EXPLORATIONS IN FLORIDA 21 



eter has made leaps from SO to 89 degrees in 24 hours, cold, 

 warm, sandy, muddy, watery, — all these varieties may be seen 

 in one day's travelling. . . . Game and fish, it is true, are 

 abundant ; but the body of valuable tillable land is too small to 

 enable the peninsula ever to become a rich state. 



On January 6, 1832, the party started to visit a 

 famous spring near the sources of the St. John's River, 

 which was described in his third letter to Featherston- 

 haugh as well as in a later "Episode." ^* There his host, 

 Colonel Rees, who utilized the abundant flow from this 

 curious spring for grinding the whole of his sugar cane, 

 took them down the Spring Garden Creek to a series 

 of muddy lakes which emptied into the St. John's. The 

 mud on this occasion was the cause of great disappoint- 

 ment to the naturalist, for it made it impossible for him 

 to recover what he believed to represent a new species of 

 Ibis, which was shot in one of those bottomless pits. 

 "Being only a few yards distant from us," to quote from 

 Audubon's third letter," "and quite near enough to 

 ascertain the extent of my loss, I submitted to lose a 

 fine pair of a new species, the which if I ever fall in 

 with it again, I shall call Tantalus fuscus." 



When they had reached the borders of Woodruff's 

 Lake, after noon, fatigued and hungry, he continued : 



We landed on a small island of a few acres, covered with a 

 grove of sour orange trees, intermixed with not a few live 

 oaks. The oranges were in great profusion on the trees — every- 

 thing about us was calm and beautiful and motionless, as if 

 it had just come from the hand of the Creator. It would have 

 been a perfect Paradise for a poet, but I was not fit to be in 



"See following Note; and "Spring Garden," Ornithological Biography 

 (Bibl. No. 2), vol. ii, p. 263. 



"See Bibliography, No. 36; undated; published, loc. cit., vol. i, p. 629 

 (1832). 



