of vegetation beyond the Polar circle. They climb the Andes, the Rockies,
and the Himalayas to the very line of eternal snow, and they creep to the
bottom of every valley where man dares set his foot. They come up fresh
and green from the melting snows of earliest spring and linger in sunny
autumn glens when all else is dead and drear. They give intense interest
to the botanist as he remembers that there are thirty-five hundred
different species, a thousand of which are in North America and a fourth
of that number in our own state. They give him delightful studies as he
patiently compares their infinite variations of culms and glumes, spikes,
racemes, and panicles. They give joy to the farmer with their wealth of
protein and fat and albuminoid, the material to do the work and make the
wealth of the world bulging from their succulent stems. And they are
fascinating most of all to the nature-lover as he sees them gently wave
in the June sunshine or flow like a swift river across the field before a
quick gust of wind. Such variety of color! Here an emerald streak and
there a soft blue shadow, yonder a matchless olive green, and still
farther a cool gray: spreading like an enamel over the hillside where the
cattle have cropped them, and waving tall and fine above the crimsoning
blossoms of the clover; glittering with countless gems in the morning
dews and musicful with the happy songs and call notes of the quail and
prairie chicken, the meadow lark, the bob-o-link, and the dickcissel
whose young are safe among the protection of the myriad stems. Tall wild
rice and wild rye grow on the flood-plain and by the streams where the
tall buttercups shine like bits of gold and the blackbirds have their
home; bushy blue stem on the prairies and in the open woods where the
golden squaw weed and the wild geranium make charming patterns of yellow
and pink and purple and some of the painted cup left over from May still
glows like spots of scarlet rain; tall grama grass on the dry prairies
and gravelly knolls, whitened by the small spurge and yellowed by the
creeping cinquefoil; nodding fescue in the sterile soils where the