A QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF RAUNKIAER’S GROWTH- 
FORMS AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE 400 COM- 
MONEST SPECIES OF LONG ISLAND, N. Y. 
NORMAN TAYLOR 
Brooklyn Botanic Garden 
The value of sorting species of plants into different categories, 
based on their growth-forms, has been pointed out so often that 
there scarcely seems further need of going over the subject again. 
The weakness of such a sorting and the percentages based on it, due 
to the fact that species, not individual plants, are considered, is ob- 
vious. Such percentages as have been published show not so much 
an actual response to climatic factors, as they do the multiplicity of 
forms that may have been developed. For most regions that is all 
that can be done, as anything like a plant census of a given region is 
usually impossible. Yet upon such a census, or some approximation 
to it, there could be based percentages of different growth-forms that 
reflect more accurately than any species percentage the actual climatic 
response of vegetation to climate. 
The importance of getting, if possible, some growth-form per- 
centages that should be quantitative rather than those based on 
species only resulted in a study of the flora of Long Island, N. Y., 
with this in view. The island is roughly 120 miles long and 12-16 
miles wide and, excluding ferns and their allies, has about 1120 species 
of native plants. It is diversified as to vegetation, as there are good- 
sized areas of ‘“‘scrub,” mostly oak and Ericaceae, considerable de- 
” 
ciduous forest, some extensive ‘‘pine-barrens,’’ salt marshes, a small 
prairie, and the downs at Montauk and Shinnecock. 
In a general study of the flora and vegetation of the island, distri- 
bution maps for each of the native species were made and have been 
posted up for several years. Such maps indicate actual collections 
represented by specimens in herbaria, field notes by the writer, all 
published records of species and descriptions of different vegetative 
areas by nearly all who have written about Long Island for the last 
250 years. From Daniel Denton’s History of New York, through 
the period’ when numerous Quaker journals were issued, down to the 
modern observations of professional botanists, these records have 
been accumulated. The opportunity, therefore, of getting something 
486 
