SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 



ALABAMA has probably been more thoroughly ex- 

 plored by various kinds of scientists than has any 

 other southern state, and there is not very much to be 

 said about its forests now that has not been said before, 

 in one way or another. The present report differs some- 

 what from previous descriptions, however, in the way in 

 which the geographical divisions of the state are classi- 

 fied and the descriptions of them arranged; and the 

 quantitative analyses of the forests of each division, 

 based on several thousand pages of field notes (repre- 

 senting about 200 locality-records for each species of 

 tree, on the average) , are entirely new, as are all but two 

 of the illustrations. 



Among the numerous publications dealing with the 

 geography or the forests of Alabama it will perhaps be 

 sufficient for the purposes of most persons who use this 

 report if only a few of the more important or accessible 

 ones are cited. Some of these, however, contain refer- 

 ences to many additional works of similar nature which 

 can be obtained without much trouble by any one who is 

 sufficiently interested to go into the matter more 

 deeply or scientifically. For the benefit of such persons 

 there are included in the following list the titles of a 

 few publications which, although they contain valuable 

 information about certain parts of Alabama, are so lit- 

 tle known or else so recent that they have not been men- 

 tioned in many bibliographies, particularly in the volum- 

 inous "Bibliography of Alabama" by Dr. Thomas M. 

 Owen (who is now at the head of the State Department 

 of Archives and History), published in 1898 in the an- 

 nual report of the American Historical Association for 

 1897, pages 777-1248 ; and in the bibliographies of North 

 American geological literature published every few 

 years by the U. S. Geological Survey. (Bulletin 127 of 

 that Survey, dated 1896, covers the period from 1731 to 

 1891, and there are several later ones for shorter subse- 

 quent periods.) 



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