18 THE PRIMEVAL FOREST. 



There were pines and thujas of every size ; the patriarchs 

 of 300 feet in height standing alone, or thickly-clustering 

 gTOups of young ones struggling for the vacant place of 

 some prostrate giant. The fallen trees lay heaped around, 

 so as often to rise on every side in barriers six or seven 

 feet high. Trunks of huge cedars, moss-grown and de- 

 cayed, lay half-buried in the ground on which others as 

 mighty had but recently fallen; trees still green and 

 vigorous, and only just blown doAvn, blocking the view 

 w4th the masses of earth still held in their matted roots ; 

 trunks dead, trunks rotten, trunks living ; trunks dry and 

 barkless, and trunks still moist and green with moss ; bare 

 trunks, and trunks throwing out innumerable boughs and 

 branches; trunks prostrate, reclining, horizontal, and 

 propped up at different angles ; timber of every size, in 

 every stage of growth and decay, in every possible posi- 

 tion, entangled in every possible combination. The swampy 

 ground was densely covered with American dog- wood ; and 

 elsewhere with thickets of the araba, a tough-stemmed 

 trailer, with leaves as large as those of the rhubarb plant, 

 and growing in many places as high as a man's shoulders. 

 Both stem and leaves are covered with sharp spines, which 

 pierce your clothes as you force your way through the 

 tangled growth, and make the legs and hands of the 

 pioneers scarlet from the inflammation of myriads of 

 punctures. 



ANIMAL LIFE IN THE FORESTS AND PRAIRIES. 



The preceding sketch, brief as it is, will have prepared 

 the reader to learn that North America is rich only in 



