AMERICAN HEATHS AND PINE HEATHS 
JOHN W. HARSHBERGER 
University of Pennsylvania 
One of the attempts of modern phytogeography and ecology has 
been to establish 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 writer 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. 73: 146. 1914. The Vegetation of the New Jersey Pine-barrens, 
p. 48. I9g16. 
2 Graebner, Paul. Die Heide Norddeutschlands. Die Vegetation der Erde 
5: 14. Leipzig. Igor. 
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