TORREYA 



July, igo8 

 Vol. 8. No. 7. 



LIBDA 



SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE WORK ON THE HIGHER ^EW v< 

 PLANTS IN THE VICINITY OF NEW YORK * boTmni 



( j A K- 



By Roland M. Harper 



New York is one of Nature's strategic points. Three very 

 important and entirely mdependent physiographic lines which do 

 not intersect at any other one point, namely, the terminal moraine, 

 the fall-line, and the coast line, pass right through the city, which 

 therefore includes within its limits parts of the ancient highlands 

 founded on solid rock, the unconsolidated coastal plain, and 

 glaciated and unglaciated portions of both, as well as the beaches, 

 dunes, and marshes of the coast itself, which is as distinct from 

 the coastal plain as that is from the highlands. There is prob- 

 ably not another spot in North America, if in the world, which 

 exhibits so much natural diversity in its immediate surroundings. 

 Within fifty miles of here are considerable areas of Archaean, 

 Palaeozoic, and Triassic rocks, some of them forming considerable 

 mountains, as well as the nearly flat expanse of the Cretaceous 

 and Tertiary coastal plain of Long Island and New Jersey, some 

 of it covered with pine-barrens and some with fine oak forests. 

 A circle with New York as its center and a radius of lOO miles, 

 as shown by the Preliminary Catalogue of Anthophyta and 

 Pteridophyta published by the Club in 1888, includes over half 

 the species of vascular plants credited to the northeastern United 

 States and adjacent Canada. 



The earliest botanists in this rich region had their hands pretty 

 full with merely collecting, identifying, and enumerating the flower- 

 ing plants they found. Many species were at once seen to be new 

 to science, and such had to be carefully compared and described ; 



* Read at a meeting of the Torrey Botanical Club, April 29, 1908. 

 [No. 6, Vol. 8, of ToRREYA, comprising pages 125-152, was issued June 30, 1908. 



153 



