10 ECONOMIC BOTANY OF ALABAMA 



The names of a few other botanists who worked in Alabama before 

 or since Dr. Mohr's time are indicated in the bibliography of the 

 present report, but some others have left no records of their work 

 other than specimens deposited in various herbaria. 



Like nearly all other botanists who have worked on plant dis- 

 tribution, before and since. Dr. ^lohr does not seem to have made 

 full notes while traveling (especially by rail). Init must have de- 

 pended mostly on dried specimens, literature, and memory. But 

 he did remarkably well under the circumstances, and his book is 

 still without much doubt the best state flora ever published. 



Considering woody plants only, in addition to nearly 100 

 species which are so widely distributed in Alabama that Dr. Mohr 

 did not attempt to list the counties in which he had seen them, he 

 reported 148 species from Mobile County, 89 from Baldwin, 69 

 from Tuscaloosa (mostly on the authority of Dr. Smith), 46 from 

 Clarke (mostly by Dr. Denny), 41 from Montgomery, 37 from 

 Clay, 37 from Lee (nearly all by Prof. Earle and his associates), 

 32 from DeKalb, and so on ; but none from Bullock, Chambers, 

 Conecuh, Coosa, Covington, Crenshaw, Geneva, Greene, Lowndes, 

 Pickens, or Shelby, although he must have often passed through 

 some of these on the train. The southeastern corner of the state 

 is very sparingly represented by any j^lant records in the book. 



FIELD WORK OF THE WRITER 



The present writer came to Alabama in the fall of 1905, and 

 made it a point to visit every county in the state within a year, 

 except one which had no railroad then ; and that was visited in 

 1908 and later. By this time every county has been visited more 

 than once, in different years, sometimes at state expense and some- 

 times on pleasure trips. Notes have been taken on practically ever) 

 mile of travel by rail, for many of the commoner trees and shrubs 

 are just as easily identified from a moving train as by herbarium 

 specimens, and this makes my notes on their distribution far more 

 complete than they would be otherwise.* In recent years consid- 

 erable information has been gathered on automobile trips ; but that 



*The Legislature of 1919 enacted a law requiring the windows of in- 

 trastate passenger trains in Alabama to be screened. If that law had been 

 in force when I first came to the state it would have been a considerable 

 handicap to my work. 



