166 



REVIEWS 



Hall and Ingrall on Illinois Forests* 



This important publication seems to be little known to botan- 

 ists, and the reviewer was wholly unaware of it until it was about 

 seven years old; but it deserves to be brought to the attention of 

 readers interested in such matters even at this late date. Both 

 the authors were (and are?) connected with the U. S. Forest 

 Service, and the first-named is also the author of a preliminary 

 report on the forests of Tennessee, published by the Geological 

 Survey of that state about the same time. 



As Illinois was originally about two thirds prairie, and most of 

 the forest (as well as prairie) has long been superseded by culti- 

 vated fields, on account of the prevailingly fertile soils, one 

 might not expect to find much of interest in a report on the exist- 

 ing forests of the state. The whole state is covered in a general 

 way, but statistics are given only for the 26 most densely wooded 

 counties; one in the driftless area in the northwest corner, two 

 bet^^een the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers on the west side of 

 the state, and 23 in the extreme south. These counties include 

 less than one fifth of the area of the state, but about one third of 

 its forests. (They contained at that time about a million acres 

 of woodland, which Hall and Ingall thought to be about half the 

 state total; but the results of the U. S. census of 1910, which were 

 not available until a little later, showed over three million acres 

 of woodland on farms in Illinois, and there is of course a little 

 outside of the farms also.) 



A small map in the introductory portion of the report divides 

 the state into seven statistical divisions, and indicates the per- 

 centage of forest in each in 1880, following a book about the West 

 by Robert P. Porter (director of the nth Census). (The cen- 

 suses of 1890 and 1900 did not give the acreage of woodland on 

 farms, like those of 1870 and 1880, but that of 1910 did; too late 

 however to be taken advantage of in the report under considera- 



* Forest conditions in Illinois. By R. C. Hall and O. D. Ingall. Bull. 111. 

 State Lab. Nat. Hist. 9: 173-253. pi- 21-36 and frontispiece. 1911. 



