The Natural History of Chautauqua 



waste areas. We will find it among the tilled fields, where 

 their gentle slopes run together, forming a depression that is 

 poorly drained. In such places the crops that we know how 

 to raise on farms will not thrive. There is too much water. 

 The soil is soft underfoot. Though black with humus, and en- 

 riched with washings from surrounding slopes, it is spur, and 

 unavailable to our field crops. 



" It has its own crops, and they are never-failing. It is a 

 place of rushes and sedges, rather than of grasses. It is a 

 place of abundant flowers the whole season through, from the 

 cowslips and cresses of spring to the asters and gentians of 

 autumn. It is a place where crawfish sink their wells, a place 

 where rabbits hide, and where song-birds build their nests, a 

 place where the meadow-mice and shrews spread a network of 

 runways over the ground, in short a place where rich soil and 

 abundant light and moisture support a dense population, among 

 which the struggle for existence is keen. 



" No two swales are alike in the character of their plant 

 population. But all agree in their meadowlike appearance, in 

 being made up of patches of rather uniform character, where 

 uniform conditions prevail, and in having each of these areas 

 dominated by one or two species of plants, with a number of 

 lesser plants as * fillers ' in its midst, and a great variety of mis- 

 cellaneous plants growing about its edge." 



Needham's Natural History of the Farm. 



84 



