68 PRAIRIE FIRES. 
very beautiful, low liliaceous plant with grassy foliage and crocus- 
like flowers, which now begins to whiten the hill-sides nearest the 
plains. Its name is Calochortus venustus, and it deserves its name, 
which, equally for the species and the genus, refers to its beauty. 
PRAIRIE FIRES. 
BY DR. C. A. WHITE. 
——+9-+—__ 
Every dweller in the great interior region of North America, is 
more or less familiar with prairie fires, or rather, they have often 
at nightfall seen their lurid light in the distant horizon, or by day 
their huge volumes of smoke rising and blending with the clouds, 
and many are even familiar with the consuming march of the 
flames themselves. Strangers visiting these regions, between Oc- 
tober and May, are often alarmed at the first sight of these illumi- 
nations, being impressed with the belief that they emanate from 
urning buildings. 
' - Usually, these fires are harmless, but there is always danger that 
they will cause destruction of property, and even of life, and the 
settler in sparsely inhabited districts watches with anxiety until 
the almost inevitable annual scourge has swept all the uncultivated 
prairie in his neighborhood. The greater part of the combustible 
materiał which feeds these fires is grass, the remainder being the 
dried remains of those annual plants so well described by Mr. J. 
A. Allen, in the Naturauisr for December, 1870. These together 
cover the ground every season, for the fires of one year do not at 
‘all impair or prevent their abundant growth the next. Stringent 
laws are enacted in all the prairie states, against the setting of fires 
to the prairies, yet each year’s growth of grass upon at least the 
larger ones, is somehow almost invariably burnt. The progress of 
the fire is usually slow, and is often arrested by a few furrows 
plowed around the field for that purpose, by small rills or even by 
a slightly beaten road. But when the wind is high upon the great 
prairies, the case is very different. Then nothing can withstand the 
-fury of the fire, and it often runs an unchecked course of more 
than a hundred miles, sometimes leaping rivers of more than 4 
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