Development of the Ve,etation of New York State 19 
upon boulder strewn mountain slopes and plains, or morainic 
deposits, upon vast sand beds or sand plains, upon the finer 
glacial soils laid down in more or less level sheets or in 
elevated knolls and ridges (drumlins, ete.), in stream ways 
almost or quite obliterated or much blocked by glacial till, 
upon low wet lands, in kettle holes and lake basins left by 
glacial action. Such is in inadequate expression the terrain 
presented at the first landmark selected. 
The second landmark by which to measure the degree and 
results of vegetation development is taken thousands of years 
later, taking the estimate, say, at twenty-five thousand 
years — the approximate number is of no immediate con- 
cern, so that we allow what humanly speaking would be a 
very long period — at a time falling within the range of the 
recorded history of this State. The first explorers and the 
pioneers of three hundred years ago found this State covered 
by a massive vegetation, which impressed them as being a 
vast forest wilderness. It appeared to the early settler as 
the great incubus to settlement. It took arduous labor to 
clear out a little farm in this forest, and once the forest was 
cleared away the energy of its return threatened to engulf 
his home as a returning tide. Early writers * comment on 
the rapidity with which the forest claimed abandoned settle- 
ments. There was forest of oak, hickory, chestnut, sweet 
gum and tulip in the lower Hudson region. The oak, 
hickory, chestnut type also extended up the Hudson and 
Mohawk valleys into the Iroquois—Ontario basin. Forests 
of sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, hemlock and white pine 
covered the Alleghany plateau region and much of the 
1Van Der Donck, New Netherlands, 1656. Reprinted in Coll. N. Y. 
Hist. Soe. 2nd Series, Vol. I, 1841. 
There is much interesting information embraced in this account of 
the early conditions of plant life in the vicinity of New York City. 
Among other things, confirmation of the dominance of oak, chestnut 
and hickory in the lower Hudson region. The author cites in particular 
an account by Indians of the rapidity with which land cleared and 
planted became again forested. Thus the Indians pointed out a tract 
of heavy young forest which twenty years previously they had planted 
in corn. 
