518 HARPER: CLIMAX VEGETATION 
seemed to be even denser if anything than on the peninsulas; 
which is just about what one would expect, whatever the cause 
of the approach to climax conditions on the peninsulas. From 
examining maps and literature, and from my own field notes for 
other parts of the country, I have been led to the conclusion that 
this relation between climax vegetation (the term ‘‘hammock” is 
not used so much outside of Florida). and peninsulas or islands 
is almost universal, at least in the coastal plain, and where the 
width of the peninsulas or islands lies between certain limits. A 
few examples in the coastal plain, from New Jersey southward, 
will serve to illustrate this principle. 
Cape May, New Jersey, and neighboring beaches, from all 
accounts, are or have been noted for their fine white oaks, hollies, 
cedars, and some other trees which are rare or absent in the pine 
barrens a few miles farther north.* 
On the Delaware peninsula, especially in Virginia, where it is 
narrowest, there are quite a number of species of trees and shrubs 
that are characteristic of hammocks farther south.| The whole 
coastal plain of Virginia north of the James River is cut up into 
peninsulas, and lacks many of the pine-barren plants which are 
found both in New Jersey and in North Carolina.t The original 
forests of this region (northern “Tidewater Virginia’) must have 
been mostly hardwoods,§ and the timber and the accompanying 
humus-laden soil were doubtless among the attractions that deter- 
mined the location there of some of the earliest English settlements 
in America, in the seventeenth century. 
251, 252. 
tT See Torreya 9: 223. 1909. Tillandsia usneoides, a characteristic epiphyte 
of the Florida hammocks, has been reported from this same peninsula by Mr. Robert 
Ridgway (Bull. Torrey Club 8: 6. 1881), a fact that has been overlooked by 
many subsequent writers. 
t See Torreya 7: 44, 45. 1907; 9: 217. 1909. Dr. Forrest Shreve, in his recent 
Plant Life of Maryland (pp. 85-88), has commented on the absence of some of the 
same species from the coastal plain of that state, which is also extensively dissected 
into peninsulas. Some notes on insular and peninsular vegetation on the western 
shores of Chesapeake Bay, by Dr. M. A. Chrysler, can be found on pages 187-189 
of the same volume. According to C. D. Mell (Md. Geol. Surv., report on St. 
Mary’s Co., p. 183, 1907) hardwoods originally predominated in this part of 
Maryland. 
§ See Bull. Torrey Club 37: 422, 423. 1910. 
