250 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 15, 1908. 
miles of genuine prairies on this island. 
The prairies are situated mostly in the cen¬ 
tral portion of Nassau county, in all the three 
townships of the county—Hempstead, North 
Hempstead and Oyster Bay—and have long been 
known to people living near by as the Hemp¬ 
stead Plains. These thousands of treeless acres, 
covered with grasses and herbs and dotted with 
a few bushes, of course attracted the attention 
of the early settlers of Hempstead in the seven¬ 
teenth century, and have been used more or less 
for grazing and other purposes ever since. But 
by the time geographies came to be written in 
this country these prairies were an old story 
to the inhabitants, few of whom ever realized 
that there was no other prairie within several 
hundred miles, so not many accounts of this 
remarkable area have ever found their way into 
print. 
Almost by accident I “stumbled across” the 
Hempstead Plains one day last summer and was 
surprised to find that on thousands of acres the 
flora is still practically all of native species, which 
is pretty good evidence to the botanist that such 
land has never been cleared or plowed up. This 
state of affairs is rather remarkable considering 
that Nassau county now has about 300 inhabi¬ 
tants to the square mile, and is all within the 
radius in which it is profitable to haul farm 
products to New York by wagon. The parts 
of the prairie which are under cultivation seem 
to produce well, but the native sod is so tough 
and the subsoil so dry and porous that it is not 
a very easy matter to put the land in shape for 
tillage. Besides, considerable areas are owned 
or leased by wealthy persons and kept open for 
the sake of fox hunting and other equestrian 
sports, and thus protected from the encroach¬ 
ments of real estate developments. 
The prairie originally extended about as far 
west as Floral Park, but farms and villages 
have encroached on it so that now only about 
one-fifth of it remains in an approximately 
natural condition, and even that bids fair to 
be obliterated before the end of the present 
century by the expansion of New York city. 
The undisturbed prairies now center about 
Hicksville (twenty-five miles from New York), 
from which village one can walk about ten 
miles in almost any direction and find essen¬ 
tially the same vegetation that the earliest white 
settlers saw. 
Like the Western prairies the Hempstead 
Plains are very nearly level. They are crossed 
from north to south by a few broad shallow 
valleys, all of which are dry except the one in 
which East Meadow Brook has its source, about 
three miles east of Garden City. The soil is 
a very fine-grained dark brown loam, under¬ 
laid at a depth of a foot or two by a great 
thickness of coarse sand and gravel. 
The natural vegetation averages about two 
feet tall, covers the ground pretty closely, and 
consists of over fifty species of plants, some 
of which are rarely found elsewhere, as a 
favored few among botanists know. Likewise 
several birds which frequent this area are sel¬ 
dom seen in other parts of the island. The ac¬ 
companying picture, taken last fall, will give 
an excellent idea of the natural or primeval 
appearance of the prairies. 
The cause of the treelessness of this large 
area is as much of a mystery as it always has 
been in the case of the better known Western 
prairies, which have puzzled scientists for nearly ] 
a century. It is of course difficult for trees to 
invade an area already thickly clothed with 
grass vegetation on account of fire, grazing, 
rapid evaporation, scarcity of humus, etc., but 
this does not explain how the grasses got ahead 
of the trees in the beginning. 
August Night. 
O glorious summer night! 
To think that I 
Should lose myself in stupid sleep, 
When vigil kept with thee would be so sweet! 
A thousand winged things, 
In bush and tangled grass, 
Do shrill, and harp, and sing continually; 
And with their din rejoice my listening ear. 
The Lady Moon shines high 
From far, mysterious place, the cool night air 
Creeps in deliciously. 
Ah me! That all this glory, 
All this rapturous bliss, so soon must pass! 
—Mary Wood du Bois. 
Some Habits of the Horned Toad. 
Everyone who has traveled over the high dry 
plains is familiar with the horned toad—so 
called—a spiny lizard which is found in suit¬ 
able localities from British Columbia on the 
north to Mexico on the south. It is a queer 
little beast, short-legged, short-tailed and spiny 
to the last degree. Of course it is not in any 
sense a toad, but is a true lizard. 
Horned toads are slow of foot and the spiny 
horns which cover them seem to be their only 
defense. Prof. Cope gives an example of a 
dead rattlesnake found with the horns of one 
of these lizards which it had swallowed pene¬ 
trating the neck through the upper skin, one 
on each side of the spine. John K. Strecker, 
Jr., records another case where the capture of 
a horned lizard was fatal to the animal that had 
eaten it. He says: “Some years ago a friend 
brought me a dead hawk ( Butco lineatus alleni) 
that he had found lying out on the prairie west 
of the city (Waco). It was greatly emaciated 
and there was considerable dry blood on the 
feathers of the throat and breast. On skinning 
it I found no shot wounds, but when I made 
a careful examination of the carcass I found 
that it had swallowed two horned lizards, and 
that one of the occipital horns of one of these 
had penetrated the bird’s trachea.” 
Though the horned toad is slow of foot, and 
so unable to run away, it is yet likely to escape 
the observation of its foes through its protec¬ 
tive adaptation to its surroundings, for in the 
way in which they “imitate” the color of the 
ground on which they live, they are quite won¬ 
derful. On the red earth of certain portions 
of the dry West they are red and generally they 
simulate in color the ground on which they 
live, while the lighter markings resemble the 
mosses and lichens of the stones among which 
they live. In a case mentioned by Dr. Stejneger 
a specimen collected by Dr. Merriam in the 
black lava belt of the San Francisco Mountain, 
the ground color of the animal’s upper side was 
black, and even the gloss of the black lava was 
imitated. 
The horned toad is an inoffensive animal and 
makes rather an agreeable pet. If frightened 
it will sometimes open its mouth as if to bite, 
but it is so feeble a creature and its teeth so 
weak and small that it accomplishes nothing in 
this way. Sometimes it raises itself to the full 
height of its legs, puffs out its body and emits 
a feeble hiss. If in any way annoyed it lowers 
its head, throwing its horns forward, thus pre¬ 
senting its spiny and rough surface to attack. 
At the same time the lowering of the head is 
absurdly suggestive of a charging bull. The 
attitude, however, is apparently taken for the 
same reason that causes a porcupine to lower 
its head and erect its spine when threatened. 
Most people who have had much to do with 
horned toads believe that they are viviparous, 
although as long ago as 1898 Prof. Cope wrote 
that in confinement these animals frequently lay 
eggs. On the other hand we have frequently 
had them in confinement where they produced 
living young, and we recall one occasion in the 
field, when having captured a horned toad, we 
put it in a large old fashioned tin tobacco box 
to carry to camp, to be put in spirits, and when 
we opened the box we found not only our cap¬ 
tive, but twelve tiny young ones. 
John K. Strecker, Jr., of Waco, Tex., has 
recently published in the Proceedings of the 
Biological Society of Washington some notes on 
the breeding habit of the horned toad ( Phryno- 
soma cornutum) and other Texas lizards. He 
points out that most people believe these lizards 
to be viviparous and then goes on to say: 
“P. cornutum is the only species whose habits 
I have had an opportunity to study thoroughly, 
and since the publication of my brief notes on 
this lizard I have received letters from a num¬ 
ber of naturalists who express their surprise to 
learn of its egg laying habit. The two sets of 
eggs mentioned in my notes were described 
simply to show the difference in the habits of 
the animal under different circumstances. In 
