THURE KUMLIEN. i 255 
enclosed the place northward and westward; to the eastward 
lay a stretch of open undulating arable land, suitable for 
farming purposes. The pristine quiet and seclusion of the 
place was always retained ; for, when other settlers had taken 
possession of all the country round about, and regular public 
roads had been laid out, the naturalist’s home was left about ` 
equally distant from every public highway; so that one 
reached the place by either of two by-roads, closed by gates, 
and leading circuitously about among the woods. 
Lake Koshkonong proved not to be the only naturalists’ 
paradise in that immediate region. Some two miles to the 
eastward lay, deep down among the wooded hills, a chain of 
three lesser lakes. Along the bluffs above these lakes there 
flowered in earliest spring, almost as soon as the ice had 
melted, such rarities as Anemone patens, Ranunculus rhom- 
boideus, Draba Caroliniana and Arabis lyrata, plants not 
then to have been found in Wisconsin except on the bleak 
summits of such hills; and they are probably all now extinct 
even there. In the reedy margins of the smaller lakes there 
grew, in summer time, such interesting aquatics as Pontederia 
cordata and Brasenia, and also every kind of water lily 
indigenous to the northern states; Castalia tuberosa and 
Nelumbo lutea both in rich abundance. 
Another point, altogether unique in botanical interest, for 
that part of the country, was a little tract of tamarack marsh 
which occupied a deep abrupt depression amid the heavier 
forest some two miles distant northward from the dwelling. 
Singularly isolated from its kindred tracts so frequent and 
extensive in more northerly portions of the State, this little 
swamp of not more than ten acres contributed immensely to 
the diversity of the flora of the region as a whole. The 
prairies, and the timbered uplands which bound them, have 
no coniferous trees or shrubs, no erieaceous plants, almost no 
orchids. In the marsh, a single species of deciduous conifer, 
Larix Americana, was the only tree, but formed almost every- 
where a forest well nigh impenetrable; the older branches 
draped with lichens such as one did not meet with in other 
