FOREST GEOGRAPHY AND ARCHAEOLOGY. 1 



It is the forests of the Northern temperate zone which we 

 are to traverse. After taking some note of them in their 

 present condition and relations, we may inquire into their 

 pedigree ; and, from a consideration of what and where the 

 component trees have been in days of old, derive some proba- 

 ble explanation of peculiarities which otherwise seem inexpli- 

 cable and strange. 



In speaking of our forests in their present condition, I 

 mean not exactly as they are to-day, but as they were before 

 civilized man had materially interfered with them. In the 

 district we inhabit such interference is so recent that we have 

 little difficulty in conceiving the conditions which here pre- 

 vailed, a few generations ago, when the " forest primeval " — 

 described in the first lines of a familiar poem — covered 

 essentially the whole country, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence 

 and Canada to Florida and Texas, from the Atlantic to be- 

 yond the Mississippi. This, our Atlantic forest, is one of the 

 largest and almost the richest of the temperate forests of the 

 world. That is, it comprises a greater diversity of species 

 than any other, except one. 



In crossing the country from the Atlantic westward, w- 

 leave this forest behind us when we pass the western borders 

 of those organized States which lie along the right bank of 

 the Mississippi. We exchange it for prairies and open plains, 

 wooded only along the watercourses, — plains which' grow 

 more and more bare and less green as we proceed westward, 

 with only some scattering Cottonwoods (i. e. Poplars)_on the 

 immediate banks of the traversing rivers, which are them- 

 selves far between. 



1 A lecture delivered before the Harvard University Natural History 

 Society, April 18, 1878. (American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., 

 xvi. 85, 183.) 



