Excerpt from Flora of the Vicinity of New York: A Contribution to Plant Geography
This book deals chiefly with the distribution of the flora near New York. Taxonomy and nomenclature are considered only as fundamentals upon which the phytogeographical structure of the book has been reared. This has been done because of the belief that local flora lists and manuals are significant chiefly as they are projectors of ideas rather than mere records of species, be those records ever so accurate. The attempt to explain the origin of the flora centering near the city, and the factors that have played their part in shaping its present composition, has, it seems to the writer, greater value than any enumeration of the species could possibly have.
The opportunity for deductive reasoning on the distribution of our flora can be rightly based only on a complete and accurate record of the occurrence of individual species, authenticated by herbarium specimens and reliable field notes. Our knowledge, therefore, is limited by the amount and the availability of such information, and, in the present instance, no one is so conscious of the scarcity of such material as the writer. The book, therefore, is not so much a local flora as a method of writing one, - in some ways it is little more than a record of the incompleteness of our present knowledge.
The work was begun at the New York Botanical Garden, in January, 1909, and continued until March, 1911. Since then it has been carried on at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where a division of time between it and increasing administrative duties became necessary. To the directors of both institutions grateful acknowledgement is due for much help and encouragement.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
