Spencer Trotter

“ It is a significant fact that most of the native wild flowers of our Atlantic region, excepting those that grow along the river banks and in wet meadows, are woodland species. We go to the woods to find our early spring flowers—hepatica, bloodroot, the anemones, the mayflower, dogstooth violet, saxifrage, bluets and spring-beauty. These species probably acquired the habit of vernal blooming as a necessity imposed by their forest life—unfolding their blossoms in the sunshine of bare woods before the leafage cast its heavy shade. ”

“ Tillers of the land for generations, they brought with them the old-world grains and food plants, their household goods, farm implements and cattle, and with these a bundle of curious ideas and superstitions which had a deep and widespread rootage in the ancestral soil of Europe. The forest held nothing for them save fuel and material for shelter. Fish, flesh and fowl were to be had in abundance, but of the wild food-plants that were indigenous to the soil and which the native peoples had used for ages these immigrants from civilization knew little or nothing. ”

“ The natural condition of eastern North America is that of a forest-covered land. Wherever the primeval woodland has been cleared there springs up, unless thwarted by persistent tillage, a sturdy "second growth" which in time, and if allowed to spread, would restore the face of the country to something of its former appearance. We are familiar enough with such tracts, abandoned by men as unprofitable for cultivation and left to the genial influence of birds and winds and the chemistry of humus soils—nature's way of getting back to original conditions. ”

“ These landscape and sky effects, at the same time exist largely in the eye of the beholder. It seems to be a habit of mind to interpret the facts of nature in terms of one's own sense impressions—to see things, as it were, through temperamental glasses.
The early settlers found spring invading this new land—creeping up river valleys, touching the meadows and woods with its young green—and the farmer still finds spring invading this homeland of the Atlantic slope through the valleys of the Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut. Spring is always appreciably earlier in such places. ”

“ This is the forest that nature would spread over the land again should the white man cease in his toilsome civilization. Those of us born with a love for the woods can only regret the loss and cling the more tenaciously to every woodland tract that happily we may still have the right to protect.
On the coast plain of the southern Atlantic region another form of tree-life gives character to the forest. Here the long-leaf pine and other allied species find a congenial home, the monotonous "piney woods" covering wide tracts of level, sandy country. ”

“ Undoubtedly one of the factors in this environment is isolation, through many generations, in a forest region, though we must also remember those inherent racial traits that tend to depress whole bodies of people, relegating them to the less desirable regions—overwhelming forests, unfertile tracts and fringe-lands. A non-agricultural people can not wrest a civilization out of the wilderness. It can only be accomplished by agricultural peoples with a well developed instinct to clear the land. ”

“ Its background is the domestic landscape—village, hedgerow and park; no wide tracts of uncultivated land or of wilderness to lure birds away. In America vast numbers of birds still sequester themselves in wilderness solitudes undisturbed by men, and even in the settled districts many of the more shy species find congenial haunts in the depths of undergrowth some distance from habitations. On the other hand, there are some like the grackle or crow blackbird, the robin and the bluebird, the catbird, the chipping and song sparrows that seem to prefer to dwell about the homes of men. ”

“ Possibly some subtle condition in the balance of nature—some item in the struggle for existence, has helped or hindered the spread of certain trees, excluding some from localities already occupied by others. It is well known that where pines have been cut off certain species of oaks will spring up and occupy the land. The oak seedlings must have been abundantly scattered over the soil for a long period of time. Only a comparatively few species are enabled to hold their own through some superior advantage in adaptation and grow up to form a forest. ”

“ Adventurous men who wandered beyond the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio country found, west of the Wabash River, the forest giving place to open grassland or "prairies." These were great meadows with little or no tree growth, save along the bottomlands of rivers. The edge of the broad-leaved forest along this prairie border thinned out into those scattered, open woods known to the early pioneers as "oak openings." ”

“ Many old spring-houses still linger throughout this land, with crumbling roofs and weathered walls falling slowly into decay while the rill trickles through, reminiscent of a time when pans of creamy milk and bowls of yellow butter stood cooling in its water. ”

“ Every boy who has indulged a natural propensity to haunt the wild and delectable spots of his neighborhood, to pursue shy birds and pry into the secrets of their nests, knows that there are some birds that dwell in the woods and others that make their homes in the fields. A student of ornithology, likewise, soon learns that certain species of birds are peculiar either to the woods or to the fields, and that the structure and habits of life in each are in accordance with the nature of the surroundings. ”

“ The deep wilderness of coniferous forest to the north, remote and little disturbed by European invasion, is inhabited by two species of deer—the moose and the caribou—which are still fairly numerous. A difference in habits, as well as in aboriginal distribution, may account for the persistence of these two deer, as compared with the elk, in the Atlantic region. The elk is gregarious by nature and in the early history of the country was found in large herds, sometimes a hundred or more individuals, frequenting the open beaver meadows and the timber of river bottoms throughout the Appalachians. ”

“ The primitive Atlantic forest was, for a space of three hundred years after the discovery, a dominant feature in the history of the country. For a long period its impenetrable solitudes limited the spread of settlement to a narrow seaboard margin; only the more intrepid of the newcomers plunged into its depths to meet with strange adventures. ”

“ Countless generations succeed one another, occupying the soil in which the remains of older generations lie buried, each new generation springing from the one before it and bearing the marks of an inheritance that allies its individual members with other men and trees in far distant lands, and that carries them back through a seemingly endless chain of life to a remote antiquity. ”

“ Its rich warble and brilliant color were truly a refreshing sound and sight in the June days, a touch of the woodland life now rarely if ever to be met with in the great overgrown centers of trade.
In England one is impressed with the abundance of individuals among birds which have become dependent upon man and his work. In America a process of adjustment is going on which will unquestionably bring about a similar status in the bird population as more and more of the wild land is cleared and cultivated. ”

“ With the retreat of the ice at the close of the last glacial epoch, and the gradual assumption of the present climate and physical features of eastern North America, the more hardy coniferous trees, and some of the broad-leaved species that had adapted themselves to low temperatures along the edge of the ice sheet, began to occupy the newly uncovered land as a northern belt of pine forest. This expansion of tree life toward the north must have relieved the long overcrowded southern area and permitted a fuller development of the summer-green, broad-leaved forest with its great variety of forms. ”

“ Soils, too, play their part in the foresting of a land. An underlying layer of clay holds the water, which collects above it in the permeable sands and loam of the subsoil where the tree roots interlace in a vast network. The varied nature of soils over wide regions determines, within certain limits of temperature, the character of tree growth. This explains in part the preponderance of pines on a sandy soil where the water passes more or less rapidly through the root area. Pines are physiologically dry trees as compared with the broad-leaved, deciduous species ”

“ In certain groups of plants which are eminently characteristic of eastern North America the larger number of species are of woodland distribution. This is the case with the golden-rods and asters. In glancing over these two groups one is struck by the preponderance of species that are found in woods or along wood borders. Those that grow in the more open lands, as in fields, are for the most part either of northern or western distribution or are inhabitants of moist soil districts, such as meadows and swampy glades. ”

“ The crow, though a wary tenant of the farm lands, nesting and roosting away from the haunts of men, is still a prominent figure in the landscape of agricultural districts. Many sparrows are gleaners in the shorn fields and pastures, and about the barns and door-yards. Orchards have become a favorite resort, affording an abundance of food for numerous bird families. Great numbers of migrating birds, especially wood warblers, follow the bloom of the fruit trees from south to north in the spring to feed on the insects that infest the buds and blossoms. ”

“ The English stock that colonized the Atlantic slope of North America was made up of two strains of blood that had mingled to some extent in the mother country, but which was destined to a far wider and more complete fusion in the new world. From an ethnological point of view the Welsh, the Irish and the Highland Scot or Gael have come to be regarded as the modern representatives of an ancient Celtic people that once occupied Britain and that were driven into remote corners of the land by the invading Angle and his allies. ”

“ Strange as it may appear, nearly all of these eastern American forms occur nowhere else in the world save in eastern Asia, in the more temperate parts of China and Japan, where the same or very nearly related species are to be found. What is even still more striking is the contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of North America. Excepting along the mountain crests where the more or less world-wide boreal plants find a congenial environment, the vegetation of the California region is related mainly to the dry plateau lands of Mexico and South America. ”

“ The wide gap which the Atlantic Ocean opens in the zone of habitation has the effect of producing "fringe"-lands. Although a brisk intercourse from north to south, together with thickly-peopled regions at the back, and more favorable climates, have rendered these far less ethnographically destitute than the regions towards the poles, we still find that in Africa the highest development has been reached on the east coast, in America on the west, that is, on the inner sides or those farthest from the Atlantic. ”

“ In point of fact the Teutonic is the dominant strain in most of us to-day; the Celtic being more of a local infusion here and there, like the occasional brook flowing into the main stream of a river. The New England Puritans were almost wholly English Teutons and the same was true of the Virginia colonists. The Teutonic Swede and Hollander held for a time the middle region—the Hudson and the lower valley of the Delaware—and left an infusion of their blood in the dominant English population which may still be traced in certain family names. ”

“ The indigenous fauna increases in a land of aboriginal hunting folk of low culture, but decreases swiftly and surely in contact with civilized men. Aboriginal man is part of the fauna of a region. As a species he has struck a balance with other indigenous species of animals and as such is a "natural race." Like the lower animals the native man also vanishes from the region of settlement. Of the lower mammals which inhabited the Atlantic forest region in aboriginal times the gray timber wolf was conspicuous, as all early records relate. ”

“ It is hardly likely that these same plants would have gained a foothold had the land remained in its primitive forest-covered state, for they are all light-loving species, thriving in the open expanse of fields. Many indigenous species, as the Joe-Pye weeds or thoroughworts and the tickseeds and others of more or less moist habitats have undoubtedly greatly increased their range since the days of settlement, spreading out from river borders into the low meadow lands. One interesting plant is unquestionably a rather recent migrant from the prairie country. ”

“ Modern separator machinery has dispossessed the spring-house—only on some remote farm does it still do service. Its passing is not altogether to be regretted, for many women-folk fell early victims to the crippling rheumatism that its damp walls engendered. Occasionally some poor family makes a home in one of these abandoned structures, and this recalls a still more interesting abode which one now and then happens upon in some out-of-the-way district—an old log-house that has lingered on through the changing years, a quaint reminder of the past. ”

“ The Atlantic fringe-land as a whole was thinly populated. Where many millions of Europeans now dwell on a sound basis of agriculture, the aboriginal population seemed barely able to hold its own, living as it were from hand to mouth. This failure to advance culturally and increase numerically through intelligent use of the soil is the underlying fact in all backward peoples, and their backwardness is, in large measure, the result of environment. ”

“ Others, however, found suitable conditions of life only in certain localities, often widely apart, but with similar climatic features. Here we have a solution of the similarity of tree forms in forests so widely separated geographically as those of eastern North America and eastern Asia. In every other portion of the wide region into which the trees of this polar forest migrated a certain number of species failed to occupy the soil through some adverse conditions in climate or life relations. ”