176 BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN MEMOIRS 



with phytogeography. He believes that there should be universal 

 expressions in Latin, or Greek, and to have these alone. I can heartily 

 agree with the general opinion of Diels about the necessity of a stable 

 nomenclature in plant geography, but it would be unwise to abolish 

 vernacular terms, even if these are used with some confusion. As 

 teachers in the class-room, in our published papers, in our conversa- 

 tion and in our encyclopedic work, if called upon to contribute articles 

 to dictionaries and encyclopedias, we should try and clarify the ideas 

 of the public on these essential points. 



For example, the word forest is a nomen confusum. In its use, in 

 England, a forest may signify any wild, open, uncultivated tract of 

 land, not necessarily a tract of woodland, though historic documents 

 prove that parts of the ancient forests of the British isles were covered 

 with trees. The term forest in the United States fortunately is applied 

 more exactly and properly to a tree-clad area. The same confusion 

 is seen in the application of the words swamp, marsh and moorland. 

 The natives of the island of Nantucket, and the visitors who have 

 learned the name from the habitant, call typic heathland by the cog- 

 nomen moor, and similarly in England, where the word heath is in 

 common use, it is applied very inexactly. Heath to the Britisher is 

 usually a heather-clad tract of land, yet in eastern England, the word 

 is also used to denote a calcareous pasture, with no heather, as New- 

 market Heath and Royston Heath, and in Somerset, it is used to 

 designate tracts of deep and often wet peat. 



As the research investigations of the writer have led him to believe 

 that certain types of vegetation in America correspond with the true 

 heath and pine-heath of Europe, it becomes necessary to see if we 

 can correlate the different usages of the word heath so as to unsnarl 

 the tangle into which the use of the word seems to have fallen. 



Tansley in the introduction to " Types of British Vegetation " (p. 2) 

 states that heathland nearly always involves a relatively poor and dry 

 soil. Under the climatic conditions of the British Isles, heath is found 

 on shallow, dry, peaty soils dominated by the common ling {Calluna 

 vulgaris) and occurs in regions of medium rainfall in the center, south 

 and east, and on similar sandy soil in Belgium, Holland, Denmark and 

 northwest Germany. The surface of the soil of such heaths is covered 

 with dry peat (Trockentorf) with the general absence of deep peat. 

 Where in hollows of true heathland with an impervious substratum, 

 true moor peat is found, heath passes imperceptibly into moor, and 

 hence there has often been confusion of the two kinds of phyto- 

 geographic concepts. 



In "Types of British Vegetation" (pages 98-99) is given a state- 

 ment as to the character of the heath formation of northwest Europe. 



