264 SEMI-CENTENNIAL OF TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB 
the Hempstead Plains, but Hicksville, which is in the heart of the 
area, is cited as a locality for about twenty species, collected by Dr. 
G. D. Hulst. (A few of these are introduced, but the majority 
are typical prairie plants.) The first specific mention of the 
Plains in botanical literature that has come to the writer’s notice 
is a rather indefinite one in a short paper by William L. Fisher 
on Long Island violets іп the Plant World (3:` 91-92) for June, 
1900. More explicit is a paper by James Kirby on “Some plants 
of Hempstead Plains” in the American Botanist (7: 110) for 
December, 1904 (published in May, 1905), which enumerates 14 
species; about one third of which, however, do not properly 
belong to the prairie flora. In Torreya (6: 213) for October, 
1906, a few species found in the same area by the Torrey Club 
excursionists on Sept. I are mentioned. In Dr. Harshberger’s 
Phytogeographic Survey of North America (1911), page 421, is 
probably the most complete list of Hempstead Plains plants 
published up to that time, based on a walk of several miles through 
the area with the writer on Aug. 25, 1909.* By 1913 this prairie 
was sufficiently well known to plant sociologists to be featured 
as one of the attractions for the International Phytogeographic 
Excursion, most of the members of which visited it on July 27 
of that year. Since then it has been on the regular field program of 
the summer classes in botany at Cold Spring Harbor. Taylor’s 
Flora of the Vicinity of New York (1915) devotes nearly a page 
(29-30) to this area, and farther on, in the catalogue, eight species 
are recorded from the Hempstead Plains, besides a few weeds. 
from Hempstead. 
ENVIRONMENT 
Area and topography. The area originally treeless was about 
fifty square miles, corresponding approximately with the Nassau 
County portions of the “‘Hempstead loam” and “Hempstead 
gravelly loam” as mapped in the government soil survey. (There 
seems to be no evidence that the areas of “Hempstead loam” in 
Kings and Suffolk counties were ever prairie.) By 1907 the area 
of natural vegetation had been reduced to about ten square miles, 
and probably at least a tenth of that has been destroyed since. 
* A more extended account appears on pages 170-171 of “Тһе vegetation of 
the New Jersey pine-barrens," by the same author (1916). 
