BIRDS OF THE GRASS LANDS. 453 



fancy that he is a being without limitations, the center around 

 which the universe gravitates, the sovereign for which all Nature 

 has been created. He will, in fact, constitute a separate kingdom 

 — the human kingdom. 



Even then, in the midst of his triumphs, his body will con- 

 tinually call him back to himself, and the anatomist will still be 

 able to cry to him, in words but little changed from an expression 

 of Broca's, " Remember that you are one of the animals ! " — Trans- 

 lated for The Popular Science Monthly from the book L'Homme 

 dans la Nature. 



BIRDS OF THE GRASS LANDS. 



Br Peof. SPENCER TROTTER. 



AN eastern North American landscape is chiefly characterized, 

 - at least in the more settled portions of the country, by its 

 diversified aspect of woods and fields. All other distant features 

 gradually melt away and leave to the involuntarily closing eye a 

 checkered expanse of darkly shaded masses and broadly open 

 sunlit spaces. In the wilder parts, along the ranges and spurs 

 of the Appalachians, the forests still hold undisputed sway over 

 the fields, yet surely and rapidly the venerable woods are falling 

 away as the axe sweeps with ever-widening swath along the clear- 

 ing's edge. Year after year we have gone to some beloved spot 

 of wilderness and learned to love the great, tall hemlocks that 

 were ever whispering their secret to the wind. Some spring 

 morning we are again at the old place ; alas ! what a pitiful sight 

 awaits us ! The giants of a hundred springs are fallen, and their 

 long, white trunks and ghostly arms make a picture more deso- 

 late than the deepest gloom of the forest. To me the sighing of 

 the hemlocks is a death song — a melancholy prophecy of the fate 

 that awaits them. 



The forest does not yield without a struggle. The tangled 

 underwoods and seedlings so long stunted in the evergreen shade 

 spring up with renewed life in the refreshing sunlight, and a 

 sturdy "second growth" takes in a few years the place of the 

 primeval forest. These are the woods of oak, hickory, and chest- 

 nut ; of maple, birch, beech, and gum ; of dogwood and sassafras, 

 tulip, elm, ash, and linden, that invite us with their shade, their 

 cool depths and reaches of sunlight, their fragrant blossoms and 

 mystery of hidden things, from the broad fields of grass and 

 grain that encompass them on every side. 



Not less diverse than the woods and fields themselves are the 

 living things that people them. Each offers its own peculiar en- 

 vironment and each has brought its own peculiar changes. There 



