TORRES 
Vol. 31 July-August, 1931 | No. 4 
Some notes on vegetational change 
ROBERT R. HUMPHREY 
During the winter of 1928, while looking through “The 
Plant Life of Maryland,” (1) I ran acrossa statement by Dr. For- 
rest Shreve in which he says, ‘Where extensive clearings exist 
and scarcely any areas of virgin forest remain, as is the case in 
Maryland, itis extremely difficult to reconstruct a picture of the 
virgin vegetation, and equally difficult to draw wholly satis- 
factory conclusions as to the relation between natural vegeta- 
tion and the physical conditions. Particularly is the character of 
the forests changed by clearing.” The statements did not seem 
to me to be entirely justified, so at my first opportunity, which 
happened to be the following summer, I spent some little time 
unearthing what records I could find at the Library of Con- 
gress which bore any references to the early vegetation of Mary- 
land or adjacent territory. While there is undoubtedly some 
literature there which I did not find, and some elsewhere which 
was not available to me at the time, I was able to uncover a 
number of references to the flora of that region at approximately 
the time of the first European settlements there. While these 
writings do not entirely fulfill my original purpose in making the 
study, they do throw some light on the vegetation of the region 
at an early date. It has been necessary to cut the quotations 
down to include only those which give the most information on 
the points in question, a proceeding which has eliminated many 
of the most interesting passages. 
Among the passages which follow will be found some con- 
cerning the country as far north as the New England States and 
as far south as the Carolinas: these have been included because 
they fall within the same vegetational area as Maryland and 
Virginia, and because the entire eastern portion of the country 
has been subjected to much the same processes of lumbering and 
cultivation. The numbers in black type refer to the literature 
Citations at the end of the paper. : 
2: 218-219. “The products of Virginia and Maryland differ 
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