NATURE NAMES IN AMERICA 65 



racoon and opossum the Algonquin tongue has given us such words as 

 ' skunk/ ' chipmunk ' and ' moose.' 



The early colonists, Puritan and Cavalier alike, were in the main 

 English yeomen. They came not from the crowded centers, but from 

 the rural districts, and it matters little from what district they came, 

 all had been in touch with nature in England, and planted deep in 

 their hearts was the love of fields and woods. This was not often 

 expressed, it was too deep-seated a sentiment, but we see its workings 

 in many an old chronicle. It was not what in the modern sense might 

 be termed poetic, though there were undoubted poets among them. 

 It was rather the feeling that an unlettered countryman has — a certain 

 inexpressible love for the soil and the things thereof. The English 

 emigrant to America was too much a part of his surroundings to see 

 nature from the poet's point of view. The modern esthetic cult — the 

 love of the beautiful — was not a portion of his mental equipment. 

 He had the inquisitive and acquisitive qualities of mind, the interest 

 in things for the sake of knowing about them, the attitude of the 

 curious, and, above all, an interest in the practical uses of natural 

 products. With this attitude of mind toward nature he set foot upon 

 the shores of the new world. The surroundings that he had left are 

 best pictured in the rural England of Shakespeare's and of Milton's 

 time. The richly green meadow pastures watered by abundant 

 streams, along the banks of which "Walton and his brother anglers 

 loved to loiter in the shade of broad-spreading trees; the rolling up- 

 lands and lines of low hills; the deeply ploughed fields and scattered 

 masses of woodland, with here and there a church spire peeping above 

 them; the hedge-rows blossoming with wild flowers and haunted by 

 innumerable song birds; ancient, ivy-mantled towers and drowsy ham- 

 lets, with noisy flocks of rooks and daws — these were the elements in 

 a landscape enveloped in the soft atmosphere of an English sky, and 

 with all the endeared associations of home, that the emigrant carried 

 in his mind and heart to x\merica. Little wonder that he sought in 

 his new surroundings for something to remind him of this old home. 

 The forbidding, untrodden wilderness hemmed him in on every side. 

 The puritan found a rugged land and a harsh climate; the cavalier, a 

 more generous display of nature; but each had to wrest wide areas 

 from the wilderness before the landscape could become in any sense 

 domestic. As this domestication of the land went on, the colonists 

 found birds coming about their dwellings, building nests in their 

 gardens and in the shelter of their barns, and they began taking note 

 of many of the wild plants that grew in their neighborhood. By the 

 time some of the earlier accounts were written, the settlers had already 

 made the acquaintance of a number of the more familiar kinds and 

 had given them names. It was the England of Elizabeth that was 

 transplanted in Xew England and Virginia, and a considerable body 



