284 SEMI-CENTENNIAL OF TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB 
the surrounding villages, before easy railroad communication with 
the interior of the country made it more economical to bring part 
of the food supply from the more fertile lands of the West. Agri- 
culture on the Plains, as elsewhére on Long Island, probably reached 
its maximum extension two or three generations ago. Census 
statistics for Nassau County go back only to 1900, for it was not 
separated from Queens until 1899, but the number of farms in 
the county decreased from 1,658 in 1900 to 1,017 in 1910, and the 
acreage of farm land decreased during the same period from a 
little over half the total area to less than a third, and is doubtless 
still less now.* But prairie land once cultivated and afterwards 
abandoned seems never to revert to the original vegetation, as 
pointed out under the head of weeds; or at least if it does the 
process is so slow that no evidences of it have yet been discovered. 
At the present time more of the land is used for residential 
purposes than for agriculture, the proximity of New York City 
and the ease of communication causing many people to settle on 
and around the Plains quite independently of soil conditions. 
Nassau County had 202 inhabitants per square mile in 1900 and 
303 in 1910, and probably has about 400 now. Although this 
causes considerable encroachment on the prairie and may be the 
ultimate means of obliterating it, in a way it tends to protect it 
from agricultural exploitation, for it makes some of the land too 
valuable for farmers to touch, just as there is said to be more 
natural prairie now inside the city of Chicago than for a consider- 
able distance outside, for a similar reason. 
À more serious menace at the present time is the appropriation 
of considerable areas for pleasure purposes, such as polo and golf; 
the latter having brought about the destruction of most of the 
Meadow Brook vegetation a few years ago, causing keen regret to 
nature-lovers. For there are innumerable suitable sites for golf 
* There was less than half as much farm land and only a little more than half 
as much cultivated land, on Long Island in 1910 as in 1850, when such statistics 
were first included in the census. The farmers are evidently being crowded out by 
commuters and millionaires. In the last few years the Garden City Company, 
unmindful of the rapid decline of farming on Long Island and the futility 
of trying to counteract it, has plowed up several hundred acres of virgin prairie by 
machinery and offered to lease the land to farmers (see news item at bottom of 
page 113 of Torreya for June, 1914), but окуы without much success. 
