670 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
his favorite fields of study, and he is said to have early made himself 
familiar with all of the species of birds and plants found about his wil¬ 
derness home”( 5 ). 
Lake Koshkonong, 
“when reached, must fully have answered every expectation of the 
young naturalist. The lake, some eight or nine miles long and four in 
breadth, as I remember it, is but an expansion of iRock River, its sinuous 
shore line touching the bases of a hundred low hills covered with oaks or 
overrun with hazel, with many a fair interval of open grassy slope, or 
widespread lowland meadows. The larger estuaries, sheltered by neigh¬ 
boring groves, their still and shallow waters bordered with green fields of 
reed and wild rice, were twice in each year the resort of great flocks of 
wild geese, pelicans, and swans, and indeed of all the tribes of water fowl 
and wading birds, not excepting many that are usually maritime only. 
And the wooded hills and open meadow lands were equally the home of 
the whole concourse of spring and summer song-birds, of grouse, and 
pheasant, and other larger wild fowl. While the region remained almost 
unsettled, and while wild birds so abounded, an ornithologist might have 
been pardoned had he forgotten more or less of his botany. Rut this one 
did not. So ardent a lover as he was of all things beautiful in nature, 
could not but have been enraptured with the floral splendors of wild wood¬ 
lands and unbroken prairie as they must have appeared to his eye in 
that early day. Even as late as 1858, when I first saw that land, after 
multiplied settlements had sprung up everywhere, and the prairies had 
been converted into fields of waving grain, and the open woods turned 
over to the destructive teeth and hoofs of the domestic flocks and herds, 
there still remained in many a protected spot charming traces of the 
primeval floral wealth, in pink and azure banks of phlox and Pole- 
monium, violets, Dentarias and Dielytras, lupines, wild peas, and vetches; 
extensive yellow beds of Caltha and Ranuculus; meadow patches of scarlet 
and yellow Castilleias; fence corners filled with grassy-leaved Hypoxis, 
Tradescantia, Camassia, and Zygadenus; hazel borders all undergrown 
with Erythroniums, Trilliums, Orchis, and nodding wood anemone; thick¬ 
ets of wild rose and shad bush, wild plums and cherries; groves of white- 
barked aspen and fragrant, rosy-blooming crabapple. 
“The building site which Mr. Kumlien chose at first, and whereon he 
dwelt to the end of his life, was, for the work and the pleasure of a poet- 
naturalist—and such was he—admirably selected; lying back from Lake 
Koshkonong, to the northward, upon a pleasant elevation, forth from 
which one looked down across a mile or more of moist meadow, to the 
shores of the lake. A considerable extent of oak woods enclosed the 
place northward and westward; to the eastward lay a stretch of open, 
undulating arable land, suitable for farming purposes. The pristine quiet 
and seclusion of the place was always retained; for when other settlers 
had taken possession of all the country round about, and regular public 
roads had been laid out, the naturalist’s home was left about equally 
distant from every public highway; so that one reached the place by 
