20 College of Forestry 
valleys. Forests of these species with red spruce, balsam and 
paper birch covered the higher Catskills and the Adirondack 
region. Sand plains—e. g., at Schenectady, Plattsburg 
and Carthage — and sand beds elsewhere had their forests of 
white pine. The wet lands were covered with swamp forest 
of soft maple, elm, basswood, black ash, or of conifers 
such as tamarack, arbor vitae, balsam and black spruce. Not 
only had vegetation reinvaded the land, but the high tide of 
it had been reached i. e., it had in large measure reached a 
stage of stability or equilibrium in which a certain perma- 
nency of forest type is maintained even in face of death and 
decay of the aged members of the forest society or even in 
the face of a calamity such as a windfall. I hope to bring out 
the significance of this climax or equilibrium stage more 
fully later, but the presence of it over so much of the State 
had a far greater significance than mere massiveness of for- 
est cover. It meant that through a long course of vegetation 
history the soil had been prepared for this very stage. A 
great blanket of humus had been spread over the land and 
more or less incorporated with the mineral soil, much of it 
quite thoroughly transformed into leaf mold, much of it no 
doubt accumulating as forest duff. More than this, vegeta- 
tion had gone far in filling shallow glacial depressions, in 
building up the land (by deposits of dead plants in the form 
of peat and muck) in the glacially filled valleys (Adiron- 
dacks, Conewango, Montezuma Marsh region). Some lakes 
and kettle holes had been quite filled and the site occupied by 
swamp forest. Cicero swamp just south of Oneida Lake 
represents a filled basin or streamway of large extent. Peat 
has accumulated there in places to a depth of thirty feet. It 
is suggested? that Flint Creek swamp south of Gorham in 
Ontario county is the site of one of the finger lakes which 
has been filled largely by vegetation remains (peat and 
muck). 
Above all these obvious results of vegetation development 
—nmassive forest cover, blanket of leaf mold and duff, beds 
1 Soil Survey of Ontario Co., N. Y., 1910, page 7. 
