98 



Kansas Academy of Science. 



Imagine yourself traveling over the level prairie where 

 sight travels for twenty or thirty miles unobstructed, and see 

 three miles before you a herd of cattle stringing across the 

 prairie at right angles to your road. Then suddenly find your- 

 self on the shore of one of those beautiful shimmering lakes. 

 While you are viewing with wonder the beauty spread before 

 you, you soon have it spoiled by the grotesque, for the cattle 

 coming up to the edge of the lake find legs fifty feet long on 

 which they wade out into the lake and disappear. Travel a 

 mile farther and you again come in sight of the cattle wending 



their way across the prairie on their ordinary short legs and 

 none the worse for having passed through the magic waters 

 in their "Seven League Boots." Such scenes are very common 

 where the buffalo grass causes the unequal heating of the at- 

 mosphere so that you look, not straight ahead, but along rays 

 of light that lead upward into the smoky blue of the atmos- 

 phere, and the objects which chance to be on the margin of 



