J(lRNAL OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM [VOL. XXXIX TIlE GENERA OF TIlHE WOODY IANALES IN TIHE SO1 TIIEASTEIIN INITEI) STATES CARROLL E. WOOD, JR. THE TREATMENTS PRESENTED BELOW of the sixteen genera of seven woody ranalian families which occur in the southeastern United States have been prepared as part of a generic study of the seed plants of that area. This work has been undertaken as a joint project of the Gray Herbar-ium and the Arnold Arboretum and has been made possible through the interest and support of George R. Cooley and through a grant from the National Science Foundation. In view of the co-operation and interest others have shown in this undertaking it seems worth while to publish our treatments of at least some of the families in advance of the completed work. In this way some of the material brought together in the course of these studies will be made available, and we should hope to have con-structive criticisms from other botanists as the work progresses. In attempting a generic treatment of the approximately 1300 genera of seed plants known to occur within the area bounded by and including North Carolina and Tennessee, on the north, and Arkansas and Louisiana, on the west, the objectives are toward a review and reorganization of familial and generic lines (often obscured in Small's Manual of the Southeastern Flora) and, especially, toward bringing together at least a part of the vast botanical literature which bears upon the plants of this rich area. The work is being done by taxonomists and is both taxonomic and floristic, but the approach, as well as the scope, is intended to be somewhat broader than is usual in a regional manual. The basic scheme is biological with the intent of including material from all branches of botany and of under-scoring the biosystematic aspects of each genus and family, insofar as possible. In such an approach more problems may be raised than are solved but. in at least some instances, some of the difficulties which must be resolved before the plants of our area can be understood adequately become evident when the literature of a particular genus or family is brought together. Of course, with the existing information such a large goal is impossible for all genera (or even most) but a biological or bio-systematic viewpoint is that which we are attempting to maintain through-out these studies. The difficulties and weaknesses of this undertaking are apparent to no one more clearly than to those of us who have planned and worked on this project. More than a year and a half were spent on the tedious but basic chore of drawing together a file of more than 50.000 references arranged by families and genera which provided the starting point for the work.The large number of references and their wide distribution in the botanicalliterature of the world point up the almost incredible amount of informa-tion which is rather effectively "lost" to most botanists and even to authori-
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