the most thorough scientific research, and a suitable staff of 
trained assistants. 
Hundreds of thousands, possibly in the course of time, millions 
of dollars worth of City property, as well as the proper protection 
of the water supply, may be insured by the comparatively small 
annual cost of maintaining such a laboratory. 
Moreover, for its own best interests, the forest-to-be on this 
watershed will not only need continual removals and replacements, 
but this process may and should become, by judicious forest 
management, a source of income to the city, much more than 
sufficient to meet the entire cost of upkeep of both forest and 
reservoir. For this work a thoroughly trained and experienced 
forester is necessary, with a corps of assistants. 
The City has no more important problem in connection with 
its new water supply, for here lies one of the indispensable con- 
ditions to maintaining not only the abundance but the purity of 
the drinking water of over five million human beings. 
C. Stuart Gager. 
PLANTS OF THE CATSICILL AQUEDUCT 
REGION 
From near sea-level to the highest mountains within 100 miles 
of the City stretches the Catskill Water system, and this diver- 
sity of elevation suggests at once a division of the plant life of 
the area into the mountain and low-land types of vegetation. 
This may not be such an artificial division as at first sight ap- 
pears when it is remembered that many of our local wild flowers 
are found only on the mountain-tops of the Catskills or at 
elevations in excess of 1,500 feet. Others, again, common enough 
near the mouth of the Hudson, seem to creep rather sparingly up 
the Valley, perhaps as far as the Highlands, only to find these 
hills a barrier to a more northerly journey. 
There are many striking illustrations of these well marked 
tendencies of plant distribution in the region. For instance, near 
the mouth of the Croton River there is a tree of the yellow pine 
( Pinus echi?iata), more than fifty miles north of its usual home, 
near the pine-barrens of New Jersey. And on the Palisades, op- 
posite Yonkers, there grew, until quite recently, large masses of 
the native yew ( Taxus canadensis ), otherwise at home in the 
highland region northward. Near Peekskill Bay and just below 
it on Verplanks Point are many specimens of the ninebark 
(. Pliysocarpjis op7ilifolius) , which, while it is common enough 
