BOOKS AND CURRENT LITERATURE 



Pine-Barrens of New Jersey. — Probably no region in North Amer- 

 ica is more famous from a botanical standpoint than the New Jersey 

 Pine-Barrens. Situated as it is at the very threshold of New York and 

 Philadelphia, this barren wilderness of pines, so strikingly different from 

 the deciduous forest areas to the west both in the general aspect of its 

 vegetation and in the unique nature of its flora, has been a happy hunt- 

 ing-ground for local collectors since the earliest days of botanical study 

 in America. Several local floras, dealing with portions or all of the 

 area, have been published at various times, and the most recent of 

 these, by Witmer Stone,' leaves little to be desired along floristic lines. 

 Stone was perhaps the first writer to clearly outhne the boundaries of 

 the pine-barrens, as delimited from other parts of the New Jersey coastal 

 plain. It has remained for Harshberger to discuss their vegetation 

 from the ecological point of view.- 



The subject matter in the present work can be grouped for the 

 most part under one of three heads: (1) Origin and present distribu- 

 tion of the pine-barrens ; (2) Ecology of the vegetation as a whole (syne- 

 cology); (3) Ecology of individual plants (autecology). In attempting 

 to explain the origin of the pine-barrens Harshberger urges the very 

 reasonable theory, which he himself first suggested^ but which later was 

 worked out in detail by Taylor,-* that the vegetation of this area repre- 

 sents an isolated relict of an ancient Miocene coastal plain flora, the 

 present distribution of which is practically coextensive with the Beacon 

 Hill (geological) formation of New Jersey and whose perpetuation may 

 be attributed to the fact that the area which it occupies, in contrast to 

 surrounding portions of the coastal plain, has been uninterruptedly out 

 of the water since upper Miocene times. That the ecologically more 

 advanced deciduous types of forest which prevail in regions farther 



1 Stone, Witmer, Ann. Rep. N. J. State Mus., pp. 22-828, pis. 1-129 + map. 

 Trenton, 1911. 



2 Harshberger, J. W., The Vegetation of the New Jersey Pine-Barrens, pp. 1- 

 329, figs. 1-284 + map. Christopher Sower Company, Philadelphia, 1916 ($5.00). 



3 Harshberger, J. W., Phytogeographic Survey of North America, pp. 219-221. 

 Leipzig, 1911. 



* Taylor, Norman, Torreya 12: 229-242, 1912. 



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