138 THE AAIERICAN BOTANIST 



Although we are most at home while delving into the 

 quiet depths of a far-off thicket, or wandering after pipits 

 and marsh-wrens through the swamp, yet we are sometimes 

 wont to amuse ourselves by speculating as to how great a 

 variety of wild life a person might manage to become ac- 

 quainted with in case he were always to remain within the 

 town's limits. It is without doubt true that civilization betters 

 the conditions of life for many kinds of birds and other ani- 

 mals, and of plants, and that such favored beings are in con- 

 sequence more abundant in the vicinity of man's habitations 

 than in the unkempt wilds. Notice the vast numbers of birds 

 in our grapevines and hedges, the armies of mice and voles 

 in our fields and the myriads of weeds along our roadsides 

 and in our gardens; and think, furthermore, of the countless 

 beings of all sorts that are constantly becoming adapted to the 

 new circumstances that the influences of settlement and civili- 

 zation are establishing. Does not a little observation and re- 

 flection soon satisfy one that, as a whole, our fauna and flora 

 are far from being on the road to extinction and that there is 

 much for a naturalist to learn even amid the city's moil? But, 

 nevertheless, the fact remains that virgin nature pleases best, 

 and we may be sure that a stroll through woods and waste- 

 lands will never lose its charms. 



My happy hunting-grounds, during boyhood and youth, 

 were confined to a limited district in Knox County, Illinois, 

 northwest of the state center. This region overlies the Coal 

 Measures and the surface consists of consolidated deposits of 

 glacial drift, loess, and alluvium. Here are prairie lands 

 along whose water-courses are considerable growths of timber. 

 Cornfields, clover and timothy meadows, woodland tracts and 

 treeless slough-lands, separated from one another by osage 

 orange hedges, wire fences, or, in a few pleasing instances 

 still, by old, zigzag rail fences, indicating how Nature and 

 man are administering the affairs of the world in this region. 



