Indigene Versus Alien in the Development of Arid Hawaiian Vegetation

The conflicts of the old and the new, the conservative and the radical, the classicist and the romanticist, represent fundamental types of activity in the organic world. We find that their observation and study have been prominent for centuries. More recently, with the extensive introduction into new lands of human beings, of cultures and civilizations, of plants and animals, and of diseases and pests of man, long established equilibria have been disturbed and new ecosystems of very different nature are in process of formation. One unusually interesting aspect of this readjustment is that which is taking place today between the indigenous and the alien plants of tropical regions of both hemispheres. The author's purpose is to reveal the problem as one involving the ecology of individual species, and not involving an anthropocentric sentimentalism that breeds a spirit of defeat and that prevents experimentation and further observation. The island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, is the scene of one of these conflicts, where the plant life has been vastly altered since the impact of Europeans and their civilizations. More than two thousand cultivated and naturalized plants have been