204 
THE PLANT WORLD. 
More recently Ganong has given an excellent description of 
plant societies and their interrelations on the salt marshes of New 
Brunswick. 
Concerning the ecological work in America in the last few 
years it is still too early to give an estimate. There have been 
many workers in the field, some of them venturesome, others 
cautious, and all of them have perhaps erred in trying to draw 
conclusions from work based on too few observations. Some 
of their ideas will undoubtedly live, others will not. 
The establishment of such laboratories as that of the Carnegie 
Institution at Tucson, Arizona, and of the New York Botanical 
Garden at Cinchona, Jamaica, are signs of a movement in the 
right direction. No less important, for the progress of ecological 
study, is the spread of botanical laboratories throughout the 
country as a concomitant of the growth of universities and col¬ 
leges in the last twenty-five years. From places like these we 
may expect observations from resident investigators which will 
replace those of the hasty midsummer vacation trip. They will 
be able to put their work upon on experimental basis. 
When we look back over the ecological work which has been 
done in America we must admit that, at best, it makes a poor 
showing. In the first place, the botanist has a hard task before 
him because our flora is very large and very diverse. The ab¬ 
sence of barriers in the central and eastern parts of the conti¬ 
nent admits of extensive dispersal resulting in a heterogeneous 
flora. Possibly the desire to explore regions unknown, botanically, 
has kept some men from the less inviting task of accumulating 
biological data. Certain it is that until the last few years we have 
had little but studies of distribution from the field worker. Again 
we must admit that, as a whole, our ecological work displays but 
little originality or creativeness and that some of it is a poor 
imitation of work done on the other side of the Atlantic. This 
may be partly due to the fact that we have as yet no great schools 
of ecology in this country which give the best of their energy and 
time to ecological botany. Then too it must be acknowledged that 
our students who attend European institutions generally go to 
the savants of morphology and physiology, while only a few catch 
the ideas and methods of the workers in ecological lines. 
