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. 
