FOREST GEOGRAPHY AND ARCHAEOLOGY. 
Ir is the forests of the Northern temperate zone which we 
are to traverse. After taking some note of them in their 
present condition and relations, we may inquire into their 
pedigree; and, from a consideration of what and where the 
component trees have been in days of old, derive some proba- 
ble explanation of peculiarities which otherwise seem inexpli- 
cable and strange. 
In speaking of our forests in their present condition, I 
mean not exactly as they are to-day, but as they were before 
civilized man had materially interfered with them. In the 
district we inhabit such interference is so recent that we have 
little difficulty in conceiving the conditions which here pre- 
vailed, a few generations ago, when the “ forest primeval ’’ — 
described in the first lines of a familiar poem — covered 
essentially the whole country, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence 
and Canada to Florida and Texas, from the Atlantic to be- 
yond the Mississippi. This, our Atlantic forest, is one of the 
largest and almost the richest of the temperate forests of the 
world. That is, it comprises a greater diversity of species 
than any other, except one. 
In crossing the country from the Atlantic westward, we 
leave this forest behind us when we pass the western borders 
of those organized States which lie along the right bank of 
the Mississippi. We exchange it for prairies and open plains, 
wooded only along the watercourses, — plains which grow 
more and more bare and less green as we proceed westward, 
with only some scattering Cottonwoods (7. e. Poplars) on the 
immediate banks of the traversing rivers, which are them- 
selves far between. 
1 A lecture delivered before the Harvard University Natural History 
Society, April 18, 1878. (American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., 
xvi. 85, 183.) 
