and the town, are usually tangled thickets of underbrush and 
swamp-land trees, which at certain seasons of the year are gay 
with multitudes of flowers and vocal with the songs of a great 
variety of birds. The general aspect of the flora of the sandy 
bluffs is quite unusual for Illinois, many plants occurring there 
abundantly which are rarely seen in ordinary situations. The 
bottom-lands become covered in late summer and autumn with 
an immense growth of composite plants, setting the intervals 
and recesses of the forest ablaze with yellows, purples, and 
reds, and loading the air with the heavy odor of the upland 
Eupatorium. 
This forest itself, beginning at the water’s edge with a bil¬ 
lowy belt of pale green willows (Plates IX. and XIII.), is an 
untamed tract of primitive wilderness, differing from that 
through which the Indian hunted his prey only by the absence 
of the small percentage of its growth which had a commercial 
value. Subject to periodical overflow, it has not even been 
fenced. Elms and pecans and sycamores tower overhead or 
slowly moulder where they fall, and vines and creepers clamber 
over the underbrush in a growth like that of a semi-tropical 
jungle (Plate XX.). The shallow lakes and swamps are glori¬ 
ous in their season with the American lotus and the white water- 
lily, the former sometimes growing in tracts of a hundred acres 
or more, over which its gigantic peltate leaves, borne on tall 
slender stems, flash in the sun as they bend to the summer wind. 
In July and August many of the lakes are nearly filled with 
submerged vegetation, and in the latter part of the season a 
film of the duckweeds forms along the shore and floats in large 
patches down the sluggish current of the stream. Water-fowl 
abound at the period of their migrations, and fish lie on the 
shallows, basking in the summer sun in numbers such that 
dozens may he seen at a time as one floats along in a boat. 
The microscopic life of the water is equally varied and 
abundant, a measurement of the quantity present in a cubic 
meter of water showing that with a single reported exception* 
it is at certain times far in excess of the amount recorded for 
any other situation in the world. The variety of species present 
is equally remarkable. The list of those occurring in a single 
cubic meter of water from the river at Havana in the month of 
* Dobersdorfer See, Holstein. 
