382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



brown and gray in streaks and blotches — is one of the most conspicuous 

 features about the grounds of many old homesteads. 



V. 



Adventurous men who wandered beyond the Appalachian Moun- 

 tains into the Ohio country found, west of the Wabash Kiver, the 

 forest giving place to open grassland or " prairies." These were great 

 meadows with little or no tree growth, save along the bottomlands of 

 rivers. The edge of the broad-leaved forest along this prairie border 

 thinned out into those scattered, open woods known to the early pio- 

 neers as " oak openings." It may have been that this prairie country 

 was at one time more extensively wooded and its later deforested condi- 

 tion a result of the persistent burning of the undergrowth by the hunt- 

 ing tribes of Indians to increase the pasture area for the vast herds of 

 bison that roamed over the grass country of the Mississippi Basin. 

 The late Professor Shaler advanced this view some years ago, stating 

 that it was his belief that had the discovery of the continent been de- 

 layed for another five centuries much of the original forest to the east 

 would probably have been burnt off in this way and the land changed 

 into a prairie country. This burning of the woods seems to have been 

 a wide-spread custom in aboriginal times. William Wood, in his 

 " New England's Prospects," speaks of it as follows : 



For the Indians burning it [the ground] to suppresse the Underwood, 

 which else would grow all over the Countrey, the Snow falling not long after, 

 keepes the ground warme, and with his melting conveighs the ashes into the 

 pores of the earth, which doth fatten it. 



Mention is also made of this custom by numerous writers at a later 

 period. Eichard Smith, 2 of Burlington, New Jersey, who made a sur- 

 vey about the headwaters of the Susquehanna and the Delaware, in the 

 spring of 1769, speaks of the appearance of these burnt tracts, and I 

 have been told on reliable authority that in the lower Delaware region 

 the Indians burned the tops and slopes of the hills, leaving the land 

 along the river bottoms untouched. 



The clearing of land in the progress of settlement had the same 

 effect as the burning off of the forest — it virtually converted a wide 

 area of primitive forest-covered country into prairie, though inter- 

 spersed with tracts of woodland. Our pastures are in reality prairies 

 so. far, at least, as their faunal and floral features are concerned. This 

 fact suggests a very interesting question. When the country was almost 

 entirely forest-covered, as in the period before settlement, what was the 

 manner of life of such plants and animals as now inhabit our fields and 

 meadow pastures? Were they originally forest-dwellers which have 

 altered their habits to meet the new conditions, or are they migrants 

 from the western prairie country ? In the case of certain birds I think 

 that the last view embodies what has actually taken place. A large 



2 " Journal of Eichard Smith," edited by F. W. Halsey. 



