254 PITTONIA. 
neighboring groves, their still and shallow waters bordered 
with green fields of reed and wild rice, were twice in each 
year the resort of great flocks of wild geese, pelicans and 
swans, and indeed of all the tribes of water fowl and wading 
birds, not excepting many that are usually maritime only. 
And the wooded hills and open meadow lands were equally 
. the home of the whole concourse of spring and summer song- 
birds, of grouse and pheasant and. other larger wild fowl. 
While the region remained almost unsettled, and while wild 
birds so abounded, an ornithologist might have been pardoned 
had he forgotten more or less of his botany. But this one 
did not. So ardent a lover as he was of all things beautiful 
in nature, could not but have been enraptured with the floral 
splendors of wild woodland and unbroken prairie as they must 
have appeared to his eye in that early day. Even as late as 
1858, when I first saw that land, after multiplied settlements 
had sprung up everywhere, and the prairies had been con- 
verted into fields of waving grain, and the open woods turned 
over to the destructive teeth and hoofs of the domestie flocks 
and herds, there still remained in many a protected spot 
charming traces of the primeval floral wealth, in pink and . 
azure banks of phlox and polemonium, violets, dentarias and 
dielytras, lupines, wild peas and vetches; extensive yellow 
beds of caltha and ranunculus; meadow patches of scarlet 
and yellow castilleias ; fence corners filled with grassy-leaved 
hypoxis, tradescantia, camassia and zygadenus ; hazel borders 
all undergrown with erythroniums, triliums, orchis and 
nodding wood anemone ; thickets or wild rose and shad bush, 
wild plums and cherries; groves of white-barked aspen and 
fragrant rosy-blooming erab apple. 
The building site which Mr. Kumlien chose at the first, 
and whereon he dwelt to the end of his life, was, for the work 
and the pleasure of a poet naturalist—and such was he—admi- 
rably selected ; lying back from Lake Koshkonong, to the 
northward, upon a pleasant elevation, forth from which one 
looked down across a mile or more of moist meadow, to the 
shores of the lake. A considerable extent of oak woods 
