157 



the first is almost essential to the second, the second is far more 

 interesting and valuable.* 



The portions of the Eastern United States whose vegetation 

 has been described in anything like a thorough manner at 

 present constitute scarcely one per cent, of the whole, and, curi- 

 ously enough, descriptions of vegetation are scarcest for some of 

 the states in which botanists are and always have been most 

 numerous. The plant habitats of the vicinity of New York are 

 almost as little understood to-day as the plants themselves were 

 in the time of Linnaeus, and even in some of the latest syste- 

 matic works habitats are treated as unscientifically as plants are 

 in non-botanical literature, f 



North of latitude 35° and east of the Mississippi River no 

 systematic classification of habitats seems to have yet been 

 attempted for an area as large as a whole state, | though it 

 would be a far simpler task to classify the few score of habitats 

 in this part of the world than it has been to classify the several 

 thousand species of plants. 



An adequate description of a habitat would require as many 

 words as a plant description, and would be out of place in the 

 literature of systematic botany ; but we should have a system 

 which would enable us to designate any habitat accurately with 

 not more than two or three words, just as a binomial or trinomial 

 technical name suffices to designate any plant. Some ecologists 

 believe that habitat names should be formed from the ancient 

 languages, but it would seem as if our own language should be 

 sufficient for the purpose, and that too, perhaps, without coining 

 any new words. Of course there are now many short habitat 

 names in common use, just as there were plant names before the 

 days of systematic botany, but most of these are used rather 



* For brief but illuminating comparisons of floristics and ecology see Clements, 

 Research Methods in Ecology, 7-9, 1905 ; Bray, Bull. Univ. Tex. 82 : 59-60. 

 (Distribution and adaptation of the vegetation of Texas) 1907. 



f See in this connection W. M. Davis, Am. Nat. 23: 579. 1889. 



j An excellent beginning in classifying the vegetation of a small part of New 

 England, with the novel feature of keys and descriptions for the habitats, was made 

 by J. W. Blankinship in Rhodora for May, 1903, but it has not yet been followed up 

 by any one else in that region. 



