TORREYA 



January, 1917. 

 Vol. 17 No. I 



THE NATURAL VEGETATION OF WESTERN LONG 



ISLAND SOUTH OF THE TERMINAL 



MORAINE 



By Roland M. Harper 



Introduction. — In the hundred years or so that New York has 

 been a botanical center much time and energy has been expended 

 in cataloguing the flora of the neighborhood, which consists 

 largely of rather rare or imperfectly understood species; while 

 very few persons have thought it worth while to study the vege- 

 tation, which is an important part of the landscape, and is mostly 

 made up of common and easily identified species.* A consider- 

 able proportion of almost every local list of plants for a populous 

 region consists of species which were not there a few hundred 

 years ago, species not identified with certainty, species seen only 

 once in the area, and records based on specimens from abnormal 



*See Torreya 8: 156. 1908; Bull. Torrey Club 41: 557 (last footnote). 1914. 

 The relation between flora and vegetation is much like that between anthropology 

 and sociology, qualitative and quantitative chemical analyses, or dictionaries and 

 literature. The services of a chemist who could make only qualitative analyses 

 would not be worth much. Dictionaries are useful and well-nigh indispensable, 

 but one does not need to know every word in the dictionary before producing any 

 literature, and if all writers made revising the dictionary their chief aim we would 

 not have much literature. Likewise one does not have to know all the plants of 

 a region before describing its vegetation, and if all botanists were taxonomists 

 primarily it would be difficult to get any information about the aspect of the vegeta- 

 tion in a region one had not visited. 



For a concrete illustration of the difference between vegetation and flora see 

 the treatment of those topics in the article on Florida in the latest edition of the 

 New International Encyclopaedia (8: 708-709. 1914). A similar treatment for 

 the whole United States was prepared for a later volume of the same work (22 : 698- 

 700. 1916), but there the flora part was crowded out entirely by exigencies of 

 space, though the title still reads "Vegetation and Flora." 



No. 12, Vol. 16, of Torreya, comprising pp. 251-284, was issued 16 January, 1917.] 



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MEW 



