HARPER: VEGETATION OF THE COASTAL PLAIN 415 
Extending out from Wilmington in all directions (that is, on 
the land side) for thirty or forty miles is a most interesting area of 
genuine pine-barrens, long noted for being the home of Dionaea 
muscipula and several other local species. In general this region 
is nearly level, except near some of the streams, where the topog- 
raphy somewhat resembles that of the Altamaha Grit region of 
Georgia. Pocosins* are frequent, savannas are occasional, and 
lakes and ponds are rare or wanting. There seems to be no 
marked difference in topography or soil between this region and 
the preceding, and they intergrade over a zone perhaps ten miles 
wide. This and other circumstances seem to indicate that the 
boundary is determined by succession of vegetation more than any- 
thing else, that the pine-barrens were formerly more extensive, 
and that the short-leaf pine forests are tending to close in on them 
and will ultimately ‘‘wipe them off the map”’ (that is, if man does 
not do so first, which is more likely). 
The Wilmington or Cape Fear pine-barren region as here 
treated coincides almost exactly with that part of eastern North 
Carolina in which according to Kerrt less than one tenth of one 
per cent. of the area was cultivated in cotton in 1880. Descrip- 
tions of it have been published by Emmons, Kerr, Ashe, and others, 
and pretty good floras of parts of it by Curtis in 1835 and Wood & 
McCarthy in 1887. The U. S. soil survey of New Hanover 
County, by Drake & Belden (February, 1907) covers the very 
focus of it, and Circular 20 of the Bureau of Soils, by H. H. Bennett 
(January, 1910) contains a preliminary report on the soils and some 
other geographical features of Pender County.$ 
*See Bull. aye Club 34: 361-362. 1907; also C. A. Davis, N. C. Geol. Surv. 
Econ. Pbeie 5: 149-150. ps ip dated 1908). 
ent ae U. S:, vol. 
or more complete eae to these works see my 1907 paper. 
§It is probably something more than a mere coincidence that the summers are 
a little wetter in this Cape Fear region than in adjoining regions or in many places 
where the native vegetation more nearly approaches the climax condition and there 
is more land under cultivation. At Wilmington, according to the latest statistics 
I have been able to obtain, 49.4 per cent. of the total annual precipitation occurs 
jn the four warmest months, June to September, inclusive. 
For a number of other places in the coastal plain within a few hundred miles of 
Wilmington the same factor is somewhat lower, as follows:—Norfolk, Va., eg per 
cent.; Tarboro, N. C., 41.0; Goldsboro, N. C., 43.6; New Bern, N. C., 4 ; Cape 
Hatteras (one i the rainiest ‘pe in the Eastern Unites States outside of coe moun- 
