AQUARELLES OF OUR COMMON WOODLANDS* 
By Warren H. Miller 
Editor of Field and Stream 
UR Museum has many wonder- 
lands of American wild life 
upon which the hungry city 
dweller may feast his eyes, but none more 
beautiful than the collection of scenic 
cases presenting the amphibian life of the 
ponds and brooks of our familiar wood- 
lands. It is a veritable fairyland that 
one enters here, a fairyland in more ways 
than one, for it is the gateway back to 
one’s own forgotten youth, a fairyland 
having the power to touch the mystic 
chords of memory and reawaken the 
keen pleasures that one experienced, 
with the tenfold sensitiveness of youth, 
when going into the woods in the spring- 
time to collect wild flowers, to renew 
acquaintances with the birds, and to 
watch the still pools for signs of the 
activities of the small creatures which 
give the touch of life to such places. 
I presume that these cases are given 
such prosaic names as the “toad group,”’ 
and the “bullfrog group,” but my soul 
will have none of it. To me the scene 
presenting the life of our common toads, 
is May; fresh, bounding May, the 
eternal New Year of the wilderness: 
when the new leaves have just unfolded, 
soft and feathery as fine plumes, the 
forest floor is carpeted with anemones, 
dog-tooth violets and jack-in-the-pul- 
pits; and every dell has its wild bird 
finding melodious breath over the nod- 
ding sprays of Solomon’s-seal. When I 
look upon that scenic picture of May in 
the woods I hardly see the wild life at all, 
at first. Isee, dimly, a Boy of Ten, with 
1 Photographs for this article and the preceding 
as well as for the four-page sepia insert, made 
from the Toad Group by Mr. Julius Kirschner, 
Museum photographer 
a net and an aquarium pail, and dimly 
recognize in him my own weatherbeaten 
and battle-scarred self. That boy is — 
somehow different. He is free, and bare- 
legged, and eager with the devouring 
eagerness of childhood; keen in his 
observation of every least detail of the 
pool beside which he is standing. It is 
a pool very like the one shown in the 
scenic case, every feature of the latter 
recalling similar scenes that were then 
of poignant interest to the Boy of Ten. 
Impelled by the hunter’s ardor of pur- 
suit and the scientist’s eagerness to col- 
lect new specimens, the boy is gradually 
filling his pail with fish, tadpole, froglet 
and turtle, until after a morning’s work 
he returns home triumphant and adds 
the spoil to the wild life already inhabit- 
ing his large aquarium. I suppose that 
nearly every boy who lives anywhere 
within reach of our ordinary woodlands 
has maintained an aquarium; certainly 
all the boys in our town did, and therein 
lies the appeal of the “May” scene to 
many observers of the male persuasion. 
To the feminine minds also come memo- 
ries: of girlhood days in the Maytime 
woods collecting wild flowers, memories 
coupled probably with amazement that 
the abundant pond life of these same 
woods had been utterly overlooked dur- 
ing the careless days of youth. 
Of course in these groups, the wild life 
of many pools must be concentrated into 
one, perhaps far beyond the capacity of 
the normal insect supply to support life. 
The boy who spent his morning collect- 
ing for his aquarium had, I am sure, to 
visit many such pools to secure even part 
of the complete series shown here — but 
there were no doubt many creatures 
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