"131 settlers— old and new 



ing a mere seventy-five years into Oklahoma, Louisiana 

 and even southern Arkansas. Though it is not, I am sorry 

 to say, native here — sorry because I should like to know 

 better a creature who is certainly not very smart but has 

 many quaint habits, including the invariable habit of giv- 

 ing birth to its young in one or two sets of identical quad- 

 ruplets. But even to know about the spread of the coati 

 and the armadillo makes it easier to believe that tapirs 

 and saber-toothed tigers really did once roam about what 

 is now New York State. 



"The buckeye," as Thoreau once oracularly declaimed, 

 "does not grow in New England." But who knows? Some 

 day it may. It was Thoreau also who confessed that, "I had 

 no idea there was so much going on in Heywood's 

 meadow.'' So there was and so there is in every meadow, 

 and plain and mountain: things accomplished in a day, 

 and others which require thousands of years before even 

 their intention becomes apparent. 



To say that something is as sohd as the ground under 

 one's feet is not to say much: that ground may be lifted 

 miles into the air. Forests and grasslands and deserts flow 

 like rivers. Stability, dominance and security are short- 

 term words. We haven't a long enough view really to 

 know what is even now in the process of happening to our 

 earth or its populations, or what fateful changes are taking 

 place — changes which may finally add up to something 

 quite as tremendous as those which made the ice ages, or 

 may even mark the end of a long geological epoch like the 

 Paleozoic or the Mesozoic. Few stop to think what a 

 small change in rainfall or a shift in a flora may mean 

 even for their children or grandchildren. Like the city 



