854 Causes of Forest Rotation. [October, 
had exercised polite forbearance and kept out of the way ; would 
there not have been founded a dense oak forest ? 
In the fall of 1876 and winter and spring of 1877, I was sur- 
veying a line of railroad in Southern Illinois. About five miles 
west of Benton, the county seat of Franklin county, the line of 
survey cut across peninsulas of prairie extending into the timber, 
and likewise peninsulas of timber extending into the prairie. 
These are called arms of prairie and points of timber. The old 
timber followed up the small streams into the prairie. The buf- 
falo and deer, in past time, kept the grass eaten and tramped 
down along the water-courses where they drank, thus greatly 
reducing if not entirely preventing the destructive prairie fires 
from consuming the young trees; hence the points of timber fol- 
lowing up the streams. In the locality I am describing the tim 
ber was almost exclusively white oak. After the settlers stopped 
the prairie fires, these points of timber began to widen and crowd 
on the prairie, and in the last forty to fifty years the young oaks 
had extended out about a half mile from the old timber, and 
they ranged in height from about fifty feet next to the old trees, 
to the infants just emerging from the ground out at the frontier. 
At that frontier I saw oaks, not over four feet high, bearing 
acorns—keeping the seed right up to the front. In Indiana, 
where it is unnecessary for trees to perform the parent functions 
so young, I never saw a white oak less than thirty feet high bear 
acorns, and not then among older oaks. 
In the second or terrace-bottoms of the Wabash river, when 
the whites first settled them, they found most of them to be 
prairie, grown up in weeds, the prairie grass had not yet gpt pos: 
session of the ground except in patches. They found also scat- 
tering and stunted white oaks, black oaks (Quercus mg" a) and 
jack oaks (Quercus ferruginea). The Indians had, for an T 
known time, burned the prairie weeds and grass, which not a 
killed the infant trees but greatly injured the old ones, especially 
te on the south side, where to-day, notwithstanding seventy ye 
— o protection from fires, they still show the scars, though pe 
a ally healed over, and on their sawed-off stumps can be read the q 
_ true history of their lives. After the prairie fires were effectually 
_ stopped, a dense growth of young trees sprang up, and eee 
they are fifty to seventy-feet high, vigorous and thrifty. me 
r I had occasion to hunt for piling timber in a grove of 
i $ 
sci Gl a pm pile R E EASE E eee MOE EEE E SS 
