STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 



ducing a few of the lovely, graceful things to the notice of 

 my readers. And if my remarks should prove rather desul- 

 tory in their range from prairie to forest, and from field to 

 lake or to swampy bank of creek or marsh, I beg my friends 

 to bear with me a little while. 



Drooping gracefully in wide branching panicles, we find 

 on our wild plains a soft pale-flowered grass, known by the 

 Indians as Deer-grass, Sorghum nutans (Gray), in the herb- 

 age of which the deer found (for it is a thing of the past) 

 both food and shelter. The husk or glumes of this beautiful 

 grass are hairy or minutely silky, which gives a peculiar 

 soft grayish tint to the bending pedicels of the pale spikelets. 

 The culm is from three to four feet high, the leaves hairy at 

 the margins. 



Another grass, Andropogon furcatus ( Muhl. ) , more showy 

 but not so graceful, being more upright in its habit of 

 growth, differs very much from the above. This grass 

 is tall, jointed, stiff er in the stem; leaves of a brighter 

 green; heads of flowers spiked, but also branching; glumes 

 of a rich red-brown, made more conspicuous by the bright 

 golden yellow anthers. This grass is also a plain grass, and 

 is known by the same familiar name as the former; the 

 Indians say, " Yes, both deergrass ; deer like that, too." It 

 was to increase the growth of this grass that the Indians, at 

 intervals of time, set fire to the Eice Lake plains on the 

 high plateau of land to the eastward, where there was a 

 great feeding ground for the deer and their fawns. For 

 many years this tract of land was covered with oak brush, 

 with only a few old trees that had escaped being injured by 

 the fire. Now, indeed, we have noble oaks of many species, 

 fine branching, well developed trees of white, black, red, 

 scarlet, and overcup oaks, that adorn the plains and form 

 avenues of the concessions and sidelines, most ornamental 



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