THE RELATION BETWEEN FORESTRY AND 
GEOLOGY IN NEW JERSEY. 
ARTHUR HOLLICK. 
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE FLORA. 
WITHIN the boundaries of the state are geological formations 
representing all the great time divisions — Eozoic, Palzeozoic, 
Mesozoic, and Neozoic — and rocks of all the included geologic 
periods, with the exception of the Carboniferous and Jurassic. 
In -tracing the development of plant life through geologic 
time the fact is well recognized that the flora of Eozoic and 
Palzeozoic times is not related to our living flora by any closer 
ties than those of sub-kingdoms or classes. In Mesozoic time 
generic relationships may be traced, while in Neozoic time 
many species either identical with or closely related to living 
ones may be recognized. _ 
It has also been accepted as a broad generalization that bio- 
logic development has been coincident with geologic sequence, 
or, in other words, that the farther back in geologic time we 
begin our investigations the lower in the scale of life we find 
the plants to be; and, conversely, that the nearer we approach 
modern time the higher they are in development. Plants have 
developed in the past in accordance with changes in their 
environments, as they do to-day, so that in order to understand 
the evolution of any living flora it is necessary to know some- 
thing about the changes which have preceded the existing con- 
ditions. 
For the purposes of this discussion we need not begin any 
farther back in geologic time than the Triassic period, when 
the shore line of the North American continent, so far as New 
Jersey is concerned, extended irregularly from about the vicin- 
ity of Mahwah to a few miles south of Phillipsburg. This was 
evidently a period of slow subsidence, and the Triassic deposits 
were largely laid down in shallow estuaries or lagoons, which 
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