrate before the wind, they also travel behind one dune and before the next; and they are seldom deep enough to develop typical swamp vegetation. Thoreau tramped the area in 1849, and two hundred years earlier the dune area on the town side of the “Hook” and possibly further must have been much more circumscribed and held back. The early inhabitants cut down all the trees they could find, for firewood; “try works” for melting whale blubber; boats, houses, and salt works (in the days when salt was produced by boiling sea water instead of the later refinement of using solar heat to evaporate it). Blowing sand became a threat to Provincetown and its harbor early in its history. In his _Cape Cod; its people and their history_, Henry Kittredge describes the war declared by the people of the town against almost every stick, living or dead, that surrounded them. “When the Mayflower band arrived,” he writes, “the sand hills to the north were for the most part held stationary by trees and shrubs. But from the earliest times the inhabitants, following the example of visiting fishermen, fell upon the trees until the sand lay bare, a prey to the four winds of heaven. The captains of fishing schooners were allowed to take sand ballast from these hills, and not content with this, the citizens turned their cattle loose to graze on what clumps of vegetation still struggled for existence on the denuded hills, with the result that the grass was demolished as fast as it grew. The sand was free to blow down upon the unprotected village with every northwester, threatening even to bury the houses.”