Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 24. January, 1922. No. 277. 
CAPE COD IN ITS RELATION TO THE MARINE 
FLORA OF NEW ENGLAND. 
, WILLIAM ALBERT SETCHELL. 
(Plate 134.) 
Tur first to call attention to Cape Cod as a dividing point, or 
demarcation area, in the marine flora of the Atlantie coast of North 
America was William Henry Harvey (1852, p. 24). In his introduc- 
tion to Part I of the Nereis Boreali-Americana, the first account 
of the North American algae to be published, Harvey divides the 
eastern coast of North America into four divisions, as follows:— 
“First, the coast north of Cape Cod, extending probably to Greenland; 
second, Long Island Sound, including under this head New York 
Harbor and the Sands of New Jersey; third, Cape Hatteras to Cape 
Florida, and fourth, Florida Keys and shores of the Mexican Gulf." 
This division of our eastern coast by one who had collected over a 
greater extent of it than any one previous to his writing and even 
more than scarcely any collector of algae since his time, and who had 
before him a very considerable collection of marine algae from the 
. coasts of the entire world, carries with it the greatest conviction and 
has withstood most admirably the test of time. "The chief difference 
between our present point of view and that of Harvey lies in the 
tendency to divide again the coast from Cape Cod north into two or 
three divisions. The position assigned by Harvey to Cape Cod is 
much the same in our present considerations. 
Farlow (1881, p. 4), in his New England Algae, also emphasizes the 
relation of Cape Cod as a demarcation point between the marine flora 
to the north and that to the south of it. Farlow, however, calls 
