Perhaps, at last, there will be raised a generation of champions of Nature, or 

 what we vulgarly call "The Environment," in spite of our adult population. Our 

 modem day youth, in its intransigence, is rapidly becoming apprised of the fact 

 that instead of continuing to live "on" Nature we absolutely must, before it is too 

 late, learn to live "with" Nature. 



A major problem for the conservationist in our area, as well as in all areas 

 that support considerable wildlife, is the indiscriminate draining of marsh areas, 

 swamps and savannahs. A more recent tendency of potentially disastrous portence 

 to wildlife is the dredging and "straightening out" of meandering streams. Instead 

 of flooding during high water, with consequent water renewal in adjacent or nearby 

 marshes and wetlands, the habitations of much of our wildlife, these newly created 

 "ditches" allow the water to rush with tremendous scouring effect down their raw 

 troughs. This, in itself, creates a pollutant condition in that the water is usually 

 badly clouded from silt which, in turn, is frequently dropped in lakes to build up 

 their silted bottoms or carried out into oceans to pollute their estuaries. 



We have tried to present our subject matter as objectively as possible, although, 

 as botanists, we tend to lean toward the survival of plant life, especially when we 

 are in the process of studying it. 



Support for the initial phases of this research, begun in September, 1964, was 

 provided by the Division of Water Supply and Pollution Control, later changed 

 to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, National Institutes of 

 Health, United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare (Grants 

 WP 00685-01 to 04A1 and 03S1). We are especially grateful to Dr. Robert A. 

 Littleford of the National Institutes of Health, who initially approved our project 

 for support. In September 1966- this agency was transferred to The United States 

 Department of the Interior as the Water Quality Control Administration, where, 

 thanks to Dr. J. Frances Allen, support for our project was continued until 

 December 31, 1970 (Grant 16030 DNL), after which it was transferred on 

 January 1, 1971 to the Environmental Protection Agency. We are, indeed, grateful 

 to each of these government agencies and their administrators for the support 

 we have received during the course of this research. We are also grateful to the 

 Environmental Protection Agency and its administrators for support to publish the 

 work. 



Without the cooperation and help of various individuals and institutions it 

 would have been most difficult for us to pursue and complete this work. The 

 officers and trustees of Texas Research Foundation tolerated our stay at their 

 institution so that we could complete this task. We are especially indebted to 

 John R. Crutchfield who worked with us from May 1965 through July 1967 as a 

 plant collector, and to Richard S. Mitchell who collected plants for our project 

 during the summer of 1967. 



The generosity of Herbert L. Mason, of the University of California at Berkeley, 

 in permitting us to use a great many illustrations from his excellent work, "A 

 Flora of the Marshes of California" (1957), is gratefully acknowledged. Dr. 

 Mason also generously permitted us to use some of the information and data in 

 his treatise. 



We are especially fortunate to be able to use, through the generosity of Robert 

 K. Godfrey, of the Florida State University at Tallahassee, a large number of the 

 drawings that he had made for his temporarily suspended project on the aquatic 

 and marsh plants of Florida. We were thus able to illustrate many of the species in 

 eastern Texas and Oklahoma that are also common to Florida. We are, indeed, 

 most grateful to Dr. Godfrey for the privilege of using these excellent drawings 

 which he plans to use eventually when his work is published. 



In undertaking a problem of this magnitude we have had to resort to a con- 

 siderable amount of judicious compilation from the published work of many of 



xii 



