Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/69

Rh racoon and opossum the Algonquin tongue has given us such words as 'skunk,' 'chipmunk' and 'moose.'

The early colonists, Puritan and Cavalier alike, were in the main English yeomen. They came not from the crowded centers, but from the rural districts, and it matters little from what district they came, all had been in touch with nature in England, and planted deep in their hearts was the love of fields and woods. This was not often expressed, it was too deep-seated a sentiment, but we see its workings in many an old chronicle. It was not what in the modern sense might be termed poetic, though there were undoubted poets among them. It was rather the feeling that an unlettered countryman has—a certain inexpressible love for the soil and the things thereof. The English emigrant to America was too much a part of his surroundings to see nature from the poet's point of view. The modern esthetic cult—the love of the beautiful—was not a portion of his mental equipment. He had the inquisitive and acquisitive qualities of mind, the interest in things for the sake of knowing about them, the attitude of the curious, and, above all, an interest in the practical uses of natural products. With this attitude of mind toward nature he set foot upon the shores of the new world. The surroundings that he had left are best pictured in the rural England of Shakespeare's and of Milton's time. The richly green meadow pastures watered by abundant streams, along the banks of which "Walton and his brother anglers loved to loiter in the shade of broad-spreading trees; the rolling uplands and lines of low hills; the deeply ploughed fields and scattered masses of woodland, with here and there a church spire peeping above them; the hedge-rows blossoming with wild flowers and haunted by innumerable song birds; ancient, ivy-mantled towers and drowsy hamlets, with noisy flocks of rooks and daws—these were the elements in a landscape enveloped in the soft atmosphere of an English sky, and with all the endeared associations of home, that the emigrant carried in his mind and heart to America. Little wonder that he sought in his new surroundings for something to remind him of this old home. The forbidding, untrodden wilderness hemmed him in on every side. The puritan found a rugged land and a harsh climate; the cavalier, a more generous display of nature; but each had to wrest wide areas from the wilderness before the landscape could become in any sense domestic. As this domestication of the land went on, the colonists found birds coming about their dwellings, building nests in their gardens and in the shelter of their barns, and they began taking note of many of the wild plants that grew in their neighborhood. By the time some of the earlier accounts were written, the settlers had already made the acquaintance of a number of the more familiar kinds and had given them names. It was the England of Elizabeth that was transplanted in New England and Virginia, and a considerable body