Page:The Living Flora of West Virginia and The Fossil Flora of West Virginia.pdf/26

2 little loam. The clay of the more open steep hillsides is so unctuous and unstable that frequent landslides occur during Spring, sometimes of great extent. This subsidence renders the valley streams muddy throughout the year. The rocks are principally sandstone and limestone, with some outcroppings of shales on the northeastern heights. The special features of very fertile and quite sterile soils, varied altitude and the vast areas of primitive forests, yield a flora of great variety, often widely differing at points only a few miles apart.

The amount of exploration necessary to gain a full knowledge of the flora under these conditions becomes an arduous undertaking, though the interest in searching an almost virgin field is so deep as to greatly lighten the labor.

That several of the early Pennsylvanian, Virginian and North Carolinian Botanists, including Peter Kalm, John Eraser, John Clayton, Thomas Nuttall, John Mitchell and others, collected within the eastern borders of the State is reasonably certain, though I have not been able, so far, to establish their localities with any degree of certainty. There is great difficulty in locating West Virginian stations in the field work of the very early Botanists from the fact that most of their notes and labels read simply "Virginia." Previous to 1784 Virginia extended indefinitely from the Atlantic to any point beyond the Ohio River, while the border lines of West Virginia were not established until 1863. Then, too, the country was so thinly settlemented and localities so uncertainly named that ascribing definite geographic place to collected plants was impossible to the knapsack traveller.

The following chronologic tabulation gives all the information that I have been able to compile upon the field work of botanists within the State.

(1), the renowned French Botanist (who traveled extensively in North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois; even North into Canada and South into Florida and the Bahamas) ; made many journeys, under conditions of great hardship and no little danger, along the out confines of the mountain borders of West Virginia ; especially in the New River region of southwestern Virginia. He is credited by one of his biographers with field work in the contiguous West