AMERICAN HEATHS AND PINE HEATHS 



JOHN W. HARSHBERGER 



University of Pennsylvania 



One of the attempts of modern phytogeography and ecology has 

 been to estabUsh an exact nomenclature and to correlate the existing 

 knowledge of the fundamental units of vegetation the world over. 

 The thought of the leading phytogeographers has been to limit the 

 use of descriptive terms to an exact meaning, following the lead of the 

 earlier morphologists, who, like Linnaeus, made an exact science of 

 morphology out of a chaos, or jumble, of inexactly applied descriptive 

 terms. The earlier morphologists had somewhat of an advantage, 

 because they were applying names to parts of plants which had no 

 recognition as such by the laity, and where in common usage, the 

 concept of such words as bract, carpel, ovule, and the like, had no 

 application. The phytogeographers, however, find that their con- 

 cepts parallel those of the botanically uninitiated, who refer in every- 

 day speech to forest, to meadows, to prairies, to marshes, to swamps 

 and to heaths. Elsewhere^ the waiter has shown that country people 

 have a keen appreciation of the fundamental differences in the native 

 vegetation for they have applied names in a general and unscientific 

 way to plant formations recognized by ecologists. Graebner^ has 

 emphasized this fact in his " Die Heide Norddeutschlands." If the 

 phytogeographer adopts a local descriptive term he should attempt to 

 strictly limit the use of the term to the same unit of vegetation. If 

 this is done, then there can be no objection to the adoption of the 

 descriptive name from the common speech of the people, who roughly 

 distinguish a certain association of plants. Professor Diels on the 

 other hand considers the use of vernacular names in plant geography 

 very questionable. He maintains that such terms are ambiguous, 

 even in the language to which they belong, that to persons of foreign 

 birth they are either meaningless or liable to misunderstanding, that 

 even if such terms are strictly defined, they will become confused 

 again, and that they are permanently confusing to people unfamiliar 



1 Harshberger, John W. The Vegetation of South Florida. Wagner Free Inst, 

 of Sci. Trans. 7^: 146. IQM- The Vegetation of the New Jersey Pine-barrens, 

 p: 48. 1916. 



2 Graebner, Paul. Die Heide Norddeutschlands. Die Vegetation der Erde 

 5: 14. Leipzig. 1901. 



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