EXPLORATIONS IN FLORIDA 21 



eter has made leaps from 30 to 89 degrees in 24 hours, cold, 

 warm, sandy, muddy, watery, all these varieties may be seen 

 in one day's travelling. . . . Game and fish, it is true, are 

 abundant ; but the body of valuable tillable land is too small to 

 enable the peninsula ever to become a rich state. 



u 



On January 6, 1832, the party started to visit a 

 famous spring near the sources of the St. John's River, 

 which was described in his third letter to Featherston- 

 haugh as well as in a later "Episode." 14 There his host, 

 Colonel Rees, who utilized the abundant flow from this 

 curious spring for grinding the whole of his sugar cane, 

 took them down the Spring Garden Creek to a series 

 of muddy lakes which emptied into the St. John's. The 

 mud on this occasion was the cause of great disappoint- 

 ment to the naturalist, for it made it impossible for him 

 to recover what he believed to represent a new species of 

 Ibis, which was shot in one of those bottomless pits. 

 "Being only a few yards distant from us," to quote from 

 Audubon's third letter, 15 "and quite near enough to 

 ascertain the extent of my loss, I submitted to lose a 

 fine pair of a new species, the which if I ever fall in 

 with it again, I shall call Tantalus fuscus." 



When they had reached the borders of Woodruff's 

 Lake, after noon, fatigued and hungry, he continued : 



We landed on a small island of a few acres, covered with a 

 grove of sour orange trees, intermixed with not a few live 

 oaks. The oranges were in great profusion on the trees every- 

 thing about us was calm and beautiful and motionless, as if 

 it had just come from the hand of the Creator. It would have 

 been a perfect Paradise for a poet, but I was not fit to be in 



14 See following Note; and "Spring Garden," Ornithological Biography 

 (Bibl. No. 2), vol. ii, p. 263. 



15 See Bibliography, No. 36; undated; published, loc. cit., vol. i, p. 529 

 (1832). 



