its animals having been left there after the ice retreated for the 

 last time, cut off from their brethren to the far north by the 

 St. Lawrence valley and the escarpment of the Canadian Shield. 



To enter these woods, especially in early summer, is to step 

 into a world of long ago. Away from present cleared land, the 

 surface of the earth has never been desecrated by man since it 

 was released from the mile-thick icecap. It is a climax forest 

 par excellence, as any botanist can tell by examination not so 

 much of the trees, which are not, comparatively, of any great 

 variety, but by looking down upon the ferns, mosses, and above 

 all the funguses. I do not know of any comparative statistical 

 survey having been made of the fungi of Maine specifically for 

 comparison with those of any other region of this continent (or 

 any other), but to an ecologist, it is these plants that, in this 

 area, impress one above all others. Their species and forms seem 

 to be endless. They grow on all kinds of trees, alive, dying, or 

 dead, from their roots to their summits; they proliferate on all 

 fallen wood, on the earth itself, on the stems of bushes, and 

 even on stones. They spread their fleshy masses in all manner of 

 forms and in almost every color of the rainbow— purples, 

 magentas, bright blues, reds of every shade, oranges, jet-black, 

 yellows, and all manner of browns. There is even a bright green 

 species, an anomaly if ever there was one, since fungi do not 

 manufacture chlorophyll. The color in this case, however, is due 

 to commensal algae that grow in special pits on the surface of 

 the fungus. 



The matter of funguses has connotations of several kinds 

 other than the aesthetic. Although plants, these "things," like 

 animals, live exclusively on matter; they are called saprophytes, 

 and they play a most vital role in the whole economy of nature. 



Without them, the rest of the plant world would come to a dead 

 stop on land. It once used to be thought that the growing threads, 

 or mycelia, of funguses found infecting the roots and stems of 

 other plants indicated some sort of horrific parasitical infestation 

 or "disease." It is now appreciated that, without these, most of 

 the plants so "infected" would be unable to carry on their 

 essential life processes. Then again, moulds — which are only 

 funguses — were once also thought to be invariably unpleasant. 

 It is true that they are almost always engaged in destruction 

 through the process that we call "rotting," but we have now at 

 long last come to realize that this is a most essential procedure 

 in the great cycle of life and one upon which we are wholly 

 dependent for our food. If the funguses did not get to work and 

 break up all the dead things that fall to the earth, their lesser 

 brethren the bacteria would be unable to digest them, and we 

 would, eons ago, have been submerged under a stratum of 

 ammoniacal debris. 



ANIMAL LANDSCAPERS 



Here again, as in the other northern lands that we have visited, 

 there have been other special factors at work to rebuild a ravished 

 country. Beaver, for instance, did as much here as they did across 

 the wide swath of the center of the continent. Northeastern 

 Appalachia is a checkerboard of lakes. These are mostly glacial 

 in origin, due to the changing of watersheds, the damming of 

 valleys by moraines, and the gouging of gutters by the ice. 

 However, there has been time for the industrious beaver to alter 

 many of these into lush meadows, to drain others, and generally 



A beaver with a freshly cut stick for its winter food supply. After he has built dams to raise the 

 water, and constructed lodges, he anchors masses of food under the water for the winter. 



