Abstract
SOME months ago Prof. Asa Gray delivered to the Harvard University Natural History Society a lecture on Forest Geography and Archæology, which has been published in two recent numbers of the American Journal of Science, The lecture referred mainly to the forests of North America, and in speaking of these, Prof. Gray referred to them not exactly as they are to-day, but as they were before civilised man had materially interfered with them. In the first part of the lecture Prof. Gray showed how the distribution of forests is mostly dependent on the distribution of moisture, and thus explained the great difference which exists in this feature between the eastern and western States. The Atlantic “forest primeval,” he stated, a few generations ago covered essentially the whole country from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada to Florida and Texas, and from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. This Atlantic forest of the United States is one of the largest and almost the richest of the temperate forests of the world. Then going westwards from the Mississippi come prairies and open plains; beyond these is the Rocky Mountains, forest again, but only in narrow lines and patches; but after passing the Sierra Nevada, the western rim of the basin, we come to what is in some respects the noblest and most remarkable forest in the world. In the long valley of California it almost disappears again, to resume its sway in the Coast Ranges, with altered features, some of them not less magnificent and of greater beauty. Thus there are two forest-regions in North America—an Atlantic and a Pacific, each dependent on the oceans which they respectively border. Prof. Gray then goes on to show how the distribution and nature of these forests are dependent mainly on moisture and temperature, proceeding to prove that the difference in the composition of the Atlantic and Pacific forests is not less marked than that of the climate and geographical configuration to which the two are respectively adapted.
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Forest Geography . Nature 19, 327–330 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/019327a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/019327a0