that younger trees have not been able since then to persist in numbers. 

 If this is the case, when the stand opens up again the normal number of 

 smaller trees will become established and the forest is in no danger of 

 destruction through lack of regeneration. In support of this latter as- 

 sumption is the fact that the stand as a whole seems vigorous and the 

 crown canopy dense, and here the condition of relatively few small trees 

 prevails ; but along a strip through the center of the stand where there 

 was formerly a highway, seedlings and small trees have come in until the 

 old road is now choked with them. 



Perhaps the most interesting fact brought out in the tabulation is 

 the relative abundance of the species which make up the stand. There 

 are actually almost as many hard maple trees present — 49% — as all other 

 species combined, but this preponderance of maple is only found in the 

 smaller-diameter classes. If we use 13 inches, the diameter of the aver- 

 age tree of the stand, as an arbitrary dividing line, maple composes 62% 

 of the total number of trees from 3" to 13" inclusive while it makes up 

 but IT'/r of the total number of trees of 14 inches and up. Thus maple 

 is assured a heavy representation in this forest a hundred years hence 

 merely by the great numbers of young trees now present, but its dominant 

 place in this future stand is doubly assured because maple is the most 

 tolerant tree growing in this region. It can grow where shade is too 

 dense for any of its neighbors, and when a forest becomes dominantly of 

 hard maple and is undisturbed by cyclone, grazing, fire, or heavy cutting 

 — all accidental forces which suddenly destroy the adjustment of a forest 

 to its environment — it remains hard maple. This woods is on the point 

 of reaching the final state of its evolution or climax type for the region. 

 As a forest it has been on the road to this maple type for hundreds and 

 probably thousands of years, during which the prairie has given place 

 to elm, hackberry, soft maple, then oaks and hickories, and now hard 

 maple. 



This is but a tiny division in the great sequence of changes of the 

 plants of this region. Ages ago palms and figs flourished in these lati- 

 tudes ; waves of magnolias, sequoia, sassafras, and gums were succeeded 

 by spruce and balsam as the temperatures dropped preceding the ice 

 age. When the ice sheets finally receded, these gently undulating prairies 

 were almost immediately clothed by grasses, but the forests gained the 

 slopes and stream bottoms, and from this vantage they were gradually 

 extending their areas. Thus the "Big Woods" might in time have covered 

 a great area. Our civilization has not been here a century when there 

 remains of the "Big Woods" nothing suggestive of their sturdy trees 

 but this 56 acres. There are oaks and maples here which in the first of 

 their three centuries of existence have doubtless sheltered elk and bison, 

 have stood while the bison, the elk, the Indian, and the turkey vanished 

 before our race, and today are as unusual in Illinois as would be these 

 vanished forms if they were to return. Brownfield Woods can be de- 

 stroyed in about three months as a sawmill operation, but there would 

 not be seen another such forest in Champaign county in 300 years if we 

 started to build it today. 



