This paper deals with a fairly homogeneous area within the 

 limits of New York City, in which there is still enough natural 

 vegetation to be well worth describing before it is all gone. It 

 is that part of Kings and Queens Counties (or the boroughs of 

 Brooklyn and Queens) south of the terminal moraine, which is a 

 very conspicuous topographic feature in the western third of 

 Long Island. The eastern boundary of the area under consider- 

 ation is a political one, but it happens to mark almost exactly the 

 western limit of the Hempstead Plains, whose vegetation is very 

 different from that here described, and* the eastern edge of the 

 extensive salt marshes around Jamaica Bay. The total area 

 studied is about lOO square miles, including the marshes. 



Geology and Soils. — The area is presumably underlaid at a 

 considerable depth (lOO feet or more) by Cretaceous strata of the 

 coastal plain, which here have little or no influence on soil or 

 topography. The surface material is classed by geologistsf as 

 "outwash" from the Pleistocene ice-sheet, which terminated at 

 or near the present sites of Fort Hamilton, Prospect Park, East 

 New York, Richmond Hill and Creedmoor.t 



There is no rock other than pebbles and small boulders of 

 glacial or fluvial origin, which decrease in size and abundance 



Torrey Club 41: 511-521. Oct. 1914; Harshberger, Trans. Wagner Free Inst. 

 Sci. 7: 183-186. Dec. 1914; Taylor, Am. Jour. Bot. 2: 26. 1915; Harper, Rep. 

 Fla. Geol. Surv. 7: 181-183. Sept. 1915; Bailey & Sinnott, Am. Jour. Bot. 3: 

 25-27. 1916; Harshberger, Vegetation N. J. Pine-barrens, 181. Nov. 1916, 

 For examples of the quantitative or census method and its applications see Coville 

 Rep. Geol. Surv. Ark. 1888^: 246-247. 1891; Harper, Bull. Torrey Club 34: 

 363-366. 1907; Torreya 9: 223. 1909; Bull. Torrey Club 37; 113-117, 409, 

 417. 1910; Torreya 11: 231. 1911; Plant World 15: 245-247. 1912; Torreya 

 13: 243-244. 1913; Bull. Torrey Club 41: 562-563. 1914; Rep. Fla. Geol. 

 Surv. 6: 175 et seq. Dec. 1914. 



* See Torreya 12: 277-287. Dec. 1912. 



t See U. S. Geol. Surv. Professional Paper 82, on the geology of Long Island, 

 by M. L. Fuller, 1914. 



I It is hardly possible to correlate the vegetation here with geological history, 

 however, and the writer does not now attach the importance to such matters 

 that some contemporary phytogeographers do. For vegetation of similar aspect, 

 and most of the same species, can be found elsewhere on soils that are much older, 

 while areas with similar geological history forty or fifty miles to the eastward 

 have very different vegetation. The present environment is evidently more im- 

 portant — and incidentally much more easily determined — than any changes that 

 have taken place in the past. 



