1920] A Flora of the Penobscot Bay Region 93 
so-called zones, and anyone who has carefully mapped the detailed 
ranges of hundreds of species knows that no two maps are alike. 
In fact it is difficult from Merriam's definition to determine where the 
Carolinian begins for no two of the trees he indicates as indices have 
coincident northern limits. It is natural to attempt to sort the 
species into groups of similar range, but we are inclined to make our 
groups altogether too limited in number. As Colonel Harvey so 
aptly says of the sociologists’ attempts to classify all human beings 
into a few categories, “ There is no especial harm and there is much 
mental exercise to be obtained from reducing all mortality to these 
few theoretical types—no especial harm, that is, supposing that one 
bears ever in mind what a constant whopper is involved in the reduc- 
tion of any individual to a type." 
Unfortunately, however, in the Flora before us the author seems 
not to have obtained “much mental exercise" in reducing all his plants 
to restricted geographic groups. At least it would be astonishing 
to a resident of Maryland or of Missouri, where Galium triflorum 
is common in woods, to find it classed unreservedly as a “ Hudsonian" 
plant,—the more so since in the eastern part of the American con- 
tinent we do not know it north of the southernmost border of Cana- 
dian Labrador. Similarly, Dryopteris spinulosa, Deschampsia flexu- 
osa, Festuca rubra, Arenaria lateriflora and numerous others classed 
by the author as “Hudsonian” are surely common throughout most 
of southern New England and often much farther south, and most 
of them do not characterize Hudsonian areas. The same lack of 
very clear visualization of actual ranges of plants which is responsible 
for the above classifications is too apparent in succeeding lists: Poly- 
gonum sagittatum, Ilex verticillata and Cornus alternifolia, which 
extend from Florida, Alabama or Texas to southern Newfoundland 
and southernmost Canada, classed as “ Canadian"; Carex novae- 
angliae, which qccurs from Newfoundland to the mountains of New 
York and northern Pennsylvania [a splendid example of Canadian 
range], called “ Alleghanian"; and Juncus Greenet, which covers the 
mountains of western Maine and northern New Hampshire (up to 
Maine, New Hampshire, and Michigan. . . . In the East it covers the Green 
Mountains, Adirondacks and Catskills, and the higher mountains” to western North 
Carolina and eastern Tennessee. ' Among . . . characteristic mammals and 
birds . . . lynx, marten, porcupine, . . . spruce and dusky grouse, cross- 
bills and Canada jays”; the ALLEGHANIAN, ''the greater part of New England, south- 
eastern Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania . . . and the Align 
to Georgia," characterized by ‘‘chestnut, walnut, oaks, and hickories’’; the ln. 
LINIAN, occupying “the larger part of the Middle States, except the mountains 
on the Atlantic coast it reaches from near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay 
to southern Connecticut, and sends narrow arms up the valleys. . . . Counting 
from the north, the Carolinian area is that in which the sassafras, tulip tree, hack- 
berry, sycamore, sweet gum, rose magnolia, red bud, persimmon and short-leaf pine 
first make their appearance.”’ 
1 Harvey's Weekly, ii. no. 47, pp. 12, 13 (Nov. 22, 1919). 
