ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY <j 



diameter across the top of the stump. Many of the- other trees (mostly 

 American elms) were nearly if not quite as tall. The ten-year old tree 

 (also a "sycamore") measured fifty-one feet two inches in height and 

 twelve inches across the stump. Had it not been for two consecutive 

 seasons of severe drought the dimensions would have been greater, for those 

 two years (1913 and 1914) were easily identified by the very narrow rings 

 representing their growth. Another sycamore tree felled in May, 1908, 

 and known to be nineteen years old (confirmed by the rings of growth) was 

 seventy-two and a half feet in length and eighteen and a half inches across 

 the stump. All these trees grew in deep and moist but not very rich soil, 

 in bottom-land. A fourteen year old tree of the same Species growing on 

 dry. poor upland, also cut in May, 1908, measured only forty feet in length 

 and nine inches in diameter — a little less than the eight-year-old bottom- 

 land tree. 



I know of another tract of woodland in this (Richland) county which is 

 also of much interest. This is a ten-acre tract along Gentry Creek. A 

 remarkable feature of this woods consists in the fact that while oaks of 

 different species are usually the predominant trees, there are here only four 

 kinds of oak in a total of forty species, and two of these are represented 

 by a single specimen each, while only one of the four is at all common. 

 On the other hand all the species of elms growing north of Mason and 

 Dixon's Line are represented, including the southern red elm (Ulmus 

 serotina) and the winged elm (U. alata), and there are two hackberries 

 (Celtis crassifolia and C. mississippiensis) . This bit of forest is less than 

 seventy-five years old, for in 1885, while taking some photographs there, 

 a relative who was present told me that just forty years before he had 



Photographed by Robert Ridgway. 



This is the "wood-lot" of a farm on Gentry Creek, Richland County. Illinois (Nov. 14, 

 1918.) Here are four species of elms in one group, Ulmus fulva, U. thoniasi (?) U. serotina, 

 and U. americana. 



