HARPER: VEGETATION OF THE HEMPSTEAD PLAINS 263 
vegetation. The present communication describes the vegetation 
more fully, but does not attempt a complete enumeration of the 
flora, which could very well constitute a separate paper of con- 
siderable length. Facts previously published will not be repeated 
here except where necessary for the continuity of the discussion, 
for the earlier papers are quite accessible. 
Although this unique eastern prairie was mentioned in a few 
early histories and books of travel, and was well known to several 
local botanists a generation ago as a good place to collect certain 
species of plants, it was overlooked by all students of vegetation 
(as distinguished from flora)* until a very late date, when at least 
three fourths of it had already been obliterated. In a sketch of 
the fauna and flora of the neighborhood of Cold Spring. Harbor 
by Dr. C. B. Davenport (the flora part contributed by Dr. D. S. 
Johnson), published in Science for Nov. 18, 1898, for the purpose 
of showing the attractions of that locality for botanists and 
zoólogists, there is no hint of the existence of a natural prairie, 
with its many interesting ecological problems, within five miles 
of the Biological Laboratory (and plainly visible to any one 
coming out there by train from New York). Апа for nearly 
ten years after that none of the botanists or ecologists who 
attended the summer school at Cold Spring Harbor as instructors 
Ог students seem to have known of this prairie, although some of 
them had lived or studied in Chicago and should have had some 
acquaintance with prairies. 
In Jelliffe's Flora of Long Island, 1899, there is no mention of 
* See Torreya I7: I. 1017. 
T There is much to be said in extenuation, resa and my own recognition of 
the unique character of this area was almost as tardy. I had read about the Hemp- 
stead Plains in the government soil survey ien on western Long Island, by J. A. 
onsteel, in the spring of 1905, and visited Cold Spring Harbor once that year and 
twice the next, and walked a few times along the western and southern edges of the 
Plains as mapped in the soil survey report, without noticing anything unusual, until 
on July 3, 1907, I happened to cross the middle of the area on the way from the 
Merrick cedar swamp to Hicksville; and the facts were then irresistible. On my 
previous walks I had passed through only those parts where the original vegetation 
been completely destroyed, and the portions viuis from the railroad I had 
on 
Henry Hicks of Westbury, as did Dr. Bonsteel ten years before, and several subse- 
quent explorers, 
