38 College of Forestry 
173 and 175). These anticipations as to the evolution of a 
great fauna of plant-eating animals were realized in the 
Tertiary. At the end of the Tertiary (the Pliocene period) 
“the herbivores ees, to occupy the foremost as well as 
the fundamental place” (C. and S., III: p. 322). So also 
was this Tertiary elabo sion of angiosperm vegetation corre- 
lated with the evolution of bird and insect life and especially 
must one assume, as no doubt evidence shows, the elaboration 
of those diversified and mutualistic relations between the 
specialized nectar and pollen eating insects and the floral 
structures of plants. Personally, no chapter in the evolution 
of life appeals more vividly than this parallel or, better, con- 
vergent development of the two mutually dependent relations 
of nectar and pollen feeding by specialized insects (and some 
birds) and the pollination of angiosperm flowers. To any- 
one who, now-a-days, observes the intimate interdependence 
between animal and plant life, the period of elaboration of 
these relations seems a necessary and vivid feature of geologi- 
val history. And certainly with our present intimate knowl- 
edge of the factors which influence the behavior of living or- 
ganisms can we more readily adopt this point of view in the 
interpretation of phenomena which have come to pass in the 
world of living things. That is the heart of this dynamic 
idea, that things come to be something. It implies the funda- 
mental idea of development, the coming to be something, than 
which there is no more powerful idea as an inspiration for 
individual human conduct. 
So if this preliminary review of the development of plant 
life seems a bit prolonged, you will recognize the more fully 
that this bulletin aims not so much to elaborate the plant 
geography of New York State as to get a proper perspective 
and point of view from which to go about that important 
work. Also that a very deep- seated conviction lies in the 
writer’s mind that the elaboration of settled policy with 
respect to dealing with natural resources as represented by the 
productive energy of the land is, somehow, intimately linked 
up with the study of the dynamics of plant life. 
