164 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [MARCH 
and the renascence of these views in Italy through the influence 
of LEonarDO DA Vinci and of other great contemporaries and 
followers. 
So far as we know, the beginnings of dynamic plant geography 
are much more recent than are the beginnings of dynamic geology, 
nor is this strange, since it is easier to recognize the destruction of 
land by waves and the deposition of material by rivers than to 
observe the more silent transformation of one plant association 
into another. Doubtless the earliest observers of such trans- 
formations failed to record the things they saw. It is hardly to 
be doubted, for example, that long ago many a philosophic woods- 
man must have noted, when he cut down the trees of a forest, that 
there sprang up a new vegetation differing from the old, and that 
gradually these first trees of the newly developing forest were dis- 
placed by other trees; and there may have been some who were 
keen enough to see that, after a long time, there was a return to the 
primeval type of forest. 
The earliest account which I have discovered that clearly deals 
with vegetative dynamics is in a short paper in the Philosophical 
transactions in 1685, in which Witt1am Kine (1) gives a good 
account of the origin of bog vegetation from floating mats; many 
times since, this has been reported as an original discovery. Per- 
haps the first to have a real glimmer of the doctrine of succession, 
as understood today, was the great French naturalist BUFFON- 
Although better known for his splendid descriptions of animals, 
Burron in his earlier life was much interested in forestry, and 
1742 he noted (2) that poplars precede oaks and beeches in the 
natural development of a forest. As a result of this observation, 
he gave the important advice to foresters that if they wished to 
cultivate beeches, they should plant them not in the open, but 
the shade of those trees which they naturally succeeded. BIBERG 
(3), a student of the great LinNAEUS, published his thesis in 1749 
and in this he describes the gradual development of vegetation on 
bare rocks; here he observes accurately the pioneer activity of 
the lichens and mosses, and he notes as well the importance of 
Sphagnum in the development of bogs. : 
The seeds planted by BuFFoN and BIBERG fell on sterile soil; 1m 
