386 HARPER: BOTANICAL CROSS-SECTION OF MISSISSIPPI 
Hickory Flat and New Albany are only 14 miles apart, and 
between those points I had less than twenty minutes in which 
to gather the following list of plants. 
TREES HERBS 
Pinus wesc tie Sorghum Halepense 
Quercus stella Helenium tenuifolium 
a eae Typha latifolia 
nigr E igeron ramosu 
Faais grandifolia Tripsacum dactyloides 
‘(Quercus Phellos Rudbeckia hir 
Quercus marylandica Scirpus teases 
‘Quercus falcata 
SHRUBS 
Sambucus canadensis 
Rhus glabra 
Arundin 
aria 
Cephalanthus occidentalis 
This list is too short to draw many important conclusions 
from, but the fact that a pine stands at the head is significant. 
The second tree, Quercus stellata, is the one which gives the region 
its name. Forests of very similar aspect can be seen in the 
“barrens” of extreme northern Alabama and in the Paleozoic 
flatwoods of the Coosa valley in Georgia and Alabama. 
Eocene red hills. The more hilly portions of the Eocene (i. e., 
excluding the flatwoods) are traversed by the Southern Railway 
from the eastern part of Webster (formerly Sumner) County to 
Carrollton, and by the ‘‘Frisco”’ from the Mississippi River to 
Hickory Flat. Geologists subdivide the Eocene into several 
formations, but with the exceptions named above and below, I 
was not able to correlate these with any marked differences in 
topography or vegetation. The Southern Railway keeps pretty 
close to a small river nearly all the way across Webster County, 
and.that probably makes more difference in the appearance of 
the country between that county and those immediately west of it 
than the difference in age of the underlying rocks does. West of 
a line drawn from about Holly Springs to Carrollton, though, the 
Eocene is covered by a superficial formation which affects the 
vegetation enough to warrant a geographical separation. 
called pine-barrens, evidently on account of the contrast with the pineless prairie 
region bordering them on the east. (The “ Aletris obovata” mentioned, judging from 
the EAN given, and a specimen which I have since seen in the author’s her- 
barium, seems to have been wrongly identified. The locality is several hundred miles 
pees: any known station for that species, and in a very different kind of country.) 
