Forest Development in the Adirondacks . i 
the associated species above listed. Present conditions in the 
Adirondacks abundantly illustrate this diversity of vegetation, 
though in surveying the region one has constantly to bear in 
mind that with difficulty do we find a vegetation type wholly 
unmodified by the hand of man. Every one who has traversed 
the Adirondacks is familiar, for example, with beaver meadows, 
alder thickets, peat bogs covered by sphagnum and heath shrubs 
or by black spruce and tamarack; with balsam swamps, with 
spruce covered mountain sides, with vast areas of nearly pure 
hardwoods from which pine, hemlock, and spruce have been 
removed and with more nearly virgin tracts in which many 
soft woods are still left; and finally with the apparently end- 
less tracts of popple and fire cherry, of bracken and blueberry, 
of red raspberry thickets, which with blackened snags and 
stumps and bare granite, mark the path of lumbering followed 
by burning or of greatly destructive fires in virgin tracts. 
Theoretically, the Adirondack forest should, from the stand- 
point of climate and with the lapse of centuries, be of the 
stable climax type. Actually and quite independent of human 
agency, it showed, when white men first entered it, the varied 
types of vegetation above mentioned, for there was diversity 
of soil and topography, and of course, even in areas of climax 
forest, fires and disease and storms wrought their destruction 
before man became a competitor in forest devastation. 
The causes of this diversity of vegetation types in a region 
which climatically favors the establishment of a stable, more 
or less uniform forest are to be sought chiefly in the nature of 
the ground which vegetation is seeking to occupy. Looking at 
it as a.static phenomenon, a peat bed, a shallow lake bottom, a 
deposit of sand, an area of bare granite, a precipitous mountain 
side, a cover of easily dried out duff and a rich, moist sub- 
stratum of leaf mould is each sufficient cause to explain the 
presence severally of a bog heath, a bed of water weeds and 
rushes, a cover of bracken or blueberry, a patch work cover 
of rock mosses and lichens, a stand of red spruce, of red pine, 
and finally of the mixed hardwood and conifer climax forest. 
But exactly the point to be emphasized is that the phenomenon 
