235 
has resulted in a great accumulation of buried forests. “ Тгипікѕ 
of trees are found buried at all depths beneath the surafce, quite 
down to the gravel." This and “numerous facts of the same 
kind . . . collected along the shores of the Delaware Bay and 
River, in Salem and Cumberland Counties, and on the sea-shore 
in Atlantic, Ocean, Monmouth, and Middlesex Counties," 
all seem to point to a decided ancient subsidence of the area 
surrounding the Beacon Hill formation. 
For the phytogeographer the salient features of these changes 
are that Beacon Hill has been uninterruptedly out of the water 
since upper Miocene times, and that it has several times been’ 
partly, and often entirely surrounded by water. These facts, 
together with the encroachment of the glacier, and its recession, 
with the probable deposition of a great deal of morainic material 
around Beacon Hill, makes this formation the oldest in New 
Jersey, either on the coastal plain or in the glaciated regions 
northward, that could have been continuously covered with 
vegetation. This, it seems to me, is why the Beacon Hill forma- 
tion is the controlling factor in the origin and present distribution 
of the pine-barrens. The area of the pine-barrens (see fig. 1) 
is not exactly coextensive with Beacon Hill (see fig. 2) but the 
differences are so slight that recent and local erosion of the 
formation would account for the failure of the two regions to 
superimpose, as it were. 
In other words the New Jersey pine-barrens exist exclusively 
on this Beacon Hill formation, an area isolated by geological 
processes, and maintaining a relict or climax flora, the antiquity 
of which greatly antedates any of the rest of our vegetation 
hereabouts, so far as permanency of position and phytogeo- 
graphical isolation are concerned. This undoubtedly accounts 
for the composition of the flora, and it is interesting to note that 
zoólogists have found this same apparent isolation, the same 
endemism noted above. The sphagnum frog, Rana virgatipes, 
described by Cope and collected only thrice since, is unknown 
outside of this region, and the late John B. Smith in his work 
3 Geology of the county of Cape May 62. 1857. 
м Ibid. 39. 
15 Fowler, H. W. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia 57: 662-664. 1905. 
