Lake Maxinkuckee, Physical and Biological Survey 131 



nut oak or sweet oak (Q. muhlenbergii) , with immense fruitful 

 groves of papaw, scattered spice brush, and for herbage all the 

 common plants that grow in rich woods mould, hepaticas, anem- 

 ones, pepper-and-salt, in that great variety which delights the 

 flower lover and botanist. Some notion of the variety produced in 

 this region may be obtained from the remark, probably not exag- 

 gerated, of a man who was hauling wood from this region and who 

 said he had 27 species of wood in one cord. 



The gullies have a rich, springy soil usually black and in places 

 more or less miry. On their sides grow luxuriant but tender 

 moisture-loving ferns, while in the bottoms flourish patches of 

 skunk cabbage, large flowered asters of various sorts, lizard's-tail 

 and the like. 



Farrar's woods, Walley's woods and Zechiel's woods along the 

 south and southwest shores of the lake are mostly rather flat, sandy 

 but moist woods, in general without salient characters enough to be 

 characterized briefly except that all contain woodland ponds, and 

 the two latter are characterized by having plentiful low heaths such 

 as Gaylussacia baccata, checkerberry, false beech-drops, etc., scat- 

 tered through them. Holton's woods near Walley's contain the 

 only clump of river birch in the region, and Walley's woods the only 

 clump of Princess pine, Chimaphila umbellata. 



The ivoodland ponds are so various that it would prove weari- 

 some to describe them in detail. Those of Farrar's woods are shal- 

 low, the bottoms thickly covered with leaves, the water, which is 

 present only during the wet season of the year, is usually of a tea 

 color. The plants are few. A few trees of the various-leaved cot- 

 tonwood, Populus heterophylla, Cephalanthus bushes, their bases 

 skirted with mosses and liverworts, a few herbaceous species re- 

 markable for their adaptability and variability of form, the water- 

 parsnip, yellow water-crowfoot and the curious Riccia lutescens 

 which floats about on the surface like green butterflies and repro- 

 duces by a division into almost exactly equal parts. All these 

 herbaceous plants flourish, but assume entirely different forms dur- 

 ing the dry season. For their fauna they have numerous frogs, 

 speckled and Blanding's tortoises, both almost entirely absent from 

 the lake, the slender-pincered crawfish Cambarus blandingi acutus, 

 not found in the lake, and a remarkable Sphserium which spends 

 half its life, the dry season, among the moist leaves in a state ap- 

 proaching suspended animation. They, along with other shallow 

 pools, contain the fairy shrimp and doubtless various Entomostraca 

 of unusual habits and characters. Farther down toward Walley's 



