STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 
ducing a few of the lovely, graceful things to the notice of 
my readers. And if my remarks should prove rather desul- 
tory in their range from prairie to forest, and from field to 
lake or to swampy bank of creek or marsh, I beg my friends 
to bear with me a little while. 
Drooping gracefully in wide branching panicles, we find 
on our wild plains a soft pale-flowered grass, known by the 
Indians as Deer-grass, Sorghum nutans (Gray), in the herb- 
age of which the deer found (for it is a thing of the past) 
both food and shelter. The husk or glumes of this beautiful 
grass are hairy or minutely silky, which gives a peculiar 
soft grayish tint to the bending pedicels of the pale spikelets. 
The culm is from three to four feet high, the leaves hairy at 
the margins. 
Another grass, Andropogon furcatus (Muhbl.), more showy 
but not so graceful, being more upright in its habit of 
growth, differs very much from the above. This grass 
is tall, jointed, stiffer in the stem; leaves of a brighter 
green; heads of flowers spiked, but also branching; glumes 
of a rich red-brown, made more conspicuous by the bright 
golden yellow anthers. This grass is also a plain grass, and 
is known by the same familiar name as the former; the 
Indians say, “ Yes, both deergrass; deer like that, too.” It 
was to increase the growth of this grass that the Indians, at 
intervals of time, set fire to the Rice Lake plains on the 
high plateau of land to the eastward, where there was a 
great feeding ground for the deer and their fawns. For 
many years this tract of land was covered with oak brush, 
with only a few old trees that had escaped being injured by 
the fire. Now, indeed, we have noble oaks of many species, 
fine branching, well developed trees of white, black, red, 
scarlet, and overcup oaks, that adorn the plains and form 
avenues of the concessions and sidelines, most ornamental 
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