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TRANSACTIONS
OF THE
WISCONSIN ACADEMY
OF
SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS
VOL. LI
NATURAE SPECIES RATIOQUE
MADISON, WISCONSIN
1962
OFFICERS OF THE WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES,
ARTS, AND LETTERS
President
J. Martin Klotsche, University of Wisconsin — -Milwaukee
President-Elect
Aaron J. Ihde, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Vice-President (Sciences)
Alvin L. Throne, University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee
Vice-President (Arts)
Fredrick M. Logan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Vice-President (Letters)
Ralph A. McCanse, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Secretary
Ted J. McLaughlin, University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee
Treasurer
David J. Behling, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., Milwaukee
Librarian
Roy D. Shenefelt, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chairman, Junior Academy of Science
Jack R. Arndt, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Editor, Wisconsin Academy Review
Walter E. Scott, Wisconsin Conservation Department, Madison
Editor, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts and Letters
Stanley D. Beck, University of Wisconsin , Madison
The Academy Council
The above named officers and the past presidents :
Robert J. Dicke
Henry Meyer
Merritt Y. Hughes
Carl Welty
Paul W. Boutwell
A. W. Schorger
H. A. Schuette
L. E. Noland
Otto L, Kowalke
E. L. Bolender
Katherine G. Nelson
Ralph N. Buckstaff
Joseph J. Baier, Jr.
Stephen F. Darling
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Page
Knowledge and the Law of Diminishing Returns^ Joel Carl Welty _ 3
NATURAL SCIENCES
Wildlife Restoration in Wisconsin. A, W. Schorger _ 21
Bionomics of Podisus spp. Associated with the Introduced Pine Sawfly,
Diprion similis (Htg)^ in Wisconsin. H, C. Coppel and P, A. Jones 31
Notes on Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi, XXVIII. H. C. Greene _ — _ 57
Forest Cutting and Spread of Sphagnum in Northern Wisconsin. T. Kel¬
ler and K. G. Watterson _ 79
Preliminary Reports on the Flora of Wisconsin, No. 47. The Orders
Thymelaeales, Myrtales, and Cactales. D Ugent _ 83
Mineral Deficiency Symptoms on Turfgrass. J. R. Love _ _ _ 135
Studies on the Iron, Manganese, Sulfate, and Silica Balances and Distribu¬
tions for Lake Mendota, Madison, Wis. G. Fred Lee - 141
SOCIAL SCIENCES
“Brick’^ Pomeroy and the Democratic Processes: A Study in Civil War
Politics. Frank L. Element _ 159
The Wisconsin Idea and Social Change. M, L. Cohnstaedt _ 171
Midwestern “Town Meeting” — An Evaluative Study of Oral Decision-
Making in Shorewood, Wisconsin. G. F. Berquist, Jr. and T. J.
McLaughlin _ 177
The Retreat of Agriculture in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Loyal
Durand _ 197
Freedom of Speech in Wisconsin, 1870-1880. T. L, Dahle _ 219
“All the Running We Can Do” — Continuing Education for Alumni.
Roger W. Axford _ 227
The Cross-Media Approach to Teaching and Its Effect on the Acquisition
and Retention of Science and Social Studies Vocabulary Learnings
at Selected Grade Levels. L. G. Romano and N. P. Georgiady - 231
Allis Chalmers: Technology and the Farm. Walter F. Peterson - 245
ARTS AND LETTERS
A History of The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.
A. W. Schorger _ 255
The Significance of Thoreau^s Trip to the Upper Mississippi in 1861.
H, M. SWEETLAND _ 267
Henry James on the Role of the Imagination in Criticism. D. Emerson _ 287
The statements made and the opinions expressed in the articles contained
herein are solely the responsibility of the authors of the individual articles.
They do not necessarily express the opinion or the policies of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.
^•73
7/7^3
TRANSACTIONS
OF THE
WISCONSIN ACADEMY
OF
SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS
VOL. LI
NATURAE SPECIES RATIOQUE
MADISON, WISCONSIN
1962
The publication date of Volume 51 is
January 14, 1963
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
/
KNOWLEDGE AND THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS*
Joel Carl Welty
President, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters,
May 6, 1961 to May 5, 1962
About half a century ago, my youngest brother was given a birth¬
day present of seventeen cents to do with as he pleased. In those
days that was, for a child, a princely sum. My brother liked licorice
candy, so he invested his complete fortune in licorice sticks, licorice
straps, whips, and jawbreakers, with the predictable result that to
this day he cannot abide the taste of licorice. Early in life he learned
about the law of diminishing returns.
It is an interesting fact that in many affairs changes in quantity
often bring about changes in quality or in essential nature. When a
solid cone is intersected with a plane, the resulting figure may de¬
scribe an ellipse. If the tilt of the plane is increased in one direction,
the ellipse gradually shortens until it suddenly becomes a circle: a
geometric figure with quite different mathematical properties. In¬
creased in the opposite direction, the ellipse eventually turns into a
parabola : again, a very different figure from an ellipse. Even in the
esthetic enjoyment of simple pleasures, this same principle may be
demonstrated. The Japanese have a poem which underscores this
idea :
The moon is at its loveliest tonight.
I thank the clouds that o’er it flit
And let me rest my neck a bit.
Consider, for example, the sizes and shapes of mammals. Ele¬
phants and mice are both warm-blooded animals, and one might
think that a mouse is, so to speak, an elephant cut into 200,000
pieces, or an elephant, 200,000 mice huddled together. But their
metabolism is geared to the amount of body surface each animal
possesses, and proportionately the mouse has much more surface
through which it loses body heat. You could never make an ele¬
phant-size animal out of a mouse simply by enlarging the mouse.
Whereas an elephant burns oxygen at the rate of 67 cubic milli¬
meters per gram of body weight per hour, a mouse burns 1,580
cubic millimeters per gram, or 24 times as much. If the tissues of
the elephant metabolized as rapidly as those of the mouse, the ele¬
phant would literally cook itself to death in minutes. This all hinges
* Address of the retiring- president, delivered at the 92nd annual meeting- of the
Academy, May 5, 1962.
3
4 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
on a simple geometric law: as one doubles the linear dimension of
an object, its surface increases 4 times, but its mass, 8 times. As an
animal increases in size, its metabolic needs change strikingly.
Body architecture is also subject to the laws of geometry. The
strength of a supporting column such as the thigh-bone of a leg
depends on its cross-section area. Since area does not increase as
rapidly as mass as an animal grows larger, a big animal such as an
elephant must have proportionately stronger, stockier legs than
an antelope. Merely enlarging an antelope to the size of an elephant
would not equip the animal with strong enough legs to hold the
heavy body. A whale has so great a mass that there would not be
space enough under the body to accommodate four legs large enough
and strong enough to support it.
One more biological example. Turkey growers are interested in
raising as much tender meat, on as little food, in as short a time
as they can. Breeds of Turkeys that cooperate with these goals have
been developed, among them the Broad-breasted Bronze Turkey.
But here again the law of diminishing returns has caught up with
'^progress.’’ Apparently, rapid, efficient meat production requires
high blood pressure. As a result, these birds have developed blood
pressures of 300 to 400 millimeters of mercury — high enough to
rupture their aortas in epidemic proportions. Incidentally, Turkey
growers have, for the time being, successfully countered this opera¬
tion of the law of diminishing returns by lowering the birds’ blood
pressures through the use of tranquilizers! However, this example
reveals that there may be dangers in the pursuit of a single objec¬
tive to the neglect of a healthy, balanced concern for the good of the
whole organism.
How does this law of diminishing returns apply to mankind?
There is nothing on earth lovelier than a small, healthy, happy child,
brimming with promise for the future, unless, perhaps, it is a pair
of twins. Doubts begin to arise, however, when one has six or eight
children, especially when several of them are of an age when one
has to provide them with a college education. Doubt turns to alarm
when the numbers of humans increase to the population densities
found in Java, India, British Guiana, and many other countries.
Most people are familiar with the fact that all organisms, man
included, can produce more offspring than are required to perpetu¬
ate the race. When living conditions are favorable and the death
rate drops, population climbs. This is what modern medicine has
done for British Guiana, where the population has doubled in the
past seven years (1). Few people are aware of the fact, however,
that population growth is by a form of geometric increase, or com¬
pound interest, which accelerates astonishingly in its later stages.
1962]
W elty — Diminis hin g Re turns
5
Demographers of the United Nations estimate that today the popu¬
lation of the world is increasing at the rate of two per cent per year,
and that the rate is still rising (2). Two per cent is not an awe¬
some figure, but given a little time to work it can produce fantastic
results. Professor Hauser of the University of Chicago points out
that an initial population of only 100 persons, multiplying at the
rate of not two per cent, but only one per cent per year, and not
over the full million year span of man’s life on earth, but merely
for the last 5000 years of recorded history, would by today have
produced a population of one and one-half billion persons per square
foot of land surface of the earth (3) !
Obviously such an increase has not occurred, and some of you
may be inclined to shrug off any concern over such pure theory.
What are the facts? Well, they are sobering enough. According to
estimates from the United Nations, the world had a population of
roughly one-quarter of a billion persons at the beginning of the
Christian era. 1620 years later, when the Pilgrims landed at Ply¬
mouth Rock, that number had doubled to make one-half billion.
About two centuries later, at the time of the Civil War, another half
billion was added to make a total of one billion persons in the world.
Since then, half-billion increases in population have occurred in
successively shorter intervals of time. The sixth half billion, just
added, required only eleven years. At the present rate of population
growth, the next half billion will come in only six or seven years
(4). Assuming a rate of population growth of two per cent, ‘Tn
150 years the number of people in the United States would approach
the number currently inhabiting the whole world” (5). In 1915
Java’s population was estimated to be five million persons; by 1957
it had reached 52 million.
It requires very little imagination to understand how the law of
diminishing returns applies to human population increase. Our
lovely little child already shows signs of becoming a hideous mon¬
ster. Inevitably, there will be less food, housing, irreplaceable raw
materials, and sheer space for living, as the population of the world
snowballs toward self destruction. Back in the 1920’s, if one wished
to make a trip to Chicago to go shopping, he drove into the Loop,
parked on State Street ouside of Marshall Field’s, spent a leisurely
hour shopping, came out, hopped in the car and drove home. Today
the situation is somewhat different. One can’t even park his car
beside the interstate highway to admire the view or to get out and
pick a daisy. In most parts of the world, the population has now
reached a threshold where every increase brings some loss in human
freedom, human rights, human dignity. Man must very soon choose
between high mortality or low fertility. Either man’s freedom to
6 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
have as many children as he wants must be curtailed, or else the
quality of human living will inevitably deteriorate.
Research studies by the New York City Youth Board (6) have
shown that less than one per cent of the city’s families produce 75
per cent of its juvenile delinquents. When there are already too
many people in the world, how much longer can society afford the
democratic luxury of unlimited freedom of procreation by all men?
I realize that this is not a simple problem. But I am willing to
hazard the prediction that if our population continues to grow at
its present rate, or faster, for another century, democracy as we
now know it will cease to exist.
There are other, less obvious, aspects of dense populations,
through which the law of diminishing returns operates. Some years
ago, Arthur Morgan of Antioch College made the observation that
big communities offered evil men a greater opportunity to practice
their skills as shysters, quacks, grafters, and gangsters than did
small communities, because of the anonymity possible in large
crowds. Pretending to be what one is not has survival value among
strangers. In a small community, bluff and cheating are soon dis¬
covered, and countered if not corrected. It is in the populous cities
that one finds also the anxiety-ridden man, rubbing elbows daily
with thousands of strangers, in the “lonely crowd.” Quite obviously,
bigger communities are not necessarily better communities.
A subtler complication of population increase is already causing
people to search their consciences. One of the basic tenets of Judeo-
Christian ethics declares the worth and dignity of every man, re¬
gardless of his race, religion, economic station, or politics. We find
this ethic hard enough to apply in low density populations like our
own. Must it be sacrificed entirely when the day comes when the
world is jammed with human beings barely able to find standing
room?
To make the problem more concrete, shall we, the next time there
is a famine in India, send surplus food and doctors to keep men
alive, only to create a more acute famine the next time ? To say that
we should also send agricultural and economic experts to increase
the production of food and goods only begs the question. In the race
between the production of food and the reproduction of humans,
unless some restraining factor is introduced, reproduction is guar¬
anteed to win.
So far we have merely been setting the stage for our main con¬
cern. Our chief question is this : Does the law of diminishing returns
apply to knowledge? This is an intriguing question, and worth some
scrutiny. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters is
firmly dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge. This
1962]
W elty— Diminishing Returns
7
principle is one of the unchallenged absolutes of Western Civiliza¬
tion. It is one of the basic articles of faith of numberless univer¬
sities, colleges, seminaries, and commencement speakers. “Fiat
Lux.” “Lux et Veritas.” “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free.” “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,”
said Alexander Pope. “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
Can one drink too much learning — to a point of intellectual inebria¬
tion? Is it conceivable that too much learning is a dangerous thing?
Even to suggest that the unlimited increase of knowledge might be
undesirable or unprofitable comes close to committing intellectual
treason. However, if there ever was a time ripe for examining this
question, it is now, for the production and accumulation of knowl¬
edge has accelerated phenomenally in recent decades.
We are all amply aware that the increase of knowledge has en¬
riched man's life by giving him more power over his environment,
and by making his life easier, safer, and more interesting. Technolo¬
gical science has made it possible for man to circle the globe, not
only in 80 days but in 80 minutes, and it promises soon to broaden
his horizons to include other planets. Agricultural knowledge en¬
ables us now to grow two blades of grass where one grew before. In
1900, man’s life expectancy was 47 years; today, it is over 70 years.
But there is no need to elaborate the virtues of growing knowledge
before this assembly. We live in a remarkable age of intellectual,
emotional, and material riches never before attained by the common
man.
Can it be possible that knowledge, like human population, is in
danger of snowballing into destruction? Is our store of knowledge
a chest of jewels which may be transformed as it overflows into a
Pandora’s box of horrid problems? Already some problems have
appeared, and others seem to be in prospect.
The massive quantity of modern knowledge has already created
problems of storage and retrieval. Several recent writers have esti¬
mated that scientific knowledge is now doubling every 10 or 15
years-— a rate of increase more than twice that of the world’s popu¬
lation. The rate at which biological information has been increasing
is revealed, for example, by the growth of the technical journal
Biological Abstracts. Volume 1 of this periodical, published in 1926-
27, had 976 pages and contained 10,900 abstracts. Volume 36 for
1961 contained 8,436 pages and 87,000 abstracts. Incidentally, the
price of a single subscription to this journal is $170 a year! This
single “volume” now requires about 16 inches of shelf space. Since
first published, this journal has roughly doubled in size every 10
years. If this rate continues for only 100 years, by then each single
annual volume will require 1400 feet of shelf space. And this is
8 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
only one of several abstracting journals, not to mention the thous¬
ands of other journals from which the abstracts are made. The mere
housekeeping problem of accommodating these books will be a li¬
brarian’s nightmare. Certainly, before this unhappy day arrives, the
law of diminishing returns will begin to operate.
Are we in danger of accumulating so much knowledge that, like
the massive whale, grown too large for legs, our store of informa¬
tion will wallow uselessly on miles of library shelving, unable to
be moved for man’s good simply because of its enormous bulk? Like
the Turkey growers, have we concentrated too much on one limited
objective — the accumulation of knowledge — without winnowing it
for its wholesome use to man?
At this point, someone might point out that 25 or 50 years from
now, books will be discarded in favor of microfilm, microcards, in¬
formation tape, or some other form of condensation. This will of
course help the storage problem, but I doubt that books will become
entirely passe. They are too thoroughly established in our daily
habits and affections. Not only is microfilm hard on the eyes, but
it does not lend itself to casual summer reading while one is com¬
fortably stretched out in a hammock.
The sheer bulk of recorded knowledge not only creates a storage
problem, but a serious problem of retrieval. In all the tremendous
mass of literature, how does one find what he wants? Gerard Piel
(7) tells of a paper on Boolean Algebra published by Lunts in 1950
in the Journal of the Academy of Science of the U.S.S.R. It con¬
cerned the design of computer circuits. Between 1950 and 1955,
American computer scientists spent five fruitless years and an
estimated $200,000 seeking the information they could have had
free had they only read this one Russian paper !
In other words, scientific communications no longer communi¬
cate. Today, American scientific and technical writing costs $10 bil¬
lion per year and employs 90,000 persons in full-time writing, edit¬
ing, and publishing. It is estimated that by 1970 the number will
grow to 160,000 persons. Each day in this country “enough tech¬
nical papers are written to fill an encyclopedia seven times as large
as the 24-volume Britannica/' (17) It is any wonder that much of
this knowledge lies sterile and unproductive? The annual produc¬
tion of military weapons manuals alone costs us $2.8 billions.
While it is true that electronic machines may be effectively used
to retrieve and collate wanted information from a massive store,
such machines used as “brains” for the creation of new ideas out
of the raw material of stored knowledge are analogous to the player
piano as an instrument for playing great music. Both lack the au¬
thentic touch of individual human creativity.
1962]
W elty— -Diminishing Returns
9
Probably the most serious defect inherent in the massive prolifer¬
ation of modern knowledge is its fragmentation. Specialization is
the price man pays for intellectual progress. Not only has speciali¬
zation proceeded so far that there has arisen a “conflict of cultures’’
between scientists and humanists, eloquently described by C. P.
Snow (8) , but scientists are becoming isolated from other scientists,
and humanists from other humanists, as each burrows deep into his
own specialty. A man spends so much time trying to master his
little, isolated fragment of the knowable, that he is forced to neglect
great expanses of knowledge from sheer lack of time. Experts make
matters worse, often quite unnecessarily, by speaking a technical
jargon incomprehensible to anyone not in their particular field. Re¬
cently there occurred in a Kansas City hotel three separate scientific
meetings of nuclear physicists. When asked why the three groups
did not join together in one meeting, one of the participants replied
that they could not because they did not speak the same technical
language. As a result of this confusion of tongues, a man is driven
to depend on the judgment and opinions of “authorities” in almost
every field but his own. Thus, the vast expanses of modern knowl¬
edge provide splendid opportunities for ignoramuses and intellectual
quacks to ply their trades; they create opportunities for pretense
and bluff worthy of Phineas T. Barnum. Here is a single sentence
from an “authoritative” art criticism which appeared in Art News
not long ago (9). I defy anyone to make sense out of it.
“He [the artist] pictures the stultified intricacy of tension at the plasmic
level; his prototypical zygotes and somnolent somatomes inhabit a primor¬
dial lagoon where impulse is an omnidirectional drift and isolation is the
consequence of an inexplicable exogamy.”
This of course is pure intellectual quackery; it could not be so
common if technical jargon were frowned on rather than cultivated.
But even when authorities are conscientious and honest, they are
likely to suffer the defects of intellectual myopia and isolation, and,
at times, dogmatism. Although modern man is driven to depend on
authorities for much of his information, he must constantly recall
that authoritarianism has many times in human history poisoned
and stunted the growth of man’s mind. He must always keep alive
his right to doubt, to question, and to challenge “authority.”
In nature, the extreme specialization that one occasionally finds in
animals is commonly the result and not the cause of isolation. Ani¬
mals isolated on oceanic islands often become so specialized that
when their environment changes, or when competing forms are
introduced, they become extinct. The isolated species lack the inter¬
flow of hereditary characters that keeps the mainland species tough
10 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
and resilient. I think it is a fair analogy to say that intensified iso=
lation in the intellectual realm carries comparable hazards.
Coupled with the sheer bulk of our rapidly growing fund of in¬
formation is an attribute that presents another embarrassment of
riches. That is the velocity both of the appearance of new knowledge
and of its application to human use. Scientific technology has done
more to change the modern world (for both good and evil) than
any other intellectual force. And the speed with which scientific dis¬
coveries are put into use has itself been accelerating. According to
Piel (7) it took about 100 years ‘Tor the steam engine to make its
arrival felt in economic and social history, and 50 years for elec¬
tricity to make its impact.’' The present interval between basic sci¬
entific discoveries and their application in technology he estimates
to be about 10 years, with even shorter intervals in the fields of
communications, electronics, aircraft, and chemistry. The Du Pont
Corporation estimates, for example, that one-half of its sales, and
three-fourths of its profits come from products that were still in
the laboratory ten years ago.
You may object that rapid change is in itself not a bad thing,
even though it may be uncomfortable to persons over 40 or 60 years
of age. I think that it is here that a disquieting lack of concord
begins to appear between the bulk, complexity, and velocity of
change of modern knowledge, and the innate nervous and mental
equipment that man uses in handling that knowledge. We are living
in a world of increasingly great complexity and of incredibly rapid
change. While it is true that the greater one’s store of information,
the greater his freedom of choice, Warren Weaver (7) points out
that the greater one’s choice the greater his uncertainty, and the
greater his uncertainty, the greater his mental instability. Do we
have too many choices to make today ? Must we make them too hur¬
riedly for our mental equilibrium?
Man’s mind evolved in a relatively simple environment that posed
relatively simple problems. These generally had simple either-or
solutions : eat or go hungry ; attack or flee ; work or rest ; go out and
get cold, or stay in a smelly cave and be warm ; and so on. Problems
for primitive man were generally black or white, and not the many
confusing shades of gray that so many of them are for modern
man. Although primitive man had to make simple choices between
clear-cut alternatives, they were often life and death choices vital
to his survival. The primary urgency of scrabbling a living from a
reluctant environment not only left for Neanderthal Man no leisure
time for such culturally stimulating things as composing chamber
music or attending an intertribal disarmament conference, but they
riveted in his mind two lamentably durable attributes : a tendency
1962]
W elty— Diminishing Returns
11
to seek simple solutions to problems, and an egocentric, all-consum¬
ing preoccupation with security and with material acquisition.
Is modern man really heir to these stone-age mental attributes?
Has evolution changed us much? Are our minds out of tune with
the intellectual conditions of modern existence? Let us consider one
of Neanderthal Man’s chief problems : food. Physiologically, modern
man is still chained to the prehistoric past. His digestive machinery
still requires about the same calories, minerals, vitamins, and rough-
age as did that of the Neanderthalers. Our cave man forebear had
a palate which told him to eat while the eating was good, because
tomorrow the hunting might be poor. Apparently, we still have the
cave man’s palate, but as far as American eating goes, the hunting
is never poor. The result? Overeating, overweight, cholesterol,
coronaries, exit. This, of course, helps a little to solve the over¬
population problem, but in a rather unintelligent way.
Do we still carry vestiges of a paleolithic acquisitive instinct?
Some of you are familiar with that intriguing book by Charles
Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Mad¬
ness of Crowds (10). This book, written in England 120 years ago,
tells in fascinating detail some of the popular follies of our gullible
ancestors: the Mississippi Bubble; the South-Sea Bubble; the Al-
chymists; Fortune telling; the Crusades; Witch Hunting; Relics of
the True Cross ; and others. Many of the mass delusions portrayed
by Mackay gained their chief impetus from human avarice, or our
cave man’s acquisitive instinct. For example, during the tulip mania
in Holland in the 15th century, this appetite for selfish gain rose to
such heights of folly— before the boom collapsed— -that a single
tulip bulb sold for as much as 5500 Florins. To make this fantastic
price more intelligible to modern ears, Mackay tells of a somewhat
less valuable tulip bulb, a variety called the Viceroy, worth only
2500 Florins, which was paid for in goods rather than in currency.
Here is the amount paid for one bulb :
170 bushels of wheat
340 bushels of rye
4 fat oxen
8 fat swine
12 fat sheep
105 gallons of wine
1008 gallons of beer
504 gallons of butter
1000 pounds of cheese
A complete bed
A suit of clothes
A silver drinking cup
All of this, mind you, was paid for only one fragile, perishable tulip
bulb.
Surely, you will say, we sophisticated moderns do not behave in
any such gullible fashion. We may have our weaknesses, but we are
surely not that stupid. Perhaps not, but it makes an interesting
12 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
exercise to observe, if we can, any lingering vestiges of paleolithic
man’s single-minded concern with himself. Are there any latter-
day popular delusions? What of the wild speculation on the stock
market, or in Florida real estate, in the late 20’s? Or the Gadarene
stampede of the Italian people into fascism, or of the German
people into Nazism? Do we consistently use reason to guide our
conduct? Do we make sensible use of accumulated knowledge?
We Americans are very health conscious. A man may regulate
his diet, take regular exercise, eat vitamin pills, brush his teeth,
and make sure that his children are inoculated with Salk vaccine.
Then, all too often, he may visit a tavern for a quick drink, hop
into his car, and speed 70 miles per hour down a crowded two-lane
highway while smoking a carcinogenic cigarette. To me, this pro¬
vides one of the most striking illustrations of a popular delusion
available on the modern scene. It is second only to war itself as a
present day example of the madness of crowds.
In the past 20 years there have been at least 18 independent
studies in five different countries carried out on hundreds of thous¬
ands of persons by medical research organizations of unimpeachable
qualifications — all to determine the statistical association between
smoking and lung cancer (11). The scientific evidence obtained
from these studies establishes beyond the slightest doubt the fact
that cirgarette smoking causes lung cancer. Whereas among non-
smokers, one man in 275 will probably die of lung cancer, among
heavy smokers the statistical chances of death from lung cancer are
one in ten. The British Ministry of Health, alarmed by such statis¬
tics, has displayed over 400,000 posters in an educational anti-smok¬
ing campaign. One of these posters states: “Danger! Heavy cig¬
arette smokers are thirty times more likely to die of lung cancer
than non-smokers. You have been warned.” (19) . Add to the hazard
of lung cancer the fact that cigarette smokers are twice as likely
as non-smokers to die from coronary heart failure, and it becomes
clearly evident that cigarettes are causing the needless deaths of
well over 100,000 Americans every year (18). This means that
every day the lives of more than 250 U. S. citizens are prematurely
snuffed out because they smoke cigarettes. Can you not imagine the
public outcry for immediate remedy should 250 persons be killed
every day in airplane disasters? And yet, last year Americans spent
$6.9 billion to buy and consume 528 billion cigarettes (19). Is this
not a striking example of collective stupidity? When confronted by
such statistics, many smokers will remark, “It can’t be as bad as all
that, or nobody would be smoking. Fifty million smokers can’t be
wrong.” Exactly the same logic was advanced to justify the
speculative mania of the South Sea Bubble and the tulip-buying
mania of the Dutch.
1962]
W elty— Diminishing Returns
13
Quite aside from the damning fact that in the United States our
smoothly purring automobiles injure one and one-half million per¬
sons each year, and kill outright 38,000 (and in Italy the death rate
is, percentagewise, six times as great), they have become ego¬
centric symbols of conspicuous power and wealth, just as were tu¬
lips in Holland 400 years ago. The typical American breezes down a
costly super-highway in a chromium chariot pulled by 200 horses.
The staggering cost of such transportation was recently brought
home to me by an advertisement for the Santa Fe Railroad in Time
Magazine (12). With a typical four-unit diesel locomotive of 8,000
horsepower, a modern freight train will carry on an average trip,
1,250 pounds of freight for each engine horsepower. On an average
trip, my two-year-old Ford will carry less than one pound of freight
for each engine horsepower. Whereas my car on a typical trip will
carry a 150 pound man 15 miles on a gallon of fuel, a freight loco¬
motive will carry that same man 2,666 miles, and on a gallon of
cheaper fuel. The sad part about this is that the difference in the
standard of living provided by an automobile of 200 horsepower
compared with one of 199 horsepower is barely, if at all, detectable.
But if we could give up only one of these horse-power to furnish a
poor Indian or African peasant with a one-horsepower garden
tractor or irrigation pump, it could easily double his meager stand¬
ard of living. The law of diminishing returns began to operate in
automobiles even before the advent of the Model T, but instead of
causing a self-correcting feed-back reaction, as in the case of eat¬
ing too much licorice, it inaugurated a regime of unparalleled con¬
spicuous consumption and waste. Were our grandparents so much
more short-sighted and wicked when they killed a buffalo merely
to remove, cook, and eat its tongue? We citizens of the United States
account for only 7 per cent of the world’s population; yet we con¬
sume nearly 50 per cent of the material wealth that the world con¬
sumes (13) . While we are worrying about obesity an dcholesterol, at
least one third of all the world’s people go to bed hungry every night.
Do not these facts reflect a vestigial Neanderthal mentality rather
than that of a modern, intelligent citizen of the world ?
By this time some of you are realizing that I have departed some¬
what from my announced topic. What have popular delusions and
the madness of crowds to do with the increase of knowledge ? Where
does the population explosion fit into the law of diminishing returns
as it applies to the increase of knowledge? Simply in this way. If
we use man as the measure of all things, as we universally do, the
increase in knowledge has no point whatever unless it ministers to
human needs ; unless it is put to some use by man. The real difficulty
is that knowledge may be put to good use or to bad use ; and uses
14 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
which initially may be very good, if applied to too many people or
on too wide a scale, may become harmful.
Medical knowledge has conferred priceless boons on mankind in
relieving pain, promoting health, and prolonging lives. At the same
time, it is creating at least three very serious problems. First, it is
intensifying the problem of too many people. It is because modern
medical knowledge, in only two years, has made possible a reduction
in infant mortality from 350 per thousand of population to 67 per
thousand, that the population of British Guiana is now doubling
every seven years. In Ceylon in 1946, the malaria mosquito was
practically eliminated through the use of DDT. As a result, in two
years that island’s death rate dropped from 20 per thousand to 13
per thousand. But the birth rate remained constant, with the con¬
sequence that hunger and starvation increased in severity (1).
Secondly, by keeping alive both the strong and the weak, modern
medicine has effectively rescinded many of the rigorous laws of
natural selection that operated in the days of Pithecanthropus to
keep the hereditary quality of mankind tough and self reliant. As
a result, today the genetic quality of human protoplasm is gradually
deteriorating. Imagine the predicament of modern man should nu¬
clear war destroy civilized communities to such an extent that all
of the modern medical crutches which now support defective hu¬
mans were no longer available: glasses, hearing aids, false teeth,
wheel chairs, insulin, vitamins, antibiotics, anesthetics, antiseptic
surgery. How many of us in this room would survive if we had to
go back and compete with Neanderthal man under such condi¬
tions?
Even worse is the deliberate misuse of medical knowledge. I do
not refer to medical quackery, but to the icily efficient scientists in
this country, Russia, and elsewhere who are dedicating their skills
to the systematic, organized murder of their fellow men through
fiendish inventions for biological warfare. It is not the knowledge
itself that is necessarily good or bad, but the use to which man puts
it. Knowledge is power, and too often the power it brings is per¬
verted to evil ends. Even when man does not deliberately pervert
that power, sometimes he lacks the wisdom to use it properly, like
the teen-ager who does not have sufficient respect for the enormous
power of a modern automobile.
What is man to do? Build a cabin on Walden Pond? The chances
are that the bulldozers have already been there to level off the land
for a suburban shopping center. No, none of us cares to go back to
the days of Neanderthal Man, or even of Thoreau, and give up anti¬
septic surgery, blood banks, old age security, libraries, theatres,
colleges, or institutions such as the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters,
1962]
W elty~Diminishing Returns
15
The human mind still has enormous, unfathomed potentialities
for education—for adapting to those problems posed by the quan¬
tity, complexity, and rapid change of modern knowledge. Already, in
widely scattered parts of the globe, intelligent steps are being in¬
augurated to diminish the threat of overpopulation. I think, how¬
ever, that the urgency of the times calls for a change in emphasis
in our intellectual pursuits. Our chief problems, I believe, stem from
the fact that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, has grown
faster than man's wisdom in its use. The growth of pure knowledge
has outdistanced man's ability and willingness to retrieve, digest,
coordinate, and apply its truths for the benefit of all mankind.
Things are getting out of hand when a biologist, for example, hasn't
the time to read all that he should in his own field, let alone the
swirling, printed floods of new information in physics, astronomy,
archaeology, political science, art, and economics,
I am not suggesting that our great universities close their doors
and cease their search for the truth. But I do think that a good case
can be made for spending less effort and less money in certain fields
of intellectual interest.
Since World War II a great change has come over our universities
and colleges, especially in the field of scientific research. According
to Dr, Max Tishler (14), in 1940 our federal government spent $15
million for research and development in our institutions of higher
learning. In 1960 the amount spent was $9 billion — 60 times as
much. About 75 per cent of all academic research in the physical
and life sciences is now paid for with tax money. In 1958-59, the
government accounted for 83.6 per cent of Cal Tech's total income;
78.2 per cent of MIT's. The taxpayer has now become the patron of
science.
Gerard Piel (7) points out that in these lavish governmental pro¬
grams the scientist becomes an employee of the government, a fact
which conditions his intellectual independence. Tishler adds the
further observation that scientific ‘‘discoveries are seldom made by
direction." I think it is only fair to add that the weight of the gov¬
ernment's hand in directing research is often light to the point of
non-existence. At other times it is overpoweringly heavy and dicta¬
torial.
With the federal government now pouring $12 billion a year into
scientific research, what wonderful new scientific knowledge does
this buy? Not much. The trouble is that most of this money is spent,
as Piel remarks, on the “lowly, short-term gains of practical advant¬
age in weapons," consumer goods and the like, rather than on the
“lofty, long-range goals" of pure science. Before the war, for every
dollar spent by the government on pure science, six dollars were
16 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
spent on applied science. Today the ratio is one dollar for pure sci¬
ence for every twenty dollars on applied science, and nearly half of
the applied science is devoted to weapons development.
This, says Tishler, is no “real resurgence of interest in the in¬
tellect nor is it a rising dedication to learning. Rather it is an at¬
tempt to mobilize science through our educational system for the
single-minded purpose of solving the immediate problems of na¬
tional health and security.'' We have already seen how the law of
diminishing returns applies to discoveries in the field of medicine. It
has operated with even greater effect in the field of security. In the
laudable pursuit of personal security, primitive man used his op¬
posable thumb to pick up a rock in self-defense. With the gradual
increase in knowledge, this rock, as a symbol of security, has
evolved through the inventions of the flint arrowhead, bronze spear,
wooden crossbow, flint-lock, gatling gun and flame thrower, all the
way up until today, instead of security, we have reaped the agoniz¬
ing insecurity of the hydrogen bomb. I think it is time that we
diverted some of this torrent of money and human skills toward
more constructive ends.
As a suggestive example of constructive alternatives to the futile
production of information about ever more devastating weapons,
Piel tells of a project of the Rockefeller Foundation in combating
malnutrition in Mexico, Over the past 20 years the Foundation, at a
cost of less than $2 million per year, has supplied United States
agronomists who have established a sort of county agent system to
train young Mexicans in agricultural sciences. In this short time,
food production has risen 80 per cent, and the improved diet is
already showing up in vital statistics. All this for less than $2; mil¬
lion a year — much less than the cost of a single small satellite.
Speaking of the Rockefeller Foundation recalls a notable article
in their annual Review for 19 Al, written by Raymond B. Fosdick
(15). This article is a favorite of mine and I quote from it each
year to my beginning biology students. It illustrates so well the final
point that I wish to make that I would like to read to you an excerpt
from it. Speaking of the international character of medical science,
Fosdick writes :
“There is not an area of activity in which this cannot be illus¬
trated. An American soldier wounded on a battlefield in the Far
East owes his life to the Japanese scientist, Kitasato, who isolated
the bacillus of tetanus. A Russian soldier saved by a blood transfu¬
sion is indebted to Landsteiner, an Austrian. A German soldier is
shielded from typhoid fever with the help of a Russian, Metchnikoff.
A Dutch marine in the East Indies is protected from malaria be¬
cause of the experiments of an Italian, Grassi ; while a British avia-
1962]
Welty- — Diminishing Returns
17
tor in North Africa escapes death from surgical infection because
a Frenchman, Pasteur, and a German, Koch, elaborated a new
technique.
'‘In peace as in war, we are all of us the beneficiaries of contri¬
butions to knowledge made by every nation in the world. Our chil¬
dren are guarded from diphtheria by what a Japanese and a Ger¬
man did; they are protected from smallpox by an Englishman's
work; they are saved from rabies because of a Frenchman ; they are
cured of pellagra through the researches of an Austrian. From birth
to death they are surrounded by an invisible host—the spirits of
men who never served a lesser loyalty than the welfare of mankind.”
This breaking down of barriers is urgently needed in the intel¬
lectual world today. Not just international barriers, but intellectual
barriers that prevent intelligent men from comprehending each
other. What is needed is a greater integration of existing knowl¬
edge— more cross-fertilization of ideas— so that artists, writers, sci¬
entists, and laymen can all speak a common language. We must bend
our minds toward dissolving the barriers that fragment and isolate
our various intellectual specialties. We must reaffirm the unity of
knowledge and make it truly liberal. Last year at our annual ban¬
quet, Professor Merritt Hughes, (16) then our President, empha¬
sized that the Wisconsin Academy, unlike all other academies in
the country save one, is devoted to the integration of all knowl-
edge—sciences, arts, and letters. That is truly one of its glories, and
we should continue to emphasize it even more than we have.
Finally, while we have to accept man as he is, with all his primi¬
tive appetites and limitations, it is well to remember that man is
more than intellect alone. L. P. Jacks, for many years the editor of
the Hihhert Journal, once wrote that he believed that all the good
in the world could be accounted for by honest thinking, hard work,
and kindly feelings. The biggest problems in the world today do
not stem from ignorant minds, but from uneducated hearts and
wills. It is here that we should dedicate more of our substance and
energies. After spending many billions of dollars and many years
of time by our cleverest minds, we have acquired sufficient knowl¬
edge about the atom so that we can use it to ease man's burdens
and enrich his life to heights undreamed of— or we can use it to de¬
stroy man and his works, completely and finally. There is a Bud¬
dhist proverb that says, “To every man is given the key to the gates
of Heaven; the same key opens the gates of Hell.”
I think we are all aware that in our pursuit of security we have
passed the threshold where the law of diminishing returns has op¬
erated to produce, instead of security, a precarious balance of in¬
ternational terror ; instead of a blessing, a world-wide curse.
18 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
It is time to redress the balance. It is time that we realize that
knowledge for its own sake is not enough. Knowledge for the sake
of security is not enough. We need to recover the full dimensions of
a knowledge that ministers to the whole man-— his body, mind, and
spirit; that ministers to all men of whatever position throughout
the whole wide world ; knowledge “that never serves a lesser loyalty
than the welfare of mankind.’’
References Cited
1. Luck, M. J. 1957. Man against his environment: the next hundred years.
Science, 126:903-908,
2. The future growth of world population. 1958. U.N. Publication No. ST/SO
A/Ser. A/28.
3. Hauser, P. M. 1960. Demographic dimensions of world politics. Science,
131:1641-1647.
4. Dorn, H, F. 1962. World population growth: an international dilemma.
Science, 135:283-290.
5. Coale, A. J, 1961. Population growth. Science, 134:827-829.
6. Youth Board News, 9(1). 1957. New York City.
7. PiEL, G. 1961. Science in the Cause of Man. A. Knopf, N. Y.
8. Snow, C. P. 1960. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cam¬
bridge University Press.
9. Linton, C. D. 1962. What happened to common sense? Saturday Evening
Post, 235(17) :10-16.
10. Mackay, Charles. 1852. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and
the Madness of Crowds. Reprinted by L. C. Page and Co., Boston, 1932.
11. Joint report of the study group on smoking and health. Smoking and
health. Science, 125:1129-1133.
12. Time, 78(23) : 91-93. December 8, 1961.
13. Osborn, F. 1957. Our reproductive potential. Science, 125:531-534.
14. Tishler, M. 1961. The debt of discovery to learning. Merck, Sharp and
Dohme.
15. Fosdick, R. B. 1941. A Review for 19^1. The Rockefeller Foundation. New
York, N. Y.
16. Hughes, M. Y. 1961. An Academy ... of Arts and Letters. Transactions of
the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 50:3-14.
17. Newsletter, 3(3) :1. 1962. American Institute of Biological Sciences.
18. Hammond, E. C. 1962. The elfects of smoking. Scientific American, 207 (1) :
39-51.
19. Greenberg, D. S. 1962. Cigarettes and cancer. Science, 136:638-639.
NATURAL SCIENCES
WILDLIFE RESTORATION IN WISCONSIN
A, W. SCHORGER
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The restoration of wildlife falls under the following headings:
1) Stocking of species of animals still found in our state in areas
where they have been extirpated; 2) Introduction of species that
have become extinct in the state; 3) Planting of exotic species.
Long experience has shown that it is preferable to concentrate on
animals native to the state rather than to import foreign species
with the hope that they will fill a void. Foreign introductions are
seldom successful and leave a memory only of costly failures. Many
plantings are made against the advice of game biologists but carried
out under the guise of “good public relations.” Present land utiliza¬
tion prohibits attempts to restore any of the large extinct mammals
such as the cougar, bison, elk, caribou, and moose.
Three members of the deer family are extinct. The woodland
caribou occurred in extreme northern Wisconsin in very small
numbers and was soon exterminated. Twenty Newfoundland cari¬
bou were liberated on the Pierce estate, on the Brule River, Douglas
County in 1906. All are supposed to have died on the estate. The
moose was uncommon except in five of the extreme northwestern
counties.^ The native population became extinct about 1900. Since
this date an occasional moose has wandered into the state from
Minnesota, and from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where moose
from Isle Royale had been liberated. An individual immigrant may
be seen in the future but there is no chance for the moose to become
established with us. The elk was once common in the open terrain
of southern and western Wisconsin.^ The last certain date of its
occurrence is 1866. The state in 1913, 1917, and 1932 released three
shipments of elk from Yellowstone Park and Jackson Hole in Vilas
County. None remains due to poaching and other causes. The white¬
tailed deer, on the other hand is remarkably adaptable.^ After re¬
ceiving adequate protection it moved southward so that today it is
doubtful if there is a county in the state where deer are not present.
The problem with this deer is the harvesting of the surplus popu¬
lation. In many areas in the northern part of the state the herds are
1 A, W. Schorger. 1956. The moose in early Wisconsin. Trans, Wis, Acad. Set. 45:
1-10.
2 - . 1954. The elk in early Wisconsin. Trans. Wise. Acad. Sci. 43:1-23.
® - . 1953. The white-tailed deer in early Wisconsin. Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci.
42:197-247.
21
22 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
too large to be sustained properly by the local vegetation .This
results in stunted growth of the deer and death from starvation
in severe winters. A long-range economic problem is the great re¬
duction in tree reproduction as a result of overbrowsing.
At the turn of the century it was inconceivable that the timber
wolf was worthy of protection. Today there is a generally held
belief that no member of our fauna should be allowed to become
extinct if it is practical to save it. The timber wolf once roamed
the entire state. Thompson^ studied the habits of a pack of four
wolves in Oneida County and found that it ranged over a territory
of 150 square miles. One trapper had pursued this pack over a
period of 15 years for the sake of the bounty. The bounty on both
wolves and coyotes was withdrawn from July, 1943, to March, 1945,
then restored in deference to local public protest. The timber wolf
received protection again in 1957 by a closed season but as long as
a bounty on coyotes exists it will be impossible to avoid trapping
wolves. The present status of the wolf is unknown, but a few are
believed to still exist in the state. The range occupied by wolves is
virtually void of livestock so that economic damage would be almost
nil. A study of the food habits showed deer remains in 97 percent
of the scats ; however, there was no evidence that the wolves could
keep the deer population within desirable bounds. The eradication
of wolves on the grounds that they kill deer is thoughtless, as the
predation may be a benefit to the deer population where it is
too high.
The coyote, morphologically so similar to the timber wolf, is
amply capable of holding its own due to its well deserved reputation
for cleverness. The unfortunate bounty on the coyote, if continued,
will lead to the extermination of its larger brother. In 1945 bounties
were paid on 4,134 wolves and coyotes. The number bountied in
1953 dropped to 1,703, but rose to 4,498 adults and 324 cubs in
1960. The total expended on coyote bounties in 1960 was $93,200, a
sum that could and should have been expended on worthy conserva¬
tion projects. The bounty merely removes a surplus population that
nature eventually eliminates without a monetary consideration.
Two valuable furbearers, the fisher (Maries pennanti) and mar¬
ten (Maries americana) , became extinct about 1920. Their restora¬
tion was desirable per se. There was also the possibility that if they
became sufficiently numerous to permit trapping the returns to the
trapper might be sufficient to diminish the pressure for bounties.
In 1953, prior to suggesting to the Wisconsin Conservation De¬
partment the stocking of marten, I had considerable correspond¬
ence with state departments, and private organizations to deter-
^ D. Q. Thompson. 1952, Travel, range, and food habits of timber wolves in Wiscon¬
sin. Jour. Mam. 33:429—442,
1962]
Schorger — Wildlife Restoration
23
mine if marten could be obtained at a reasonable price. It finally
developed that the state of Montana would provide some of the
animals in exchange for eggs of the walleyed pike. The procure¬
ment of five marten from Montana and their release on Stockton
Island in Lake Superior on November 19, 1953 was performed very
efficiently by the Wisconsin Conservation Department that has
since made an annual survey of the wildlife of the island. In June,
1956, five pine marten from the state game farm were also released
on the island. Dr. William H. Marshall, with others, did live-
trapping on the island from September 13 to 18, 1954. One imma¬
ture marten was caught showing that there had been some breed¬
ing from the original stock. Tracks of marten were seen as late as
March 18, 1959. It was my suggestion that the marten be released
on Stockton Island, an area of 10,560 acres, with the thought that
they could breed here unmolested and the surplus trapped and
released in a suitable area on the mainland. The project has been
far from successful, but seems to illustrate the difficulty in restor¬
ing an extirpated species. The area of the island may have been
too small, or too few marten were rel eased. Food does not seem
to be a problem since even in winter dead deer are available.
In September, 1955, having read of the great increase of the
fisher in the state of New York, I suggested to Mr, Cyril Rabat of
the Wisconsin Conservation Department, that some fisher be ob¬
tained for release in our state. An exchange for quail was made.
Two shipments were received on February 28 and March 16, 1956,
respectively. The releases consisted of two males and five females.
Three additional fisher were received on January 17, 1957. Subse¬
quently 20 fisher were received from the state of Minnesota through
the agency of the U. S. Forest Service. All of the animals were
released in northwestern Forest County. In 1960 one fisher was
trapped accidentally near Crandon, Forest County, and another
near Carpenter Lake, northeast of Eagle River, Vilas County. The
latter animal was released in April, 1959, near the Nettleton fire
tower, hence had traveled 17 miles airline. Since at the present
time there is no difficulty in finding tracks of the fisher on and near
the release area, there is reason to believe that the transplants will
be successful.
The beaver is an excellent example of an animal that can spread
and maintain itself with no other aid than protection from over¬
harvesting. A century ago it was extinct in southern Wisconsin,
but now is to be found in most of the southwestern counties. Dur¬
ing the 1959 season, 11,515 beaver were trapped in 50 of the coun¬
ties of the state. Crawford and Grant Counties contributed approxi¬
mately 200 beaver each. It is doubtful if the state ever furnished as
many beaver as at present. Indian and white trappers were unre-
24 Wisconsin Academy of Sciem^ces, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
strained and thought nothing of exterminating a colony. In some
areas, due to building dams and flooding lands, the beaver becomes
a nuisance and must be Removed,
The first known release of the white-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus
townsendii) in the state was made about 1900,® Of 10 releases made
prior to 1945 only three resulted in the establishment of new col¬
onies, Lemke® traced the history of eight releases made subsequent
to 1945 and concluded that additional releases v/ould be useless since
this hare had spread into all parts of the state except the extreme
northern tip. It is by no means as common as the cottontail and is
unlikely to become so. It is at least an addition to our fauna.
A great, tangible achievement of the Wisconsin Conservation
Department is the creation and development of waterfowl habitat.
Horicon Marsh, Germania Marsh, Pine Island, Meadow Valley
Flowage, Wood County Public Hunting and Fishing Grounds, and
Crex Meadows, are especially worthy of mention. During the mi¬
grations Horicon Marsh draws hundreds of whistling swans and
many thousands of geese. It was estimated from an aerial census
that at one time in the spring of 1961 there were 100,000 geese at
Horicon Marsh and the surrounding area. The marsh has no small
aesthetic value for in the fall of 1960 approximately 80,000 people
came to see the display of waterfowl. This heartening form of utili¬
zation may in the future surpass hunting in importance.
The Wisconsin Conservation Department has been active in
attempting to increase the wood duck population. Breeding birds
were obtained from the Illinois Conservation Department in ex¬
change for ruffed grouse. The wood ducks were turned over to the
Badger State Sportsman’s Club, at La Crosse. In 1958 and 1960
this club released 855 wood ducks hatched from eggs laid in cap¬
tivity. It is too early to determine the results of this program.
The sharp-tailed grouse (Pedioecetes phasianellus campestris)
was formerly abundant in southern Wisconsin. The oak openings
which it inhabited by preference earned for it the name of ''bur
oak” grouse. This species is far less tolerant of civilization than the
prairie chicken so that its range was soon limited to the northern
part of the state. The habitat requirement is semi-prairie contain¬
ing grasses, and many shrubs and open woodlands."^ Management
tools to maintain a suitable habitat comprise spraying with herbi¬
cides, bulldozing, and burning. Where feasible burning is the cheap¬
est and most efficient practice. The Wisconsin Conservation Depart¬
ment is managing several areas. Burning has been very successful
5 A. Leopold. 1945. The distribution of Wisconsin hares. Trans, Wis. Acad, Sci, 37:
<>0. W. Lemke. 1956, White-tailed jackrabbit releases. Wis, Gonsv, Dept, 5 pp. Mimeo.
1-14.
'^W. B. Grange. 1950. Wisconsin grouse problems. Wis, Consv, Dept, S18 pp.
1962]
Schorger — Wildlife Restoration
25
in the jack pine barrens of Douglas County. Here two or three
burnings within a period of three or four years are necessary.
Burning releases the seeds from the hard jack pine cones and the
young pines that spring up must be destroyed by another burning.
Other areas being managed for sharp-tailed grouse are located in
the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests, the Dorothy Dunn
area in the Northern Highland State Forest, Vilas County, the
Spread Eagle Area in Florence County, and the Coleman Lake area
in Marinette County. There is no immediate prospect that the popu¬
lation of this grouse will become dangerously low.
Disregarding outlying remnants, our prairie chicken (Tympanu-
chus cupido americanus) population is limited to the Buena Vista
Marsh, southern Portage County, and the contiguous Leola Marsh
in Adams County. The prairie chicken demands large areas of
grassland, now very scarce in Wisconsin, of which not over one-
fourth is wooded.® Vital for survival of the prairie chicken is nest¬
ing cover and winter food. An area of 40 acres per section, covered
with grass of the proper height, will provide adequate nesting
cover. Food patches of standing corn for winter use need be no
closer to each other than four miles. The Conservation Department
is now managing 5,052 acres of which 3,623 acres are in the Buena
Vista Marsh. In addition there are about 5,000 acres in the Soil
Bank, This spring the population should begin recovering from the
low of the cycle, and if the hatching season is favorable, Mr. F. N.
Hamerstrom estimates that the fall population should be 1,000 to
1,500 birds in the two marshes. The full beneficial effects of the
management program will not be attainable for several years. There
is little doubt but that this species can be retained as a part of our
fauna. It is questionable that the population will increase sufficiently
to permit an open season, but this is of secondary importance.
Planting of ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) particularly on
islands, has seldom been successful. Warden William Barnhart
stocked some of these grouse on Washington Island in 1900. This
grouse, though supposedly present in 1910, eventually disappeared.
The state restocked Washington Island in 1956. Madeline Island
was also stocked in the years 1954-56. Prior to this time I spent
several vacations on the island. None of the inhabitants with whom
I talked had ever seen a ruffed grouse on the island. The present
status of the species on the two islands is unknown.
The quail is a most difficult bird to manage in Wisconsin. It was
incredibly abundant in the period 1845-1854.® The most favorable
8 P. N. Hamerstrom, O. E. Mattson, and F. Hamerstrom. A guide to prairie chicken
management, Wis. €onsv. Dept., Tech. Wildl. Bull. 15:127 pp.
» A. W. Schorger, 1944, The quail in early Wisconsin, Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. 36;
77-103,
26 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
factor was a succession of mild winters. It is reasonably certain
that at this time there was ample food and cover. In 1854 it was
stated that the cultivated portion of Dane County, consisting of
about 1,600 farms, comprised only one-eighth of its area. The quail
population declined so rapidly that private introductions were be¬
gun in 1884 and continued into the early 1900's. Quail were
imported from Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kansas. These
plantings were failures. No thought seems to have been given to
the unsuitability of southern quail for survival during a Wisconsin
winter. The experimental plantings of native birds in recent years
by the Wisconsin Conservation Department soon disappeared. Quail
released in the Arboretum at Madison in 1950 and in Waukesha
County in 1953 and 1955, simply vanished. A planting at Horicon
Marsh, Dodge County, in 1950, disappeared within less than a year,
while two plantings in Milwaukee County in 1950 and 1952 survived
for two years.
The precise requirements for perpetuating quail in an area after
it has been stocked are unknown. The two factors, weather and
food, are seemingly readily capable of appraisement, yet differences
of opinion arise. Errington^® thought that strong well-fed birds
could survive the severest cold. On the other hand, Leopold^^ found
that fat, well-fed quail died during the winter of 1935-36. Mor¬
tality ranged from 30 to 83 percent. Buss'^^ followed the population
trends of quail on an area in Dunn County. The greatest loss
occurred just prior to the nesting season and was due presumably
to predation, though supporting data are lacking. There is general
agreement that the greatest need for quail restoration is cover.
Between '‘clean farming’' and the fervor for destroying every shrub
along the highways, cover has been reduced to a minimum. The
recent program for quail management by Kabat and Thompson^^
stresses the necessity of hedgerows. Restoration requires a mini¬
mum area of 15,000 acres with one mile of hedgerow for every 550
acres. Management of this magnitude, to be successful, requires the
full cooperation of the owners of the farm lands.
Our largest gamebird, the wild turkey, has shown resistance to
establishment. It was not common originally except in the wooded
hilly areas of southwestern Wisconsin. The extremely severe winter
of 1842-43, with its deep, crusted snow reduced the population to
a remnant that gradually disappeared. The first attempt at restora-
10 P. L. Erring-ton. 1933, The wintering of the Wisconsin bobwhite. Trans. Wis. Acad.
8ci., 28:1-35.
11 A. Leopold. 1937. The effect of the winter of 3 935-36 on Wisconsin quail. Am. Midi.
Nat., 18 : 408-4 16.
12 1. O. Buss, H. Mattison, and F. M. Kozlik, 1947. The bobwhite quail in Dunn
County, Wisconsin. Wis. <Consv. Bull., 12(7) :6— 13.
12 C. Kabat and D. R. Thompson. 1960. A program for quail and upland game man¬
agement. Wis. 'Gonsv. Dept., Special Wildl. Kept. 4 : 21 2-25 3.
1962]
Schorger — Wildlife Restoration
27
tion of which I am aware was made in 1887 when a pair of wild
turkeys from the Indian Territory was released in woods at Lake
Koshkonong:^*^ Crossing with domestic turkeys soon followed so that
birds of pure stock never became established. A few turkeys were
released by the Wisconsin Conservation Department prior to 1929
but no records were kept of their number. Between 1929 and 1939
there were planted, mainly in Grant and Sauk Counties a total of
2,942 turkeysd® Though the best stock of game farm birds available
was used, the turkeys refused to become wild and associated with
their domestic relatives. An open season in 1939 for bow hunting
resulted in the killing of 54 turkeys. It was thought that hunting
would remove the least wary birds and render the remainder more
wild. Five turkeys from the Sauk County plant appeared in 1937
near Grand Marsh, Adams County, and became permanent resi¬
dents. The last member mixed with domestic blood, died Febru¬
ary 1, 1958.^®
The project was renewed in 1954. In 1954, 1956, and 1957 a total
of 746 game farm turkeys were released in northern Juneau County
on the Meadow Valley wildlife management area.^^ The plantings
have undergone various vicissitudes. The blackhead disease was in¬
troduced in 1937 through the release of infected young raised at
the game farm at Poynette. In March, 1959, a blizzard deposited 36
to 45 inches of snow.^® Some birds died of starvation while the sur¬
vivors were in poor condition for breeding. On May 7, 1960, seven
inches of wet snow fell causing the females to abandon their nests.
May and June were exceptionally rainy, wetness being highly inju¬
rious to the young that hatched. The desire to restore the wild tur¬
key is understandable. There is no doubt also that the Meadow
Valley area was the best available for restoration, as the wild tur¬
key requires a large tract of wilderness with a minimum of human
disturbance. The Meadow Valley area was originally a marsh. It
has been greatly changed by repeated burnings and the digging of
drainage ditches. It is now covered with a growth of trees, jack
pine, aspen, oak and other hardwoods. The terrain is by no means
ideal for turkeys and the area lies north of their original range.
The spread of the turkeys from Juneau County into Adams, Wood,
Jackson and Monroe Counties indicates a search for a more suit¬
able habitat. There is a high hunting pressure for deer, within the
A. W, Schorger, 1942. The wild turkey in early Wisconsin. Wilson Bull., 54 :173-182.
P. Hopkins. 1940. The wild turkey problem in Wisconsin, Wis. ^Gonsv. Bull., 5(12) :
47-48.
13 A. W. Schorger. 1958. Extirpation of a flock of wild turkeys in Adams County,
Wisconsin. Pass. Pigeon, 20:170-171,
1'^ S. Plis and G, Hartman. 1958. Are the turkeys taking? Wis. Gonsv. Bull., 23(2) :
11-14.
13 S. Plis. 1960. How are our turkeys doing? Wis, Gonsv. Dept. Ms. 3 pp.
28 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
birds’ range, which aside from poaching, cannot fail to have a dis¬
turbing influence. Long experience in turkey management has
shown that the first essential is stocking with completely wild birds.
These are difficult to obtain in sufficient number. Game farm birds
rarely have the ability to establish themselves. In the long run,
therefore, it is unlikely that there will be a successful stocking of
the turkey in Wisconsin.
There is always the hope that game birds of foreign origin can
be found to fill the areas vacated by native species. The only spe¬
cies that has produced respectable populations is the ring-necked
pheasant (Phasianus colchicus). Private introductions of the pheas¬
ant in Wisconsin began in 1895 and continued for many years be¬
fore the species became well established.^® Little knowledge of the
bird was shown when the state planted 50 pheasants near Wash¬
burn in the fall of 1897. There was no chance for survival in this
locality. Due to the Pabst liberations beginning in 1911, the pheas¬
ant became firmly established in the southeastern counties. The
state program of raising and liberating pheasants, begun in 1928
and continued without interruption, served to spread them over
four-fifths of the state. The peak populations reached in the early
1940’s have never been equalled since. This condition is due in part
to a steady reduction in suitable cover.
It was once thought that the Hungarian partridge (Perdix per-
dix) would become an abundant bird in the North Central States.
Habitat proved to be more subtle than was anticipated with the
result that most of the plantings failed. Apparently the summers
must not be too warm, the rainfall should be between 15 and 25
inches annually, and the terrain open with rich soil. The first re¬
lease of this bird was made in 1911 by Gustav Pabst on his farm
near Oconomowoc. Based on hunting statistics, a peak was reached
in 1939 when 50,478 birds were killed. The kill declined to 2,636 in
1945, a low that was followed by a closed season. The kill was ap¬
proximately 50,000 birds annually from 1950 through 1954, since
which time the population has declined steadily. The data indicate
that the species may be cyclic. This partridge continued to increase
in Ohio and Indiana until about 1937-40 then declined rapidly.
Westerskov"® concluded that the bird is not cyclic in Ohio. McCabe
and Hawkins,^^ in their comprehensive study of the Hungarian par¬
tridge in Wisconsin, concluded: ‘‘Despite averages, the climographs
13 A, W. Schorger. 1947, The introduction of pheasants into Wisconsin, Pass. Pigeon,
9 :101-102,
20 K, Westerskov, 1956, History and distribution of the Hungarian partridge in Ohio,
1909-1948, Ohio Jour. Set,, 56:65—70.
21 R. A. McCabe and A. S. Hawkins. 1946. The Hungarian partirdge in Wisconsin.
Am. Midi. Nat., 36 :l-75.
1962]
Schorger — Wildlife Restoration
29
emphasize the facts that the climate in the north central United
States does not conform to the European optimum during the nest¬
ing season of the partridge and that severe cold alone is not a lim¬
iting factor/' It is doubtful if management could effect an increase
in the population to any degree commensurate with the cost.
The chukar partridge (Alectoris graeca chukar) has refused to
become established in spite of numerous plantings. Between 1935
and 1945, 35,285 pen-reared chukars were released in Wisconsin,
some in every county. All disappeared within one year after release.
Chukars usually disperse widely after release. As a result, too few
birds may settle down in any one locality to form a permanent col¬
ony. A semiarid, rocky, broken country seems to be essential to the
chukar and Wisconsin can not provide a habitat of this kind. In
1950 and 1952 a total of 122 European red-legged partridges (Alec¬
toris rufa rufa) were released in Waushara County to determine
the length of survival. They vanished within one and one-half years.
A project for stocking the capercaille (Tetrao urogallus) and
black grouse (Lyrurus tetrix) in Wisconsin was initiated by Gar¬
diner Bump of the Fish and Wildlife Service.^^ The capercaille is a
large grouse, the males weighing up to twelve pounds. It is a bird of
coniferous forests and its food from October to April consists
almost entirely of the needles and buds of conifers. The flesh be¬
comes so tainted from this diet as to be unpalatable. Outer Island
was selected for release of the birds owing to its isolation and as an
apparently suitable habitat. There would be little incentive for emi¬
gration since the nearest islands are distant 4.5 miles which is the
limit of the flight capability of the capercaille. The stock was ob¬
tained from northern Europe. Releases of 26 capercaille and 9 black
grouse were made in the fall of 1949, and 4 each of capercaille and
black grouse in the spring of 1950. Of the 60 birds purchased only
43 were released, the others having died of disease and accident.
The total cost of the project was $7,954.50, or $185 for each bird
released. This is not a high figure when we consider that in 1950 it
cost a hunter $187 to kill a turkey gobbler in Texas. Prior to re¬
lease, some predators, raptors and foxes, were eliminated. Two
black grouse are known to have been killed by hawks shortly after
liberation, A female capercaille, seen in September, 1950, was the
last bird observed. Though disease and predation played a part, the
main reason for the failure of the plantings remains unknown. The
causes of the decline or disappearance of a population remains one
of the most baffling problems in wildlife management. Many intro¬
ductions of the two species into North America have been made
22 J. M, Keener. 1955. A study of the introduction, and survival of capercaillie and
black grouse. Wis. Wildl. Res., P. R. Quart. P'rog. Repts., 14(1) :195— 204.
30 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
and all have ended in failure.^^ A case close to home was the plant¬
ing of 201 capercaille and black grouse on Grand Island, Lake Su¬
perior, in 1904 and 1905 by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. All
the birds vanished within a year or two. Hope is eternal, so it
should occasion no surprise if, within another generation, the stock¬
ing is repeated on the basis that it was not done properly in the
first place.
Some members of the Legislature, in a moment of exuberance,
decided that since Wisconsin was a prairie state it should have
prairie dogs. Some were procured and released in June, 1881 on
the grounds surrounding the Capitol. A local newspaper was not
long in printing an obituary: “The prairie dogs which the state
tried to nurse went up the spout. They wouldn’t live.”^^ Since the
above date several other species have gone “up the spout”; how¬
ever, in view of the difficulties so frequently encountered, restora¬
tion of wildlife in Wisconsin should be judged highly successful.
28 J. C, Phillips. 1928. Wild birds introduced or transplanted in North America. 17. 8.
Dept. Agr., Tech. Bull. 61:64 pp.
2^ Madison Democrat June 29, July 20, 1881.
BIONOMICS OF PODISUS SPP. ASSOCIATED WITH THE
INTRODUCED PINE SAWFLY, DIPRION SIMILIS
(HTG.), IN WISCONSIN^
Harry C. Coppel and Philip A. Jones^
* University of Wisconsin, Madison
The dearth of insect parasites of the larval stages of the intro¬
duced pine sawfly, Diprion similis (Htg.), is compensated for, in
part, by the presence of insect predators, particularly in the family
Pentatomidae. It was possible, during studies on the overall effects
of biotic factors which help to reduce populations of this forest
insect pest, to collect series of predacious pentatomids in the genus
Podisus. Data on their seasonal history in the plots at Amery, Wis¬
consin, were accumulated and extensive laboratory studies were
undertaken at Madison, Wisconsin, to clarify their biologies. Data
were accumulated on four species and one hybrid.
Materials and Methods
In the Amery, Wisconsin, area D. similis has two distinct but
overlapping generations each year. Large collections of sawfly
larvae, required for other studies, were made in June and July and
again from late August through September to coincide with peri¬
ods of greatest larval abundance. During these periods, penta¬
tomids of all ages were accumulated in the collections and main¬
tained in the laboratory at Amery. Throughout the field season
(May to October) individual pentatomids observed feeding on
larvae of D. similis were collected and maintained singly in cages.
Collections were made by beating both small white pine trees and
the lower branches of large white pine trees with a 10 ft. bamboo
pole. The sawfly larvae and pentatomids were collected from a 9 x 9
ft. cotton mat placed under the trees. Another collecting method
utilized a circular, 4 ft. diameter, cloth beating sheet mounted on a
steel wire loop attached to a 5 ft. handle. A 4 ft. beating stick was
used to dislodge the insects from the branches. The latter method
was ideal when larval populations were low, when a high degree
of maneuverability was desired, or when strong winds were
encountered.
1 Approved for publication by the Director of the Wisconsin Agricultural Experi¬
ment Station. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Con¬
servation Department.
2 Associate Professor and Project Assistant, respectively, Department of Entomology,
University of Wisconsin, Madison 6, Wisconsin.
31
32 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The pentatomids collected with the sawfly larval collections and
on which no feeding data were established, were placed in wooden¬
framed, screen-sided cages (15 x 9 x 9 in. or 7 x 7 x 5.5 in.) . The
cages were stocked with sawfly larvae to provide food for the preda¬
cious species. The predacious species were removed and placed (sev¬
eral males and females of the same species) in cages to obtain mat¬
ing pairs. Mated pairs were isolated in 4 x 4 x 2.5 in. cages and pro¬
vided with food, moisture, and oviposition sites. Food consisted of
larvae of D, similis, moisture was provided by soaking sections of
dental wick in water, and oviposition sites consisted of either white
pine twigs with needles or strands of excelsior. At the end of the
fleld season all insect material was transferred to Madison.
In the Madison laboratory attempts were made to rear each spe¬
cies throughout the year to provide data on their biology. The mated
pairs were transferred to different rearing cages (Figure 1) con¬
sisting of one pint ice cream cartons provided with petri-dish cov¬
ers. Continuous moisture was supplied through a dental wick, sta¬
bilized by a glass sleeve. Excelsior was used exclusively in the
containers for perching and oviposition sites. Each cage was sup¬
ported above a water source by a wooden rack constructed to hold
four such cages. The racks were set up in series by species (Fig¬
ure 2). This technique was modified from Scheel, Beck, and Medler
(1958).
Larvae and fresh pupae of the greater wax moth. Galleria mel-
lonella (L.) were utilized as food. Stock cultures were maintained
in the laboratory by a method similar to that described by Beck
(1960).
Progeny of mated pairs of pentatomids were reared in the lab¬
oratory throughout the year at room temperature (24 ± 7° C.) with
no attempt to vary other environmental factors, or to simulate nat¬
ural conditions such as those required for hibernation. Numerous
experiments were undertaken on the effects of low temperature on
dormancy and oviposition response, feeding habits etc. and these
are treated under the particular species involved.
Seasonal history notes were compiled from field observations.
Notes from laboratory studies were accumulated to include data on
premating period, mating interval, duration of mating, preoviposi-
tion period, number of matings, time from adult to first egg laying,
length of life of adult, length of period from egg hatching to adult,
number of egg batches, arrangement of eggs, period between egg
laying, percentage of eggs hatched, time in days for eggs to hatch
and time spent in each instar.
Eggs and nymphal exuviae of each species were measured with
a binocular microscope equipped with a calibrated ocular microm¬
eter. Egg measurements were made at the widest and longest points.
1962]
Coppel & J ones-— Biodynamics of Podisus
33
Figure 1, Longitudinal section through rearing con¬
tainer. A, petri dish cover; B, 1 pint ice cream carton;
C, excelsior; D, dental wick; E, Masonite support; F,
glass tubing sleeve; G, 4 oz. jar containing water.
34 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Figure 2. Group of rearing containers.
Micropylar processes were measured from their tips to their lowest
points of attachment i.e., the bottom outside edge of the process
where it becomes confluent with the egg shell. Head width measure¬
ments from exuviae were made between the annular sclerites along
the mesodorsal margins of the eyes (Figure 10) .
Illustrations were made of the eggs and their characteristic struc¬
tures. To facilitate study of the pseudoperculum, micropylar proc¬
esses, and egg-bursters, excised sections were placed on slides and
examined with a binocular microscope at 160X. To retain the sec¬
tions on a slide, a strip of transparent mending tape (Scotch Brand
Magic Mending Tape No. 810, Minnesota Mining and Manufactur¬
ing Co., St. Paul, Minnesota) used as a mounting medium, was
inverted on a slide and held at each end with short strips of mask¬
ing tape. Use of the tape for mounting egg segments was efficient
as both transmitted and incident light could be used for examining
the sections under the microscope.
Adult insects, at death, were pinned and later identified by
P. Ashlock and R. Froeschner of the Insect Identification and Para¬
site Introduction Research Branch, Entomology Research Division,
United States Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland,
and L. A. Kelton, Taxonomy Section, Entomology Research Insti¬
tute, Canada Department of Agriculture, Ottawa, Canada.
1962]
Coppel & Jones— Biodynamics of Podisus
35
All data were treated with standard statistical procedures
(Snedecor and Cochran 1959).
Results and Discussion
The field collected Podisus spp. were separated arbitrarily into
groups by gross external characteristics and reared as five separate
entities before being authoritatively identified as Podisus maculi-
ventris (Say)^ P. serieventris Uhl., P. placidus Uhl. and P. mo-
destus Uhl. A fifth group derived from a mating of a female P.
maculiventris and a male P. serieventris was intermediate between
the two and vfith characters of both.
The most common species in collections made in the summer of
1960 was P. maculiventris, whereas the following summer P.
placidus was more prevalent. Collected in lesser numbers during
both summers were P. serieventris and P. modestus in that order.
Data accumulated during the 1960-1962 laboratory rearings of
Podisus spp. have been placed in tabular form (Tables 1-5) or are
included in the text.
Podisus serieventris Uhl.
Field collections of P. serieventris indicate that this species has
a single generation each year. It overwinters as a hibernating adult,
but can be found in collections most commonly from late July
through early September. Nymphs in the third instar were cob
lected on July 22, the earliest collection date in 1960. Fifth stage
nymphs were found four days later. The first field record for an
adult in 1960 was August 15, compared to a 1961 record of nearly
three weeks earlier on July 20. The extended period of three weeks
in 1960 between first observing a fifth stage nymph and the first
sighting of an adult can be accounted for by irregular collection
dates for Podisus spp. An adult female was collected from white
pine foliage as late as October 24, 1961.
According to Prebble (1933) the majority of adults in Nova
Scotia, Canada, are blackish-grey in color with some greyish-brown.
All specimens taken in the present study show the former color.
From the rearings, which have been carried through the third gen¬
eration, no color variants were observed. In some instances, after
specimens were dead and pinned for some time, the greyish-cast
was replaced by a brownish one along with a somewhat oily
appearance.
The adults cannot be sexed by size, although the females are
usually larger than the males ( Table 1 ) . The humeral width of the
pronotum was measured with a vernier caliper and corresponds
closely with measurements taken by Prebble (1933),
36 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The data on adult longevity (Table 2A) were accumulated from
those records which associated specific adults with dates. From the
limited data available on longevity differences between the sexes,
Table 1. Humeral Width of Podisus spp. Adults
Table 2. Bionomic Characters of Podisus spp.
1962]
Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus
37
the females with a mean length of life of 241 days are longer-lived
than the males, by approximately 50 days. The length of life varied
from 88 to 488 days for the females and 53 to 325 days for the
males. For P, serieventris to complete its life cycle of one generation
per year, the adult should have a longevity period of approximately
320 days. It is probable that the higher longevity values recorded
in the laboratory rearing are more realistic and indicative of field
conditions than those less than 320 days.
Longevity records do not indicate actual field conditions, since
the records are from roarings at room temperature and do not take
into account any period of overwintering in a dormant stage. Ex¬
cept for teneral specimens, field collected adults cannot be aged. A
few of the shorter longevity periods may be from adults which had
overwintered the previous year.
In the laboratory, the premating period, or the time spent as an
adult before the first mating, was recorded on two occasions as 21
and 40 days. This was from late February to early April. The mat¬
ing interval or time between matings varied from 3 to 81 days,
with an average of 32 days, based on five observations. This aver¬
age is disproportionately high as the 3 low periods of 3, 7, and 10
days are offset by two relatively high intervals of 59 and 81 days.
As in other observations of this type, discrepancies are bound to
occur, since observations have been limited to infrequent intervals
during the normal work day.
Three isolated pairs of P. serieventris mated more than once.
One pair mated three times between March 30 and May 4, another
pair mated four times from March 31 to April 20 and a more sexu¬
ally active pair mated six times, on November 11, 14, February 3,
and April 3, 13, and 20.
The duration of mating was noted on four occasions as 5, 6.5, 7
and 8.5 hours. It is probable that the average mating period is 7
hours or more.
In two cases, unmated females reared from their immature stages
deposited eggs 10 and 69 days after becoming adults. In addition, a
fifth stage nymph collected on July 26 was reared in isolation and
moulted to an adult female on August 3. This female deposited the
; first batch of eggs 12 days later on August 15 and the second batch
of eggs 34 days later on September 6. The eggs were infertile and
j did not hatch. The adult lived for at least another five months
I when its identity was lost after it was incorporated with another
I rearing lot.
During the last three weeks of January, 1961, an experiment was
’ undertaken to determine whether a short exposure to cool tem-
; peratures would stimulate mating and egg laying. It was apparent
, in the laboratory that a dormant period existed in the early winter
38 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
when activity, mating, and egg laying was at a minimum even
though the adults were held at room temperature of about 23 to
27° C. One group of adults was held at 4.4° C. for three weeks while
a comparable group were maintained at room temperature. Those
held at room temperature were sexually active and either mated or
laid eggs at 8, 23, 78 and 80 days after beginning the test. Those
adults exposed to cold required 51, 55 and 58 days for either mating
or egg laying to occur after being returned to room temperature.
Exposure to 4.4° C. at this period retarded the sexual development
of the adults and consequently was ineffective in increasing the
number of laboratory reared generations.
The preoviposition period (from first mating to first oviposition)
(Table 2B), recorded from 14 occurrences, varied from 1 to 13 days
with one exception ; a period of 72 days elapsed between an observed
mating and when the first eggs were laid. This latter extreme value
was excluded from the statistics in Table 2B.
Similarly, as with the preoviposition data, the periods between
egg laying (Table 2C) were marked by one high value of 22 days,
the remaining 20 observations falling between 1 and 11 days. If
the high value was excluded the mean or average period between
egg laying would be 4.4 days instead of the 5.2 days shown.
The eggs of P. serieventris (Figure 3) are characteristic of the
genus Podisus although each species has individual differences as
noted in the accompanying key. Eggs are .86 ±: S. E. .004 mm. in
width and 1.10 ± S. E. .006 mm. in length (Table 5). The micro-
pylar processes (chorionic processes of Esselbaugh 1946) range
from 9-13 in number and are .22 to .25 mm. in length, or approxi¬
mately one fifth the length of the egg.
The micro pylar processes (Figure 8) consist of a “central canal”
for sperm passage surrounded by a porous protein, the ‘'air
sponge”, which allows gaseous exchange (Southwood 1956). They
are closely appressed to the pseudoperculum until the egg is ex¬
truded from the oviduct when they recurve and dry to assume their
final positions (Figure 8).
The pseudoperculum, as defined by Southwood (1956), is the type
of egg cap occurring in the Pentatomidae, and is differentiated
from a true operculum in that it is essentially the same structure
as the rest of the chorion. It bears no fixed relationship to the micro-
pylar processes and lacks a distinct sealing bar.
The egg burster (Figure 9) is well developed in the genus
Podisus, but does not have species characteristics. Its function in
hatching has been described and documented by Southwood (1956)
with an extensive list of references as have the other structures
and processes associated with eggs of the terrestrial Heteroptera.
1962]
Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus
39
Usually attached to the egg burster and associated with it is a thin
membrane, the embryonic cuticle of the first nymphal instar ( South-
wood 1956). It would appear from the relative position of this
cuticle or exuvium and the egg burster that the latter mechanically
assists the shedding of this '‘first’' exuvium by the soft nymph.
Figure 3. P. serieventris Uhl. egg; Figure 4. P. placidus Uhl.,
Chorionic ornamentation; Figure 5. P. placidus UhL, section of
pseudoperculum ; Figure 6. P. serieventris Uhl., Chorionic spines
draped with serous mantle; Figure 7. P. serieventris Uhl., sec¬
tion of pseudoperculum; Figure 8. P. serieventris UhL, micro-
pylar processes; Figure 9. P. modestus UhL, egg burster; Figure
10. Podisus sp., diagrammatic view of third instar head capsule
showing location of head capsule measurement (W).
40 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The chorion of P. serieventris is armed with minute spines (Fig¬
ure 6) which provide some semblance of a pattern (Figure 7). The
chorial spines do not cover the entire surface of the eggs in any one
egg batch, and as noted by Esselbaugh (1946) they may be longer
on the central portion of the pseudoperculum and on the upper half
of the side walls. A serous mantle which envelopes the egg (Cou¬
turier 1935) is a noticeable feature where it becomes draped over
the spines (Figure 6).
The maximum number of eggs recorded from one female of P.
serieventris was 162 eggs deposited in 10 batches. In two other
instances 82 and 104 eggs were each laid in a total of 5 batches.
One female was observed depositing eggs on a cage cover. Eight
eggs had already been laid when oviposition was first noted. Seven¬
teen eggs, or those from the 9th to the 25th inclusive were depos¬
ited in 42.5 minutes. Ten eggs were laid in the first 22 minutes of
watching. The last 7 eggs laid were placed on the glass in 20.5
minutes.
When an unrestricted area for egg laying was used, there was
no pattern to egg placement. In 128 egg batches of P. serieventris,
the mean number of eggs per batch was 15.9 ± S. E. .78 with a
range of 3 to 49 (Table 2D). The eggs laid on excelsior were usu¬
ally in a linear arrangement, though occasionally they were depos¬
ited in circular masses. In 21 egg groups examined on excelsior,
eggs were in rows of 2 and 3 with frequencies of 8 and 13
respectively.
There appeared to be a pattern to the egg laying interval as
shown by the following consecutive times of 4, 3.5, 3.5, 3, 2.5 and 4
minutes. Whether this is indicative of a more general rhythm is not
known.
As noted by Prebble (1933), the hatching of an egg mass of
P. serieventris is characterized by its simultaneity. He suggested
that those eggs which failed to hatch and which had collapsed :
chorions were probably not fertile. In eggs examined in the pres¬
ent 'Study, additional causes of chorion collapse may have been
either through dessication of the contents or predation. In six egg '
batches on which no predation was observed, there were three in¬
stances of 100% hatch and three with 83 to 93% hatch. Hatching ;
of P. servientris eggs took place after 2 to 9 days incubation with i
a mean of 6.3 zt S. E. .33 days (Table 2E). That hatching could il
occur in less than four days incubation is extremely doubtful, so i
that those observations below four days should possibly be regarded
as observational errors. Under present rearing conditions, eggs are ,
more commonly laid on the undersurface of excelsior than on top
and for this reason may be missed for several days.
1962]
Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus
41
All nymphs of P. serieventris fed equally well on G. mellonella
pupae or on D. similis larvae, the only food supplied. Wax moth
larvae were not used extensively as host material because they dete¬
riorated too rapidly if killed, and if not immobilized their silk-
spinning habits created additional problems in rearing. If the
nymphs and adults of Podisus are not supplied with sufficient food,
cannibalism will occur.
First instar nymphs normally are gregarious and group together
on the eggs from which they hatched for at least the first 24 hours.
After this initial period they will move as a unit but remain close
to their egg mass until after the first moult, or for at least the first
48 or 72 hours. When two or more egg batches from the same par¬
ents were included in one rearing container the newly emerged sib¬
ling nymphs of each egg group remained clustered together and
did not intermingle until after the second nymphal stage was
reached. If simultaneous hatching from an egg batch did not occur
the first instar nymphs sometimes fed on the unhatched eggs as
also noted by Prebble (1933). This phenomenon appeared of rela¬
tively common occurrence. Whether the nymphs were using the host
material primarily as a source of moisture rather than food is not
known, although nymphs supplied only with moisture survived.
First instar nymphs v/hen feeding on an unhatched egg have their
proboscis extended forward in the normal manner of predacious
Pentatomids. In one case the proboscis sheath was rolled back with
an insect pin with the result that the stylets could be seen entering
the egg. To corroborate that the stylets actually entered the egg
was determined by their relative position to the sheath. Consider¬
ing that the stylets formed the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle,
and the sheath the other two sides then the stylets would project
past the apex of the triangle and hence have enough length, unpro¬
tected by the sheath, to enter the egg (Baker, 1927a).
After eclosion, nymphs pass through five instars or stages before
becoming adults in approximately 28 days (Table 3). When the
days spent in each instar are compared with the head capsule de¬
velopment (Table 4) the results can be shown graphically as
nymphal growth in terms of instar progression (Figure 11). Here,
the average number of days spent in each instar is accumulated on
the abscissa while the ordinate shows the average head capsule
width for each instar. The distance between each instar number
on the ordinate represents one millimeter. Using a separate base
line originating at each instar number the average head capsule
measurements were plotted directly.
The growth ratio (Table 4) is the average head width of one
instar divided by the average head width of the previous instar.
The predicted head width range for a given instar was calculated
42 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
by multiplying the growth ratio observed by the observed head
width range of the previous instar. This is a slightly different
method than that employed by Prebble (1933) who calculated an
average ratio of increase from all instars. There were close agree¬
ments between the observed and expected head widths indicating
the growth ratios were uniform and that five instars was a true
figure. The calculated growth ratios compared favorably with those
presented by Prebble (1933) of 1.257, 1.323, 1.296 and 1.230 re¬
spectively. The differences in growth ratios between similar stages
varied from less than 1 to 2.8 per cent.
The nymphal instars of P. serieventris have been described and
illustrated by Prebble (1933), A frequency histogram of head cap¬
sule widths of nymphs of P. serieventris (Figure 12) clearly shows
no overlapping between the five stages. Possible confusion was
avoided in setting off the limits for each instar as measurements
were made from exuviae of known instars, thus each measurement
could be associated with a definite stage of the insect.
Table 3. Nymphal Development of Podisus spp.
1962] Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus 43
Table 4. Head Capsule Data of Podisus spp. Nymphs
The presence of more than one peak in the histogram for each
instar cannot be assessed but it is presumed that there may be a
sex difference as noted by Prebble (1933). As there is a size differ¬
ence between the sexes in the adult stage (Table 1), it is expected
that this would be indicated also in the nymphal measurements.
Insufficient individual rearings and differentiation as to sex did
not allow testing this point.
44 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Figure 11. Nymphal growth of Podisus spp. in terms of instar progression.
Podisus placidus Uhl.
The seasonal history of P. placidus Uhl. was determined from
the field collections made in both 1960 and 1961. In 1960, the first
specimen, a second instar nymph, was collected on June 28, fol¬
lowed two days later by collections of third stage nymphs. Fourth
stage nymphs were taken July 18 and 22. Apparently eggs hatch
the middle of June through July, as a first stage nymph was also
taken July 27. Adults were collected July 20, September 5 and 6,
1960. The following spring on June 16 a pair of adults in copula¬
tion were taken. Immatures were collected on only two days in
1961 ; a. third stage nymph on July 19 and a fifth stage on
August 23. Besides the pair of adults in copulation, adults in num¬
bers were taken August 23 and October 3. The latter date is the
latest this species has been collected in the Amery, Wisconsin area.
P. placidus has a single generation each year. Kirkland (1897),
studying the predators of gypsy moth, considered this species had
two and sometimes three broods in a season, although his inter¬
pretation of the term brood is not clear.
P. placidus resembles P. serieventris but can be separated from
the latter by two main characters (Van Duzee 1904). The humeri
are obtuse and almost rounded in P. placidus compared to the more
acute humeri of P. serieventris. P. placidus has an immaculate mem¬
brane whereas P. serieventris has a longitudinal dusky vitta on the
NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS MEASURED
1962]
Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus
INSTAR
Figure 12. Frequency histogram of head capsule width of nymphs
of Podisus spp.
46 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
membrane. Adult P. placidus are brown rather than the blackish-
grey exhibited in P. serieventris. The humeral width of the pro-
notum was measured in a series of adult P. placidus. In both sexes,
P. placidus averaged .7 mm less in mean width than P. serieventris
(Table 1).
Longevity records (Table 2A) are incomplete but from the data
presently accumulated the mean length of life of laboratory reared
adults, sex ignored, is 201.6 zfc S. E. 11.6 days, and for the males
and females it is 212 and 216 days respectively. These values are
low but not unreasonably so compared with the other species reared
in the laboratory.
The premating period for P. placidus is not definitely known.
One group of field collected immature P. placidus was reared
through to the adult stage, but the actual date of becoming adults
is not known and had to be interpolated. The immatures were col¬
lected June 28, 1960, as second stage nymphs. An average develop¬
ment time of 20 days can be assumed (Table 3) as the required
time to reach the adult stage. Adults should therefore have been
present on July 18. Mating by one pair was first observed on
August 1 to give a premating period of 14 days. Subsequently this
particular pair mated again on August 5 and 16 followed by the
deposition of eggs on August 19.
The mating interval of P. placidus as determined from rearing
records has varied, with one exception, from 1 to 22 days. The mean
mating interval, excluding one long interval of 38 days, was 2.1 zb
S. E. .25 (129) days with confidence limits at the 95% level of 1.6
to 2.6 days. One pair of adults exhibited an unusual behavior pat¬
tern by initiating mating on consecutive afternoons, about 4:00
p.m., then mating for periods of 4.5 to 9.5 hours. Mating on the fifth
day was followed by egg deposition. This pattern occurred twice.
The pair, whose record is cited above, mated an additional 32 times
at approximately the same time each day and usually at one day
intervals.
The duration of mating was established from 49 records in which
the inception and completion of mating was known within a range
of 1 to 2 hours. The mean period of mating was 6.7 zb S. E. .3 hours
with 95% confidence limits of 6.1 to 7.3 hours.
The preoviposition period for P. placidus is an approximation
only, developed from the rearing records of a few individuals. The
tentative range for this period is 3 to 28 days, with an average
of 14.5.
Data were accumulated on number of matings from five pairs of
P. placidus. Records have not been completed on two pairs of adults
which to date have mated 8 and 14 times from February 12 to
March 20, 1962 and March 5 to March 25, 1962, respectively. Pre-
1962]
Coppel & J ones— Biodynamics of Podisus
47
vious rearings of three isolated pairs showed matings occurring
3, 3, and 6 times. All of these matings took place in 2 to 3 weeks.
The periods between egg laying for P, placidus are of nearly the
same duration as for P. serieventris. There did not appear to be
any radical differences in the intervals at various times of the year
in the laboratory reared material. Based on 25 observations involv¬
ing seven females, two of which had single records only, the mean
period between egg laying was calculated as 6.2 zb S. E. .79 days
with confidence limits at the 95% level of 4.6 to 7.8 days (Table 2C) .
The eggs of P. placidus are smaller and squatter than those of
P. serieventris (Table 5) . The mean width and length of the eggs is
.81 zb S. E. .004 and .97 zb S. E. .006 mm, respectively. The micro-
pylar processes range in number from 9 to 12, with a mean of 10.28
zb S. E. .17 just subequal to the mean of 10.32 ±; S. E. .17 for P.
serieventris. The processes which range in length from .26 to .32
mm are the longest of the Podisus spp. studied (Table 5). The
chorion of the eggs of P. placidus have a serous mantle, somewhat
similar to P. serieventris, but the ornamentation appears more con¬
vex (Figures 4 and 5) because the eggs of P, placidus lack the
sharp ridges of spines from which the mantle is draped as in
P. serieventris.
Table 5. Egg Characters of Podisus spp.
In 31 egg batches of P. placidus, the mean number of eggs per
batch was 26.9 zb S. E. 2.33, with an observed range of 8 to 60
eggs (Table 2D) . The arrangement of the eggs was normally linear
and in 2 or 3 rows. Very infrequently a batch of eggs was laid in a
circular pattern 5 to 6 eggs in diameter.
The maximum number of eggs recorded from one P. placidus was
362 in 14 batches from March 7 to April 23, 1962. The adult in¬
volved is still living and may deposit more eggs. Four other adults
laid totals of 104, 204, 260, and 335 eggs. One female laid six eggs
in 16 minutes which is approximately the same rate as that ob¬
served for P. serieventris. During egg deposition, six seconds are
48 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
required from when the egg is first observed leaving the oviduct,
to the final movement away from the egg by the adult.
After deposition, eggs required 6 to 9 days to develop before
hatching occurred. The mean number of days for hatching as ob¬
served in 17 egg masses, was 6.8 ± S. E. .2 days (Table 2E). Nor¬
mally, 87.5 to 100 per cent of the eggs in a batch hatched.
Similar to the other Podisus spp. studied, P. placidus passed
through five instars before becoming an adult 31.7 days after
hatching. P. placidus had a longer developmental period in each
instar than P. serieventris (Table 3). As with P. serieventris the
days spent in each instar (Table 3) are compared with the head
capsule development (Table 4) and the results are shown graphi¬
cally as nymphal growth in terms of instar progression (Figure 11) .
The predicted head width ranges (Table 4) showed a generally
close agreement with the measured head width ranges from which
they were calculated by use of the growth ratio, as explained under
P. serieventris. The only overlapping in head widths between in¬
stars occurred with one individual, when a known fifth instar
nymph showed a head capsule width of .91 mm. Although the over¬
lapping is shown in Table 4, the singular measurement was elimi¬
nated from the data for the frequency histogram of head capsule
widths (Figure 12). This was the only case of overlapping in all
the Podisus spp. studied.
Podisus modestus Uhl.
Field collections of adult P. modestus Uhl. from white pine trees
were made from June to October. The composite data from 1960
and 1961 signified one generation per year. In 1961, adults were
taken June 9 and 16, the earliest records for this species. These
were most likely overwintering adults, as eggs and immature stages
were not collected until the first two weeks of July. In 1960, the first
adult was taken July 18, with other adults collected from August 6
to September 5. The latest collection dates were recorded in 1961
when male and female adults were collected October 3 and a female
on October 9.
P. modestus is separated from the other Podisus spp. in this study
on the basis of shape of humeri and overall size (Table 1). The
humeri are more acute than in P. placidus but lack the spines of
P. maculiventris. P. modestus is smaller in size than P. serieventris.
P. modestus resembles P. placidus most closely in size, both in width
of humeri (Table 1) and in head capsule width (Table 4).
The mean length of life for an adult P. modestus was 178 days
(Table 2A). The premating period recorded from rearings in the
fall, late winter, and spring varied from 14 to 53 days. A short
period of 14 days occurred in mid-August, the longest, of 53 days
1962] Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus 49
was in the winter from December 13 to February 3, and two spring
occurrences lasted 44 and 47 days, from March 19 to May 2 and
May 5, respectively. Only one consecutive mating by a pair of P.
modesous was noted. The second mating took place 85 days after
the first mating on August 24. The duration of mating was known
from seven matings and lasted from 3 to 9 hours or an average of
6.4, The data from which a preoviposition period could be calcu¬
lated were inadequate, but periods of three and six days were noted
for two adults. The period from when adults were first present to
the first egg laying varied from 56 days in the spring to 106 and
207 days through the winter. These are laboratory records and
would, of course, not apply to field conditions. From 24 observa¬
tions, the mean period between egg laying was approximately 8
days (Table 2C), It should be noted that the standard error is
large, relative to the mean, in both P. modestus and P. serieventris.
The eggs of P> modestus are the most globular of the species
studied, the width to length ratio most nearly approaching one
(Table 5). The eggs are the shortest of those Podisus spp. meas¬
ured but are of medium width. The mean number of micropylar
processes is 11.68 zh S. E. ,12 (Table 5), which is close to the group
mean of 11.76. The processes range in length from .20 to .25 mm.,
the shortest group measured. There are no prominent spines on the
chorion of the egg, thus they appear devoid of vestiture, even
though covered by a serous mantle. The mean number of eggs in 40
batches counted was 14.8 ± S. E. 1.45 eggs with an observed range
of 3 to 49. (Table 2D), The egg masses obtained were arranged in
2 to 4 rows with an occasional, roughly circular grouping, 4 to 5
eggs in diameter. One adult deposited 16 egg batches, totalling 235
eggs between June 12 and August 1. This was the largest number
of eggs recorded from one individual. Two other females laid only
49 and 55 eggs each with the 49 laid in four batches during a
period of 16 days. Eggs of P. modestus hatched approximately 6.5
days after deposition (Table 2E). Although records were available
from only seven egg batches, the mean and calculated range com¬
pared favorably with. the other species of Podisus studied. In gen¬
eral, all of the eggs hatched in each batch, though in some, hatch
was as low as 60 per cent.
After emerging, nymphs require a mean period of 24.5 days to
reach the adult stage (Table 3), During this period they pass
through five instars. The days spent in each instar (Table 3) are
compared with the head capsule development (Table 4) with the
results shown graphically as nymphal growth in terms of instar
progression (Figure 11).
The predicted head width ranges (Table 4) corresponded closely
with the measured head width ranges. The head capsule measure-
50 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
merits were arranged as a frequency histogram (Figure 12) which
showed clearly the instar groupings as well as the characteristic
bimodal distribution within each instar.
Podisus maculiventris (Say)
Field collections of Podisus maculiventris (Say) were made from
mid- July to early October. The earliest and latest collection dates
were in 1961 when female adults were obtained July 13 and Octo¬
ber 3. Fifth stage nymphs which moulted to adults within one to
three days of collection were taken August 6, September 4 and Sep¬
tember 6 in 1960. Adults are common in August and September.
It seems unlikely that P. maculiventris would have more than one
generation per year in the study area. Stoner (1919) reported a
double brood for Iowa with nymphs present in June and July and
again in late September.
The adults of P. maculiventris as described by Stoner (1919), are
noted for their remarkably pronounced spinose humeri from which
their common name, the spined soldier bug, was probably derived.
This species can be separated from the other Podisus spp. studied
by the presence of a long ventral spine which extends forward be¬
tween the posterior coxae (Stoner 1919, 1922). The sex ratio as
determined from nearly 400 progeny of three females was essen¬
tially 1:1. The humeral width of the pronotum is the widest of those
species measured (Table 1). The average width of the males was
.8 mm less than the females.
Sufficient longevity records were not obtained to allow incorpora¬
tion of the data into Table 2. From the rearing data available, the
average length of life was 236 days with a range comparable to the
other species studied. The premating period was not established
from the rearing data. A premating period for P. maculiventris of
five days was observed by Whitmarsh (1916). Mating intervals of
8 and 9 days were noted for two separate pairs of adults. The dura¬
tion of mating varied from at least 6 to a maximum of 30 hours.
The preoviposition period, established from 19 observations, had a
mean duration of 5.8 ± S. E. 1.4 days with a range of 2 to 11 days
(Table 2B). A closely allied statistic, the period from becoming
adult to first egg laying, was observed as 12 days during the present
investigations, and nine days by Morrill (1906). The data on peri¬
ods between egg laying were compiled from observations of four
females. The observed range of 1 to 7 days included a large num¬
ber of periods close to the mean of 2.6 days as shown by the low
value of .15 for the standard error and 95% confidence limits of 2.3
to 2.9 days.
The eggs of P, maculiventris are almost identical in size to those
of P, placidus, but the mean width and length (Table 5) show they
1962] Coppel & J ones— Biodynamics of Podisus 51
are a fraction shorter and a little wider. The eggs of this species
have the greatest number of micropylar processes (Table 5). The
processes are shorter than those on P. placidus eggs but are ap¬
proximately the same length as the other species studied. The
chorion of the egg is spinose and covered with a serous mantle,
thus they are similar in appearance to those of P. serieventris. Eggs
have been laid singly and in batches up to 47 eggs. The mean num¬
ber of eggs laid in 103 batches was 19,6 ± S. E. .95 eggs (Table
2D). The eggs are generally arranged in two rows although there
are occasional exceptions to this, such as eggs being laid in a tri¬
angular shaped mass, with two eggs at the apex of the triangle and
four rows of 5, 5, 6, and 6 eggs consecutively towards the base of
the triangle. The maximum number of eggs recorded from one
P, maculiventris was 593 laid in 35 batches during the period
March 3 to May 18, 1960. Three other females deposited 142, 544
and 576 eggs during periods of 28, 69 and 58 days respectively. Of
17 egg batches observed the mean time from egg deposition to
hatching was 9.6 days with a range from 7 to 12 (Table 2E). In
any one batch, 80 to 100 per cent of the eggs will hatch.
Temperature is an important factor in the development of eggs
(Couturier 1938). Sixteen batches of eggs were reared in incu¬
bators, eight at 18° C. and eight at 24° C. The eggs developed faster
at the higher temperature and took 3 to 5 days or an average of
4.4 to hatch. Those held at the lower temperature took 10 to 11
days or an average of 10.4 to hatch. Twenty-seven batches of eggs,
reared at room temperature hatched in 7 to 12 days or an average
of 8.9.
Nymphal development through five instars occurs before the
adult stage is reached in a mean of 25.4 days (Table 3). Nymphal
head capsule measurements agreed closely with those predicted
(Table 4). The required calculations are explained in the P. seri¬
eventris section. The head capsule measurements when placed in a
frequency histogram fall into distinct grouping corresponding to
the five instars (Figure 12). The number of days spent in each
instar by the nymphs is compared with the corresponding head
widths (Table 4) and the results are shown graphically as nymphal
growth in terms of instar progression (Figure 11). The process of
moulting from the fifth nymphal stage to the adult takes 35 to 48
minutes to complete.
The food requirements of Podisus spp. were investigated using
P. maculiventris as the test species. Nymphs were supplied with
various combinations of green beans, D. similis larvae and water.
Those nymphs which were without food or moisture died within 2
to 3 days. Those with water only died in 8 to 11 days without de¬
veloping beyond the first instar. The nymphs which had access to
52 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
beans and water died in an average of 18.7 days and progressed
only to the second instar whereas those nymphs which were sup¬
plied moisture and also had beans and larvae available, or larvae
only, completed development in 30 to 37 days. The nymphs devel¬
oped fastest in those containers which had larvae and beans and
slowest in those with larvae. The average number of days required
for development were 32.9 for those nymphs which fed on beans
and larvae and *34.3 days for those nymphs which fed on larvae.
These developmental periods are longer than the average 25.4 days
shown in Table 3. The data for Table 3 were gathered from nymphs
fed on larvae only. The differences can be ascribed to dissimilar
rearing conditions.
As well as studying the food requirements, some data were gath¬
ered on the effectiveness of Podisus spp. as predators. Individual
nymphs during their period of development were able to kill but
not necessarily consume 11 to 15 larvae of D, similis, or an average
of 13.4 larvae. Nymphs if individually reared can pass through their
entire development period using only one D, similis larva for food.
There was no apparent difference in weight of the teneral adults
which had developed on one larva compared with those which fed
on two larvae during their nymphal period.
If nymphs are not disturbed while feeding and if reared as small
groups they will consume an average of 2.8 larvae before becoming
adults. If reared singly, then they will normally consume 4 larvae
before reaching the adult state. This apparent discrepancy in num¬
ber of larvae used for food may be due to dessication of the sawfly
larvae if not consumed immediately, once they are killed by the
attacking nymph.
If food was withheld from either nymphs or adults reared in a
group cannibalism occurred. There is no differentiation as to size
or stage of the nymphs or adults, as to which will be the attacker
or attacked.
Podisus hybrid
In October, 1960, a small number of field-collected Podisus spp.
adults were confined in a large laboratory cage before being set up
in smaller containers. Two adults of different species were observed
in copulation. As records of this nature are not common, the mating
pair was removed and reared separately. The female was later iden¬
tified as P. maculiventris and the male as P. serieventris. There
have been previous reports of hybridization in Pentatomidae, par¬
ticularly in the genus Euschistus (Foot and Strobell 1914, Sailer
1954), but apparently not in the genus Podisus,
The mating occurred on October 27 and three batches of eggs,
consisting of 8, 26, and 32 eggs were deposited one, four, and eight
1962]
Coppel & Jones — Biodynamics of Podisus
53
days later. Nymphs hatched from 62 of the 66 eggs. Progeny from
the original pair are now in the generation. The progeny exam¬
ined have taxonomic characters common to both species (Kelton
1962 Personal communication) .
The humeral width was measured on all hybrid adults retained
for study. In both males and females the range in widths and the
mean widths were between those measured for P. serieventris and
P. maculiventris (Table 1).
Longevity records indicate that the length of life of the adults
has not been shortened or lengthened because of the hybridization ;
the mean length of life of the adults was 199 ± S. E, 16.5 days
(Table 2A).
The premating period is not known for this group of Podisus.
The mating interval was obtained on only four occasions and
showed a wide range of values, 5, 11, 41 and 88 days. Compared
with data from the other species these figures are not unusual. The
duration of mating was 8 to 9 hours.
The preoviposition period from four observations was 7, 28, 28
and 57 days, or an average of 30 days (Table 2B). This is probably
not an accurate assessment in view of the premating periods for
the other species. Also a second generation female deposited eggs
at intervals from August 1961 to February 1962. There was no
emergence from any of these eggs. A first generation male was
placed with the female on February 5, 1962. Mating occurred four
hours later, followed by egg deposition one day and seven days
later. The eggs laid the day following mating did not hatch, but
those produced seven days after mating were viable and hatched
in four days. This indicates that the period between first mating and
deposition of viable eggs is approximately seven days.
The periods between egg laying ranged from 1 to 12 days, plus
one additional occurrence of 65 days. This latter extreme value was
excluded from the statitsics for Table 2C. The mean number of
days between egg laying was almost identical to that of P. seri¬
eventris.
The eggs of the hybrid have a mean width of .86 mm., similar to
P. serieventris, and wider than the mean width of .82 mm of P.
maculiventris (Table 5). It is of interest to note that the mean
length of the hybrid egg is intermediate between those of the orig¬
inal parent species. When comparing the width to length ratio,
which is a general indication of the shape of the egg, the ratio for
the hybrid egg approaches most closely that of P. maculiventris
with ratios of .843 and .863 respectively. The number of micropylar
processes is intermediate between those of P. serieventris and P.
maculiventris (Table 5). Their lengths are similar to those of the
other Podisus spp. except for the longer ones of P. placidus. The
54 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
spines and serous mantle on the exterior of the egg are similar in
appearance to those of both P, serieventris and P. maculiventris and
cannot be used for differentiation. The maximum number of eggs
laid in any one batch was 38, the lowest maximum of the species
studied. The mean number of eggs laid per batch was 18.5 com¬
pared to 15.9 for P. serieventris and 19.6 for P. maculiventris
(Table 2D). The eggs are normally deposited in a linear arrange¬
ment of 2 to 5 rows with three rows the usual number. The maxi¬
mum number of eggs deposited by one female was 292. These were
laid in 212 days in 1961. They were deposited in 17 batches. Another
female laid 261 eggs in 12 batches in 45 days. In contrast, a third
female deposited 11 batches containing a total of 128 eggs in 24
days. The data included records from three other females which
deposited 66, 104 and 122 eggs in three, six and five batches, re¬
spectively. Eggs hatched 4 to 8 days after deposition (Table 2E).
This range was more restricted than that of P. serieventris but the
mean of 6.5 days was similar, compared to the 9.6 mean days for
development of the eggs of P. maculiventris. In any single batch of
eggs, 85 to 100 per cent of the eggs could be expected to hatch.
Nymphs pass through five instars before becoming adults. The
total developmental period, a summation of the mean time spent in
each instar, was approximately 25 days, the same as for P. macu¬
liventris, but three days shorter than for P. serieventris (Table 3).
The periods spent in nymphal development are compared with the
head capsule development (Table 4) with the results shown graphi¬
cally as nymphal growth in terms of instar progression (Figure
11). As in the other species, there was close agreement between the
observed and predicted head width ranges. The frequency histo¬
gram of head capsule measurements (Figure 12) showed a bimodal
distribution in each instar, probably a reflection of sex differences.
Key to Eggs of Podisus spp.
A. Eggs immaculate, without ornamentation; usually yellowish-
white in color _ modestus Uhl.
AA. Eggs not immaculate, with ornamentation on surface ; appear
brownish in color.
B. Ornamentation rounded, chorionic spines not present. (Fig. 4)
_ plucidus Uhl.
BB. Ornamentation spinose, formed by chorionic spines with serous
mantle draped over spines. (Fig. 6)
C. Eggs barrel-shaped, chorionic processes usually 9 to 13 in num¬
ber, mean of 10. (see table 5) _ serieventris Uhl.
CC. Eggs not barrel-shaped, more globular; chorionic processes
usually 11 to 15 in number, mean of 14. (See table 5) _
_ maculiventris (Say)
1962]
Coppel & J ones— Biodynamics of Podisus
55
Key to Adult Podisus spp.
(Adapted from Key by A. D. Baker, 1927 b)
A. Membrane without a distinct vitta _ plucidus Uhl.
AA. Membrane with a longitudinal dusky vitta.
B. Humeral angles of pronotum rounded, color blackish grey
_ serieventris Uhl.
BB. Humeral angles of pronotum prominent and acute, color grey¬
ish to reddish brown.
C. Basal spine of abdomen long, extending between hind coxae;
color greyish brown; humeral width 5.3-7. 8 mm. _
_ maculiventris (Say)
CC. Basal spine of abdomen short, not extending between hind
coxae; color generally pale reddish brown; humeral width
4.4-5. 7 mm. _ modestus Uhl.
Summary and Conclusions
1. Four species of Pentatomidae, Podisus serieventris Uhl., P.
placidus Uhl., P. modestus Uhl. and P. maculiventris (Say), com¬
monly occur as predators of the introduced pine sawfly. Diprion
similis (Htg.), in northwestern Wisconsin.
2. Though in general, the biology and habits of the four species
are uniform, specific differences occur in these and in morphological
characteristics to enable their separation.
3. All species have at least one generation per year; however,
their developmental period is such that the possibility of two exists.
4. All species may be reared readily in the laboratory with Gal¬
leria mellonella (L.) as a substitute food.
5. A hybrid (P. malculiventris $ X P. serieventris $ ) was
reared through four filial generations and was intermediate in char¬
acters between its parents.
6. Five instars were obtained for all species. In an attempt to
shorten the period between generations in the laboratory exposure
of adults to low temperature for short periods in January did not
incite apparently dormant adults to mate and lay eggs.
7. The adult female is usually larger than the adult male. Differ¬
ence is reflected in bimodal distribution of nymphal head capsule
measurements.
8. Data were presented on bionomic characters including adult
longevity, preoviposition period, interval between matings, mating
period, period between egg laying, number of eggs per batch, de¬
velopment periods for eggs and nymphal stages, head capsule
growth, food requirements and feeding habits of the nymphs and
adults.
9. Keys to eggs and adults are included.
56 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
References Cited
Baker, A. D. 1927a. Some remarks on the feeding process of the Pentatomidae,
(Hemiptera — Heteroptera) . 19th Ann. Kept. Quebec Soc. for the Protec¬
tion of Plants (1926-1927) : 24-34.
Baker, A. D. 1927b. Keys for the identification of the Canadian species of
Pentatomidae (Hemiptera — Heteroptera). 19th Ann. Kept. Quebec Soc. for
the Protection of Plants (1926-1927) : 35-42.
Beck, Stanley D. 1960. Growth and development of the greater wax moth,
Galleria mellonella (L.) (Lepidoptera : Galleriidae) . Trans. Wisconsin
Acad. Sci., 49:137-148.
Couturier, A. 1938. Contribution a I’etude biologique de Podisus maculiventris
Say predateur americain du doryphore. Ann. des Epiphytics et de Phyto-
genetique. N.S. 4:95-165.
DeCoursey, R. M., and C. O. Esselbaugh. 1962. Description of the nymphal
stages of some North American Pentatomidae (Hemiptera — Heteroptera).
Ann. Ent. Soc. Am. 55(3) :323-342.
Esselbaugh, Charles 0. 1946. A study of the eggs of the Pentatomidae. Ann.
Ent. Soc. Am. 39(4.) :667-691.
Foot, K., and E. C. Strobell, 1914. Results of crossingEuschistus variolarius
and Euschistus servus with reference to inheritance of an exclusively male
character. Linn. Soc. London, J. Zool. 32:337-373.
Kelton, L. a. 1962. Personal communication.
Kirkland, A. H. 1897. Notes on the life history and habits of certain predaci¬
ous Heteroptera, In Fernald, C. H., Extermination of the gypsy moth.
Kept. Mass. State Board Agr. Appendix 51-59.
Morrill, A. W. 1906. Some observations on the spined soldier bug. U. S. Bur.
Ent. Bull. 60:155-161.
Prebble, M. L. 1933. The biology of Podisus serieventris Uhler. in Cape Breton.
Nova Scotia. Can. J. Research. 9:1-30.
Sailer, R. I. 1954. Interspecific hybridization among inserts with a report on
crossbreeding experiments with stink bugs. J. Econ. Ent. 47 (3) : 377-383.
SCHEEL, C. A., S. D. Beck, and J. T. Medler. 1958. Feeding and nutrition of
certain Hemiptera. Proc. Tenth Intern. Congr. Ent. 1956 (2) : 303-308.
Snedecor, G. W., and W. G. Cochran. 1959. Statistical methods applied to
experiments in agriculture and biology. Fifth ed. Iowa State College Press,
Ames, Iowa. 534 p.
SOUTHWOOD, T. R. E. 1956. The structure of the eggs of the terrestrial Heter¬
optera and its relationship to the classification of the group. Trans. Roy.
Ent. Soc. London. 108 (pt. 6) : 163-221.
Stoner, D. 1919. The Scutelleroidea of Iowa. Univ. Iowa Studies Nat. Hist.
8(4): 1-140. ;
Stoner, D. 1922. The Scutelleroidea of the Douglas Lake Region. Univ. Iowa
Studies Nat. Hist. 10(1) : 45-65. »
Van Duzee, Edward P .1904. Annotated list of the Pentatomidae recorded from '
America North of Mexico with descriptions of some new species. Trans. ?;
Am. Ent. Soc. 30:1-80. :
Whitmarsh, R. D. 1916. Life history notes on Apateticus cynicus and maculi¬
ventris. J. Econ. Ent. 9:51-53. ;*
NOTES ON WISCONSIN PARASITIC FUNGI. XXVIIP
H. C. Greene
Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The collections referred to in this series of notes were, unless
indicated otherwise, made during the season of 1961. A consider¬
able number of the fungus specimens cited were noted on phanero¬
gamic specimens in the University of Wisconsin Herbarium and
are designated (U. W. Phan.).
Undetermined powdery mildews have been noted on the follow¬
ing hosts, not previously reported as bearing any of these fungi in
Wisconsin: Eupatorium altissimum. Dane Co., near Lodi, Septem¬
ber 22, 1946. Coll. M. H. Ingraham (U. W. Phan.) ; Ranunculus
fascicularis. Dane Co., near Cross Plains, May 23. A very early
date for powdery mildews in this area; Valeriana officinalis (cult.).
Sauk Co., Baraboo, July 15. Coll. K. C. Nelson. Very destructive
on this host.
Sphaerotheca humuli (DC.) Burr, has been considered to be
the powdery mildew infecting roses in Wisconsin. However, D, L.
Coyier of the University of Wisconsin Plant Pathology Depart¬
ment, who has made an intensive study of the biology and control
of rose powdery mildew, is unable to differentiate satisfactorily,
on a morphological basis, between S. humuli and S. pannosa
(Wallr.) Lev. The latter has been widely reported in Europe as the
principal, if not the only, powdery mildew of roses there.
Sphaerotheca humuli (DC.) Burr., as the late J. J. Davis once
pointed out, seems to produce cleistothecia on Rubus in Wisconsin
only on R. parviflorus and R, pubescens (triflorus) , and is common
on the last-named only. Powdery mildews on other Wisconsin spe¬
cies of Rubus, although labeled S. humuli, have conidia only and
their identification must be considered as tentative. In three suc¬
cessive years in June in the Madison School Forest near Verona,
Dane Co., the writer has observed a massive development of pow¬
dery mildew amphigenously on leaves of Rubus allegheniensis,
which commonly also bear the Caeoma stage of Gymnoconia pecki-
ana which, in turn, is usually parasitized by Tuberculina. Most of
the infected shoots are killed back, but on such as persist not even
incipient development of cleistothecia has been noted in the course
of periodic inspection of the host plants throughout the growing
* Published with the aid of the Norman C. Fassett Memorial Fund.
57
58 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
season and, in fact, by mid- July there is little evidence remaining
of the earlier powdery mildew infection.
SCORIAS SPONGIOSA (Schw.) Fr. on Finns strobus was collected
in August at Roche a Cri State Park, Adams Co., by J. D. Rogers
of the University of Wisconsin Plant Pathology Department. Rog¬
ers belives the fungus is mildly parasitic on this host, and it may
be so, as it occurs on the green needles in very sharp and well-
defined fashion, as opposed to the “messy"’ superficial development
so often characteristic of sooty molds.
Mycosphaerella sp., believed to be probably connected with
Cylindrosporium interstitialis Greene (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts
Lett. 42:79. 1953), developed on overwintered leaves of Spartina
pectinata, collected at the type station of C. interstitialis in the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison, April 13, and held
in a moist chamber for two weeks. The host plants had been under
observation late in the preceding fall, at which time they still
showed traces of the Cylindrosporium infection, which has ap¬
peared regularly every year, plus extensive development of the
immature perithecia in the same areas on the leaves. Mature peri-
thecia are black, subglobose, ostiolate, intercostal and seriate in
long rows, and are approx. 85-100 /i. diam. Asci are hyaline, clavate,
straight or curved, 40-45 x 9-11 /x, the ascospores subhyaline, uni-
septate, subfusoid, 11-13 x 3.5-4 /x. This is plainly not Sphaerella
spartinae Ell. & Ev., described as having elliptical perithecia, 100-
112 X 170-190 /X. A further specimen collected in early September
1961 reinforces my impression that there is a connection, for here
the Cylindrosporium is abundantly present and the presumptive
perithecia, which contain many micronidia, are developing in direct
association with it.
Leptosphaeria sp. which possibly developed parasitically occurs
on oval, dark purplish-bordered ashen spots on Schizachne purpur-
ascens, collected by J. J. Davis near Laona, Forest Co., July 13,
1915. The blackish, globose perithecia are epiphyllous and gregari¬
ous, approx. 150 /x diam. The asci are short-pedicellate and narrowly
cylindric, 65-70 x 8-9 /x. The greenish-olivaceous ascospores are
about 25 X 5 /X and rather obscurely 5-7 septate.
Nectria cinnabarina (Tode) Fr., with its accompanying Tuber-
cularia stage, occurred in profusion on dead upper portions of
otherwise still living stems of Solanum dulcamara at Madison,
October 24, and may have been parasitic.
Phacidium balsameae j. j. Davis (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts
Lett. 20:424. 1922) described on Abies balsamea from Vilas Co. has
been studied by R, P, Korf, who states that the fungus belongs
under Sarcotrochila Hoehn. of the Hemiphacidiceae.
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No, 28
59
PucciNiASTRUM AMERICANUM (Farl.) Arth. II, III has been noted
heavily infecting the fruits of cultivated red raspberries of the
everbearing type in a specimen collected by G, C. Klingbiel in Octo¬
ber at Westfield, Marquette Co.
Melampsora (medusae Thum. ?) Ill was collected on Populus
nigra var. italica at Madison, October 24. Oudemans reports Mel¬
ampsora on Lombardy poplar in Europe and the U. S. D. A. Index
of Plant Diseases lists M, medusae on the black poplar group in
Massachusetts, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Phyllostictae, undetermined as to species, have been collected on
several hosts as follows: 1) On Podophyllum peltatum at Gov.
Dodge State Park, Iowa Co., July 20. Pycnidia are on broad, distal
reddish-brown dead areas of the leaf lobes, hypophyllous, clustered,
black, globose, widely ostiolate, approx. 65-100 /x diam. with hya¬
line, rod-shaped microconidia, .6-1 x 3.5-5 /t. 2) On Rubus alle-
gheniensis, near Verona, Dane Co. August 3. Spots are dull reddish-
brown, often with a yellowish halo, wedge-shaped and involving the
entire apical area of a leaflet, orbicular, or oval-elongate, approx.
.7-1.5 cm. wide by up to 3 cm. long. Pycnidia very inconspicuous,
scattered, pallid, visible only by transmitted light, subglobose, about
100-175 fji diam., the conidia hyaline, variable, from almost isodia-
metric to long-cylindric, 5-11 x 2-3.5 jn. Mostly on, but not confined
to, small, 3-foliate, axillary leaves produced near the tips of the
fruiting canes. Except for the size of the pycnidia, 100-175 vs. 60-
85 jii, this is quite similar to a fungus on Rubus strigosus, discussed
in an earlier note (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 47 :121. 1958).
3) On Angelica atropurpurea collected near Swan Lake, Pacific
Twp., Columbia Co., July 18. This is definitely not Phyllosticta an-
gelicae Sacc., a microconidial form mentioned in my Notes IX
(Trans. Wis. Acad, Sci. Arts Lett. 38:240. 1946). In the current
specimen the spots are rounded, sordid-brownish below but some¬
what paler above, with narrow darker margins, about 1 cm. diam.
The thin-walled, carneous, subglobose pycnidia are about 100 p,
diam., hypophyllous and scattered, the conidia hyaline, broadly
ellipsoid or short-cylindric, (3.5-) 4-6 (-7) /x. 4) On Valeriana edulis
at the Faville Prairie Preserve near Lake Mills, Jefferson Co., Sep¬
tember 20. In small amount on ashen to brownish orbicular spots
about 1 cm. diam. Pycnidia are pallid-brownish, subglobose, approx.
100 ,/A diam., with a large ostiole about 15 jx diam. marked by a ring
of darker cells. Conidia hyaline, often biguttulate, oblong, narrow-
ellipsoid or subfusoid, approx. 4-6 x 2-3 p.. 5) On Campanula rotun-
difolia collected at Nelson Dewey State Park near Cassville, Grant
Co., September 19, on dead current season’s leaves and still green
stems. Pycnidia black, globose, non-ostiolate, about 85-100 ju, diam..
60 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
closely gregarious on both leaves and stems. Conidia are hyaline
and rod-shaped, 4-6 x 1-2 fx. It seems possible this may be identical
with Phoma groenlandica Allesch., described as occurring on dead
stems of C. rotundifolia from Greenland, which has conidia ovoid-
oblong or oblong, 5-6 x 1.5-3 /x. There seems no question that the
Wisconsin specimen developed parasitically. 6) On Aster sagitti-
folius from Gibraltar Rock County Park, Columbia Co., August 7.
The spots are small and purplish with ashen centers, the pycnidia
epiphyllous, pallid, small, about 75 /x diam. Conidia are hyaline,
broadly ellipsoid, 1.8-2 x 3.5-4 /x. Very similar to a Phyllosticta on
Aster novae-angliae mentioned in my Notes XXIV (Trans. Wis.
Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 47:102. 1958). The latter, however had
slightly larger conidia.
CONIOTHYRIUM sp., possibly parasitic, occurred on Rubus occi~
dentalis near Cross Plains, Dane Co., June 17, 1960. The small,
irregularly rounded or angled spots are often confluent in lines and
are sordid whitish with narrow red, or reddish-brown, margins.
The pycnidia are epiphyllous, sparingly scattered on the spots, dark
brown, widely ostiolate, approx. 100-125 /x diam. The deep-greenish
spores are broadly ellipsoid, 4-5 x 2.5-3 /x.
CONIOTHYRIUM sp., on the decolorized fruits and involucral bracts
of Cornus ohliqua, collected by R. Peters near Merrimac, Sauk Co.,
August 24, 1958, suggests a parasitic development. The black, glo¬
bose pycnidia are almost superflcial and are gregarious on the
affected tissue. The olivaceous conidia are broadly ellipsoid, 4.5-6
X 3-4 /X. (U. W. Phan.)
Asteroma padi Grev. is evidently common on Prunns padus in
Europe. In Wisconsin a macroscopically similar and very conspicu¬
ous Asteroma-\ike fungus occurs commonly in the fall on leaves of
Prunus serotina, but so far no fruiting has been noted, so identity
remains speculative.
Asteroma tiliae Rud., or what is taken to be that species, is
quite common on Tilia americana in Wisconsin and elsewhere in
North America. The fungus was originally described on a specimen
on Tilia europea from Bavaria and since there was no fruiting in
the type specimen it would seem to be of dubious validity. In Ameri¬
can specimens the radiating fibrillae of a typical Asteroma are
usually evident only in rather immature, early-season collections.
Later, the lesions appear as large, fuscous, orbicular blotches which
may or may not, still provide a suggestion of Asteroma, but which,
in numerous North American specimens examined, have always
shown characteristic pycnidia, usually discerible, however, only on
the lower side of the leaf. The pycnidia are scattered to gregarious,
rather thin-walled, pallid-brownish, apparently non-ostiolate, but
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
61
with the wall tending to be imperfectly formed at a point adjacent to
the host epidermis. Pycnidia are very deeply seated, usually occupy¬
ing most, or all, of the space from epidermis to epidermis. They are
globose, subglobose, or somewhat flattened, approx. (70-) 90-110
(-125) /X diam. The conidiophores are rather loosely ranked,
vaguely bottle-shaped, hyaline structures, about 10-15 x 3-5 /x,
which almost completely line the pycnidial cavity. The conidia are
hyaline, short-cylindric or slightly curved and suballantoid, (3-)
4-5 (-6) X (1.3-) 1.5-2 /X Occasional larger, hyaline, subfusoid con¬
idia have been observed in a few mounts, but none have been seen
in place within a pycnidium, so their origin is uncertain. Of six
European specimens in the University of Wisconsin Cryptogamic
Herbarium only one, on Tilia platyphylla, shows any fruiting. Here
the pycnidia are from 125-150 /x diam., distinctly larger than in
American specimens, and they are moreover rather plainly ostio-
late, while the conidia are smaller, approx. 4-4.5 (-5) x 1.2-1. 5
(-1.8) /X. Thus, it is morphologically close to, but apparently not
identical with, the fungus on Tilia americana. Clements and Shear
indicate that a decisive key character in Asteroma is lack of an
ostiole, but this is not specified in the generic description.
Stagonospora sp. occurs on pallid areas of overwintered leaves
of Carex trichocarpa, collected in the University of Wisconsin Arbo¬
retum at Madison, March 16, 1961. The scattered to subseriate, sub-
globose, black pycnidia are about 200-225 /x diam. and the hyaline,
broadly subfusoid conidia mostly 2-3, occasionally 4-septate, 40-50
X (6.5-) 7. 5-8. 5 y. This infection had been noted in the fall of 1960,
but at the time of inspection such pycnidia as were examined did
not have the contents delimited, and the plants were marked for
future reference. In the material as brought in from the field in the
spring conidia were poorly defined, but after the leaves had been
in a moist chamber for 48 hours very good conidial development was
noted, with the septa clear and sharply defined.
Septoria sp, occurs on the brownish tips of otherwise still living
leaves of Castilleja coccinea, collected by M. F. Johnson near Ban¬
croft, Portage Co., June 23. The gregarious pycnidia are thin-
walled, grayish, inconspicuous, subglobose, small, about 50-70 /x
diam. The hyaline spores appear continuous or rarely obscurely
septate and are straight and somewhat larger at one end than at
the other, 15-21 x 1-1.5 /x. I have found no report of any Septoria
on this or other species of Castilleja.
CJOLLETOTRICHUM sp., which appears parasitic, is on leaves of
Apios tuherosa near Juda, Green Co., August 12. The con¬
spicuous spots are orbicular to somewhat angled, dull reddish-brown
and mottled with lighter areas, approx. .5-1 cm. diam. The acervuli
62 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
are small, scattered to gregarious, amphigenous, loosely organized,
with from a single seta to half a dozen or so in a cluster, where
they are moderately divergent, tapered uniformly from base to
pointed tip, slightly sinuous, but in overall appearance straight and
rigid, uniform clear brown, not appreciably paler near tip, 1-2
septate, approx. 65-85 x 4.5-5 /x. The conidia are hyaline, cylindric
to subfusoid, contents granular, (10-) 12-13 x 3-4.5 /x.
Cylindrosporium rubi Ell. & Morg. was abundantly present on
fruiting canes of dead and dying Rubus (cult, red raspberry) col¬
lected July 27 near Mt. Horeb, Dane Co. In section the acervuli are
subepidermal and deeply seated in the corky layer. Whether the
fungus was primary is somewhat doubtful, as the dry, cold, open
winter of 1960-61 was very hard on many cultivated woody plants,
and the plants in question were on a high, exposed site.
Botrytis sp., possibly parasitic, was present in heavy develop¬
ment on terminal portions of leaves of Hyacinthus orientalis (cult.)
near Cross Plains, Dane Co., June 9. It does not appear to be the
same species often found on tulips in this region.
Helminthosporium sp. occurs on small, oval, grayish-brown
spots on leaves of Agrostis alba collected near LaValle, Sauk Co.,
July 8. On heavily infected leaves the spots merge, with die-back of
the entire leaf. The cylindric or subcylindric conidia are pallid gray¬
ish-brown, with hilum recessed, 55-75 x 11.5-13.5 /x, 4-6, mostly
5 septate, with little or no constriction at the septa. The conidio-
phores are dark brown below, from almost straight to somewhat
tortuous, 2-3 times geniculate near the paler tip, about 140-215 x
7-8 /X, 4-7 septate, arising scattered individually, not in tufts. The
spores seem similar in general characters to those described for
Helminthosporium gramineum Rabh., but that species has the
phores definitely tufted. Obviously not H. sativum Pamm., King &
Bakke.
Cercospora sp. occurred on leaves of Salix adenophylla (cult.)
collected in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison,
September 3. There are usually one to two or three spots per leaf.
The spots are small, 1-2 mm. diam., with narrow dark borders and
somewhat sunken whitish centers. The conidiophores are amphi¬
genous, but mostly epiphyllous, in dense but spreading fascicles
which are gregarious and mostly about 25-30 /x diam. at the base,
but without any definite stroma. Viewed individually by trans¬
mitted light the conidiophores are pale olivaceous, non-septate, or
rarely 1-septate, spreading and often tortuous and markedly genicu¬
late near the tip, approx. 40-75 x 3. 5-4.5 /x, many per fascicle. The
better developed conidia are narrowly obclavate below, long-taper¬
ing toward the apex, truncate at base ,hyaline, indistinctly multi-
1962]
Greene— Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
63
septate, up to 100 x 4,5 p.. Others are merely obclavate, approx. 25-
35 jjL long, with the tips somewhat obtuse, truncate at base and
about 3-septate. This does not correspond with either of the two
species that Chupp mentions as occurring on Salix in his mono¬
graphic treatment of Cercospora. These are C. salicina Ell. & Ev.
and C. salicis Chupp & Greene, the latter based on a collection on
Salix alba from Madison. The host plants were moved from the
Lake Michigan shore in Manitowoc Co., and it is hoped it will be
possible to visit this area to ascertain whether the fungus is natur¬
ally present there.
Cercospora sp. has been noted on a phanerogamic specimen of
Primula mistissinica Michx. var. noveboracensis Fern., collected by
N. C. Fassett near Somerset, St. Croix Co,, June 2, 1935. The num¬
erous spots are sordid brownish and rounded and the infected leaves
have been mostly killed back. The conidiophores are in small fasci-
clese from small stromata, olivaceous-brown, straight, approx.
12-25 X 3-3.5 ja. Conidia few remaining, those seen subhyaline,
slender-obclavate, truncate at base, approx. 35-45 x 2.5-3 p., 2-3
septate. Chupp mentions only C. primulae Fautr. as described on
Primula, and he considers it to be a species of Ramularia, which this
specimen certainly cannot be.
Cercospora sp. occurs on Valeriana edulis collected September 20
at the Faville Prairie Preserve near Lake Mills, Jefferson Co. The
sharply defined spots are rounded or oval with ashen-brown centers
and dark brown borders, small, mostly about 2-3 mm. diam., and
usually only one or two per leaf. The epiphyllous condiophores are
olivaceous-brown below, somewhat paler above, widely spreading in
clusters of approx. 5-15 from a small, compact, dark brown, sub-
stomatal stroma. The phores are decidedly geniculate and somewhat
tortuous, about 5-7 septate, 95-140 x 4-5 p. The conidia are hya¬
line, ranging from slender-obclavate and long-tapering to almost
acicular, moderately curved, obscurely multiseptate, rounded at the
base, with a noticeable scar, approx. 75-110 x 3-4 p. Most of the
conidia had fallen away and only half a dozen were measured, but
these seemed characteristic. Chupp, in his monographic treatment
of the Cercosporae, does not list any species on Valeriana.
Leaves of Rhus copallina, in plantings in the University of Wis¬
consin Arboretum at Madison, September 30, 1960, were infected
by a sporodochium-producing fungus, so far undetermined, but
well-marked and evidently strongly parasitic (Plate III, Fig. 6).
The lesions are large, approx. 1-4 cm. diam., orbicular, or irregu¬
larly elongate and marginal, light brownish or sordid brownish
above and usually subzonate with a narrow dark margin, the ad¬
jacent leaf areas often bright red. On the underside of the leaf the
64 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
65
PLATE I
Explanation of Figures
Botrytis uredinicola Peck
Figure 1. Infection well advanced, but host epidermis still
unruptured. The cells surrounding the vein sheath are filled
with the hyphae of the parasite. Section 10 thick. X 410-
Figure 2. Mature fungus, showing spreading, anastomosing
conidiophores, with conidia. Section 10 thick. X 235.
f
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
67
PLATE II
Explanation of Figures
Botrytis uredinicola Peck
Figure 3. Late season collection, showing breakdown of conidi-
ophores and sclerotization of the mycelium around the veins.
Section 15 /t* thick. X 335.
Figure 4. Overwintering stage, with vein completely envel¬
oped and the sheath crushed. The pseudoparenchymatous
inner cells are filled with granular material. Section 10 /w
thick. X 425.
68 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
69
PLATE III
Explanation of Figures
Figure 5. Botrytis uredinicola. Microconidial stage. The mi-
croconidia are escaping in a cirrhus, above and to the left.
Section 10 thick. X 420.
Figure 6. Habit photo of free-hand section, in mounting fluid,
of sporodoctium-forming fungus on Rhus copallina. X 315.
70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
lesions are uniformly fuscous, immarginate and not zonate. The
sporodochia are amphigenous, but more conspicuous and noticeable
when epiphyllous, scattered to gregarious, rounded above and pul-
vinate, dull blackish, subcuticular and intraepidermal, or perhaps
in some cases subepidermal in origin, elevated, but variable and
sometimes wider than high. Thus, one sporodochium was approx.
180 /X high by 250 /x wide, while another was 230 /x high by 190 ,/x
wide. There are many where the overall dimensions are less, but
the measurements given seem representative. The conidiophores are
in such a compact, non-separable, deep-brownish mass as to make
individual description impractical. The conidia are brownish-
olivaceous, smooth, broadly ellipsoid, or rarely subfusoid, (3-) 3.5-4
(-4.5) X (4.5-) 5-6 (-7) /x, very numerous, but appearing non-
catenulate.
SCLEROTIOMYCES COLCHICUS Woronichin, the photosynthesis-re¬
tarding sooty mold mentioned in several previous notes has been
collected at Gov. Dodge State Park, Iowa Co., September 19, on the
following additional plant leaf substrates : Corylus americana,
Ranunculus septentrionalis, Geum canadense, Acer saccharum,
Viola sp. and Phryma leptostachya.
Sanguinaria canadensis, collected near Poynette, Columbia Co.,
June 7, 1960, bears numerous small, rounded to short-oblong, dark-
bordered, ashen-brown spots on the still-green leaves. Present on
the spots are Phyllostictas, a well-defined Ascochyta, a Septoria, an
immature Ascomycete, a Coniothyrium, and probably others. Since
the first three mentioned usually, if not always, are associated with
parasitism, it seems possible but scarcely demonstrable that one or
more were acting so in this instance. Winter described Phyllosticta
sanguinariae on this host from Missouri, and one of the Phyllos-
tictae mentioned has conidia in the size range specified by Winter.
Additional Hosts
The following hosts have not been previously recorded as bear¬
ing the fungi mentioned in Wisconsin.
Peronospora parasitica (Pers.) Fr. on Arabis shortii. Rock Co.,
near Avon, May 26, 1947. Coll. J. Wickiiam. (U. W, Phan.)
Syzygites megalocarpus Ehrenb. ex Fr. (Sporodinia grandis
Link) on Lactarius trivialis. Vilas Co., August 1910. On Boletus
felleus. Sauk Co,, Devils Lake, October 6, 1906. Both coll. R. A.
Harper.
Erysiphe graminis DC. on Poa nemoralis. Fond du Lac Co., near
Oakfield, July 4, 1932. Coll. N. C. Fassett (U. W. Phan.)
Hypomyces chrysospermus Tul. on Boletus sphaerosporus. Dane
Co., Madison, October 1900. Coll. R. A. Harper.
1962]
Greene- — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
71
PUCCINIA RECONDITA Rob. ex Desm. I on Anemone riparia. Rock
Co., near Beloit, June 8, 1932. Coll. B. Anthoney. (U. W. Phan.)
PUCCINIA DIOICAE P. Magn. ii. III on overwintered leaves of Carex
debilis. Juneau Co., Rocky Arbor Roadside Park, June 8, 1958. Coll.
T. G. Hartley (U. W. Phan.). On Carex cristatella. Dane Co., Madi¬
son, July 16, Host det. J. H. Zimmerman.
PUCCINIA VIOLAE (Schum.) DC. I on Viola adunca. Washburn Co.,
near Spooner, June 18, 1897. (U. W, Phan.). II, III on Viola
sororia. Lincoln Co., Schley Twp., August 23, 1955. Coll. F. C. Sey
mour (U. W. Phan.)
Gym NOSPORANGIUM JUVENESCENS Kern I on Amelanchier ama-
bilis Wieg. (A. grandiflora Wieg.) (cult.) Dane Co., Madison, June
26.
Melampsora medusae Thum. II on Populus balsamifera (cult.).
Dane Co., Madison, September 7. On leaves of rooted cuttings from
a mature tree in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. There has
been a question as to the actual occurrence of M. medusae on balsam
poplar in Wisconsin. Fungi Columbiani 3915, collected at Madison
in 1910 on this host, was issued as M. medusae, but by later workers
was somewhat tentatively placed under M. occidentalis Jacks., prin¬
cipally on the basis of spore size (Amer. Midi. Nat. 48: 39. 1952),
In the present specimen the urediospores are well within the size
range of M. medusae and show the extensive smooth areas on the
wall, characteristic of the species.
Eocronartium muscicola (P. ex Fr.) Fitzp. on Climacium den-
droides. Douglas Co., Brule, July 19, 1897. On Hypnum cupressi-
forme. Bayfield Co., between Herbster and Port Wing, July 8, 1897.
On Thuidium microphyllum. Bayfield Co., Mason, July 6, 1896. All.
coll. L. S. Cheney. Hosts det. R. I. Evans.
Ceratobasidium anceps (Bres. & Syd.) Jacks, on Ranunculus
abortivus. Sauk Co., near LaValle, July 8.
Nyctalis asterophora Fr. on Russula adusta. Dane Co., Madi¬
son, August 1, 1903. Coll. R. H. Denniston. On Russula sordida.
Same station, August 5, 1903. Coll. R. A. Harper.
Phyllosticta phaseolina Sacc. on Strophostyles leiosperma.
Waushara Co., near Hancock, September 14, 1957. Coll. M. Spald¬
ing. (U. W. Phan.)
Phyllosticta minutissima Ell. & Ev. on Acer spicatum. Sauk
Co., Parfrey’s Glen, Town of Merrimac, September 16, 1959.
Phyllosticta violae Desm. on Viola selkirkii. Clark Co. near
Stanley, June 5, 1948. Coll. M. Bergseng. (U. W. Phan.)
Phyllosticta decidua Ell. & Kell, on Myosotis scorpioides. Ozau¬
kee Co., Thiensville, June 20, 1925. Coll. S, C. Wadmond. (U. W.
Phan.)
72 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Phomopsis hieracii H. C. Greene on Hieracium aurantiacum.
Columbia Co., Gilbraltar Rock County Park, August 7. Scoleco-
spores were not observed in mounts made from this specimen, but
in all other respects it is identical with the type on Hieracium longi-
pilum.
CONIOTHYRIUM FUCKELii Sacc. on Rubus allegheniensis. Dane Co.,
near Verona, August 3. Appearing parasitic and similar to mate¬
rial collected many years ago on Rubus pubescens at Madison.
Ascochyta equiseti (Desm.) Grove on Equisetum fluviatile.
Sawyer Co., near Barker Lake, Draper Twp., September 1, 1959.
Coll. D. Ugent. On a specimen in the University of Wisconsin Her¬
barium. Many of the acervuli show a microconidial, rather than
the Ascochyta stage. The writer (Amer. Midi. Nat. 44:639. 1950)
also made this combination, overlooking the fact that Grove had
done so some years previously.
Ascochyta graminicola Sacc. {A. sorghi Sacc.) on Poa palus-
tris. Dane Co., Madison, July 14. Very heavy infection on the lower
leaves, which were entirely killed back. On Muhlenbergia mexicana
(L.) Trin. Dane Co., Madison, September 8. An earlier report on
Muhlenbergia ''foliosa” probably referred to M. mexicana, but this
cannot be ascertained from the herbarium specimen.
Ascochyta asclepiadis Ell. & Ev. on Asclepias syriaca. Iowa
Co., Gov. Dodge State Park, July 20.
Ascochyta compositarum J. J. Davis on Aster lateriflorus. Dane
Co., near Verona, August 3.
Septoria mississippiensis R. Sprague on Muhlenbergia mexi¬
cana (L.) Trin. Columbia Co., near Wyocena, July 18. Host deter¬
minations of Muhlenbergia are based on the treatment in Fassett’s
“Grasses of Wisconsin”.
Septoria salicinia Pack on Salix serissima. Dane Co., Madison,
September 3. An examination of various specimens of S. salicina in
the Wisconsin Herbarium indicates no great violence would be done
if this species were transferred to Cylindrosporium.
Septoria ludwigiae Cooke on Ludvigia polycarpa, Milwaukee
Co., Milwaukee, August 1884. Coll. E. E. Hasse. On a phanerogamic
specimen in the Herbarium of the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Septoria oenotherae West on Oenothera strigosa, Dane Co.,
Madison, August 1, 1907. Coll. J. R. Heddle. Host det. D. Ugent. On
Oenothera caespitosa. Madison, August 23. On a planting in the
University of Wisconsin Arboretum.
Septoria cornicola Desm. var. ampla H. C. Greene on Cornus
rugosa (cult,). Dane Co., Madison, October 4.
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
73
Septoria dodecatheonis J. J. Davis on Dodecatheon amethysti-
num Fassett. Crawford Co., Prairie du Chien, June 2, 1928. Coll.
N, C. Fassett. This is the type specimen of the host, which consists
of two plants mounted on one sheet, only one of which, however,
bears the Septoria.
Septoria helianthi Ell. & Kell, on Helianthus giganteus. Buffalo
Co., near Mondovi, August 25, 1956. Coll. H. H. litis. (U. W. Phan.)
Septoria hieracicola Dearn. & House on Hieracium scabrum.
Iowa Co., Tower Hill State Park, October 5. On H. florentinum. For¬
est Co., near Cavour, August 27, 1958. Coll. K. S. Snell. (U. W.
Phan.)
Selenophoma bromigena (Sacc.) Spr. & Johns, on Bromus
latiglumis. Sauk Co., near Leland, July 12, 1942. (U. W. Phan.). R.
Sprague reports a collection of S. bromigena on Bromus purgans
from Iron Co. near Hurley, August 1959, but the presence of B.
purgans in this part of Wisconsin seems questionable.
Hainesia lythri (Desm.) Hoehn, on Oenothera caespitosa. Dane
Co., University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Madison, August 23.
Cryptocline betularum (Ell. & Mart.) v. Arx (Gloeosporium
betularum E. & M.) on Betula lenta (cult.). Dane Co., Madison,
July 26.
Gloeosporidiella VARIABILE (Laub.) V. Arx {Gloeosporium vari-
ablile Laub.) on Ribes missouriense. Lafayette Co., Ipswich, August
15. This was found on cultivated Ribes alpinum in Wisconsin in
1960. It seems worth noting that in all five collections of this species
in the University of Wisconsin Cryptogamic Herbarium the fruiting
is uniformly hypophyllous, in contrast to the normally epiphyllous
Gloeosporium ribis.
COLLETOTRICHUM GRAMINICOLA (Ces.) Wils. on Elymus villosus.
Columbia Co., Gibraltar Rock County Park, August 7. On Paspalum
stramineum. Crawford Co., Prairie du Chien, September 15, 1940.
Coll. N. C. Fassett. (U. W. Phan.)
COLLETOTRICHUM VIOLAE-ROTUNDIFOLIAE (Sacc.) House on Viola
affinis. Outagamie Co., near Freedom, August 16, 1948, Coll. F. C.
Seymour. (U. W. Phan.). On V. septentrionalis. Vernon Co., near
Viroqua, June 2, 1929. Coll. H. P. Hansen. (U. W, Phan.)
Sphaceloma murrayae Jenkins & Grodsinsky on Salix petiolaris.
Jefferson Co., Faville Prairie Preserve near Lake Mills, September
20.
Marssonina kriegeriana (Bres.) Magn. on Salix serissima.
Shawano Co., Shawano, September 1, 1921 ; also Door Co., Fish
Creek, September 27, 1919. Both specimens were collected by J, J.
Davis as occurring on Salix lucida, but later redetermined, no doubt
74 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
correctly, as S. serissima, and heretofore overlooked in the Wiscon¬
sin lists.
Diplocladium minus Bon. on Polystictus pergamenus. Dane Co.,
Madison, May 2. Although Clements & Shear in their “Genera of
Fungi” list Diplocladium as a saprophyte, specimens seen by the
writer strongly suggest otherwise, so the fungus is recorded as at
least a questionable parasite.
Ramularia aequivoca (Ces.) Sacc, on Ranunculus sceleratus.
Dodge Co., near Reeseville, May 17, 1931. Coll. J. W. Rhodes. (U.
W. Phan.)
Cercospora beticola Sacc. on Chenopodium botrys. Grant Co.,
near Wyalusing, September 1, 1957. Coll. H. H. litis and P. Sala-
mun. (U. W. Phan.)
Cercospora dubia (Riess.) Wint. on Chenopodium berlandieri
var. zschackei. St. Croix Co., near Hudson, September 12, 1956. Coll.
C. W. Lemke. (U. W. Phan.)
Cercospora violae Sacc. on Viola rostrata. Sheboygan Co., near
Ada, August 9, 1959. Coll. H. H. litis. (U. W. Phan.) . On V, adunca.
Vilas Co., near Boulder Junction, August 17, 1956. Coll. J. T. Curtis.
(U. W. Phan.).
Cercospora granuliformis Ell. & Holw. on Viola novae-angliae.
Lincoln Co., Pine River Dells, August 18, 1952. Coll. F. C. Seymour.
(U. W. Phan.)
Additional Species
The fungi mentioned here have not been previously reported as
occurring in the state of Wisconsin.
Celidium pulvinatum Rehm in Rabh. on Lecanora sp. Lafayette
Co., near Belmont, July 20, 1960. Coll. K. G. Foote. Det. J. W.
Thomson.
Pyreniella lecanori Keissler on Lecanora sp. Grant Co., across
Wisconsin River from Bridgeport, July 24, 1960. Coll. K. G. Foote.
Det. J. W. Thomson.
Norrlinia peltigericola (Nyl.) Theiss. & Syd. on Bacidia sp.
Richland Co., near Yuba, July 27, 1960. Coll. K. G. Foote. The large,
many celled, muriform ascospores are up to about 70 x 30 ju, mostly
two, but occasionally three per ascus. A rarely seen and apparently
little-known species.
Hypocrea sulphurea (Schw.) Sacc. on Exidia glandulosa, Iowa
Co., Blue Mounds, November 1904. Coll. R. A. Harper.
Orbilia epipora (Nyl.) Karst, on Fomes fomentarius. Sauk Co.,
Devils Lake, July 2, 1904. Probably parasitic. Coll, R, A, Harper.
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
75
Taphrina dearnessii Jenkins on Acer rubrum. Douglas Co.,
near Solon Springs, June 12. Coll. Mrs. R. McMinn; Barron Co.,
June 10. Coll. W. Klanderman. Both specimens comm. E, K. Wade.
The disease was said to be quite severe in Barron Co.
Microthyrium rubicolum sp. nov.
Fructificationibus nigris, orbibus, applanatis, superficialibus,
gregariis, ca. 225-450 ja diam., plerumque 350 jn; scutellis compositis
cellis nigris, muris crassis, isodiametris vel oblongatis vel irregu-
laribus, fissilibus irregulariter ; aparaphysatis ; ascis subhyalinis,
formis variabilibus, subsphaericis vel clavatis late vel clavatis tan-
tum, 20-40 X 11-17 /x, crassitudinibus muris variabilibus; ascosporis
subhyalinis, subcylindraceis, uniseptatis, constrictis leniter, 12-14
X 3. 5-4. 5 II.
Fruiting bodies black, rounded, applanate, superficial, gregarious,
approx. 225-450 /x diam., mostly about 350 /x; scutellum composed of
black, thick-walled isodiametric to oblong or irregularly shaped
cells, isplitting irregularly at maturity of ascoma; aparaphysate ;
asci subhyaline, variable in shape from subspherical to broadly ob-
clavate, or merely clavate, 20-40 x 11-17 /x, ascus wall usually
moderately to much thicker in one region than in remainder of wall ;
ascospores subhyaline, subcylindric, uniseptate, slightly constricted
at septum, 12-14 x 3. 5-4. 5 /x.
On still green, early-season fruiting canes of Ruhus alleghenien-
sis. Madison School Forest near Verona, Dane County, Wisconsin,
U. S. A., June 22, 1961.
One of the cells of the ascospore is slightly wider and more obtuse
than the other. Arrangement of spores in the ascus is variable, de¬
pending on the shape of the particular ascus. This fungus bears
little similarity to Microthyrium rubi Niessl which has fruiting
bodies about 100 ^ diam., and asci 48-50 x 7-8 /x,
Rhizosphaera abietis Mangin & Hariot on Abies balsamea.
Vilas Co., near Eagle River, May 4. Coll. R. F, Patton. Described in
the Bull. Soc. Mycol. France 23: 54-61. 1907 as a new genus and
species. Shortly thereafter Maublanc made the new combination
Rhizosphaera pini (Cda.) Maub., asserting that Coniothyrium pini
Cda. is identical with R. abietis. As R. pini the fungus is reported,
in the U. S. D. A. Index of Plant Diseases, as occurring on Abies'
fraseri in North Carolina, but there seems to be no previous record
on A. balsamea.
Phomopsis thalictri sp. nov.
Maculis conspicuis, sordido-cinereis vel obscuro-brunneis, orbicu-
laribus vel cuneatis vel elongatis, marginibus fuscioribus, angustis,
ca. .5-1.5 cm, diam,; pycnidiis epiphyllis, sparsis vel gregariis,
76 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
nigris, applanatis vel subglobosis, ca. 150-215 ju, diam,, ostiolatis
latis; A-conidiis subfusoideis, hyalinis, saepe biguttulosis, 9-16 x
(2.5-) 3. 5-4.5 /X, B-conidiis curvis laxe, hyalinis, attenuatis, ca. 18-
35 X 1-1.5 /X, raro latior.
Spots conspicuous, sordid ashen to dull brown, orbicular, wedge-
shaped, or elongate, with narrow darker margin, approx. .5-1.5 cm.
diam.; ostioles wide, delimited by a conspicuous ring of blackish,
thick- walled cells; A-type conidia subfusoid, hyaline, often bigut-
tulate, 9-16 x (2.5-) 3. 5-4.5 /x, B-type conidia laxly curved, hyaline,
tapered, about 18-35 x 1-1.5 /x, or rarely a little wider.
On living leaflets (rarely on petioles) of Thalictrum dasycarpum.
University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Madison, Dane County Wis¬
consin, U. S. A., August 21, 1961.
The plants bearing this leaf parasite appeared otherwise healthy,
but among them and adjacent to them, were current season’s plants
of T, dasycarpum which were completely dead and brown. On their
stems and on the branches of the inflorescence are numerous ap-
planate, black pycnidia very similar in appearance to those de¬
scribed on the leaves. However, so far as is shown by examination
of a number of them, these pycnidia contain only very numerous
scolecospores which are produced on closely ranked, flask-shaped
conidiophores, and are quite similar in size and appearance to the
B-spores described above. While it seems possible there is a con¬
nection with Phomopsis thalictri, it cannot be regarded as demon¬
strated, since no intergradation between the two has been observed.
Specimens of the fungus on stems have been filed in the University
of Wisconsin Cryptogamic Herbarium as Rhabdospora sp. for the
time being.
Septoria chaenorrhini sp. nov.
Maculis nullis; pycnidiis subepidermidibus, amphigenis, nigris,
globosis, gregariis prope vel confertis, ostiolis indistinctis, muris
tenuioribus supra, parvis, ca. 45-75 /x diam. ; conidiis gracilibus,
hyalinis, continuis, rectis fere vel curvis leniter, raro curvis ad-
modum, (15-) 18-28 x (1.2-) 1.5-2 /x.
Spots none, pycnidia subepidermal, amphigenous, black, globose,
closely gregarious to crowded, no distinct ostiole, the wall thinner
above, small, approx. 45-75 /x diam. ; conidia slender, hyaline, con¬
tinuous, from almost straight to slightly curved, or rarely strongly
curved, (15-) 18-28 x (1.2-) 1.5-2 /x.
On the leaves and inflorescence of Chaenorrhinum minus (Linaria
minor). On Milwaukee R. R. right-of-way one mile east of Juda,
Green County, Wisconsin, U. S. A., August 12, 1961.
1962]
Greene — Wisconsin Fungi No. 28
77
S. chaenorrhini does not correspond to species of Septoria de¬
scribed on Linaria from the Old World, and is very different from
Septoria linariae H. C. Greene (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arxa Lett.
35:130. 1944) which occurs on Linaria canadensis in Wisconsin.
COLLETOTRICHUM VIOLAE-TRICOLORIS R. E. Smith on Viola tricolor
(cult.). Waupaca Co. near Ogdensburg, September 16, 1960. Coll.
L. Hansen. On green stems.
Colletotrichum helianthi J. J. Davis var. macromaculans var. nov.
Maculis orbicularibus, marginibus flavo-brunneis, latis aliquanto,
centris fusco-brunneis magnis conspicuisque, definitis, 1-2.5 cm.
diam. ; acervulis amphigenis, sparsis; setis 65-100 x 3. 5-4. 5 /x, 1-3
septatis; conidiis sublunatis vel falcatis, 18-23 x 2.5-3. 5 /x.
Spots orbicular, with rather wide yellowish-brown margins and
sooty-brown centers, large and conspicuous, sharply defined, 1-2.5
cm. diam., acervuli amphigenous, scattered but numerous; setae
65-100 X 3. 5-4. 5 /x, 1-3 septate; conidia sublunate or falcate, 18-23
' X 2.5-3.5 /X.
On living leaves of Helianthus strumosus. Gibraltar Rock County
Park, Columbia County, Wisconsin, U. S. A., August 7, 1961.
This is not sufficiently different from C. helianthi to warrant de¬
scription as a new species, but it does seem to be of varietal rank
and has been collected once earlier at the same station in 1952
(Amer. Midi. Nat. 50:503. 1953). In C. helianthi the spots, while
likewise sharply delimited, are not ordinarily over 3-5 mm. diam.
and the acervuli are strictly epiphyllous. C. helianthi, aside from
the spots it produces, is larger and coarser than var. macromacu¬
lans, with the setae 80-150 x 3-5 /x, the conidia 25-35 x 2. 5-3.5 /x,
and often, but not always, somewhat fusoid in shape.
Mycogone rosea Link on Cortinarius sp. Dane Co., Madison,
October 10. Coll. M. Hemphill.
Botrytis uredinicola Peck occurred in considerable profusion
on leaves of Panicum virgatum in the University of Wisconsin Ar¬
boretum at Madison in the summer of 1960. This fungus is sadly
misnamed, inasmuch as it does not appear to belong in Botrytis, as
that genus is generally understood, and is not parasitic on a rust,
or necessarily even associated with one. Careful examination of
ample specimens of the Fungi Columbiani series. Nos. 2907 and
4607, both labeled as indicating the fungus to be on or associated
with Uromyces graminicola Burr., shows no trace of rust, but ex¬
cellent development of the ‘"Botrytis”. No. 2907 is presumably type
material. Most of the Wisconsin collections likewise bear no rust,
although some leaves do have sori of Puccinia panici Diet, which is
very common on P. virgatum in Wisconsin. The fungus is amphi¬
genous, but mostly on the adaxial leaf surface. It is obviously a
78 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
strong parasite and sections show it to be very deep-seated in the
xeric leaves. The fructification tends to be elongate, probably a re¬
sponse to the spatial situation resulting from the prominent, closely
parallel veins. As fall progressed it was noted that the fruiting
structures were becoming black and sclerotized, suggesting the de¬
velopment of an overwintering condition and possible formation
of a perfect stage. In an attempt to learn some details of the life
history of this interesting fungus material, ranging from that of
young, new infections to that obviously old and strongly sclerotic,
was fixed, imbedded, sectioned and stained. As the accompanying
photographs show, from a very early stage, preceding rupture of
the epidermis, the fungus is in close contact with the sheath of a
host vein and, as development proceeds, in most cases tends to com¬
pletely envelop the sheath and ultimately to crush the sheath cells.
With increasing sclerotization the compacted, isodiametric, but still
hyaline inner cells of the fructification display a markedly granular
content. In some instances, however, as illustrated in Plate III, Fig.
5, less completely sclerotized overwintering bodies are filled with
small, hyaline, rod-shaped microconidia ( spermogonial cells?). In
the latter part of March 1961 a collection of naturally overwintered
leaves bearing the sclerotic structures developed the previous fall
was collected in the field. On microscopic examination there was no
evidence of an incipient perfect stage, other than the microconidia
just mentioned, but some of the leaves were placed in a moist cham¬
ber at room temperature to see whether further development could
be stimulated. After about two weeks the characteristic snow-white
conidiophores and conidia of B. uredinicola were produced from the
overwintering structures. The spring was abnormally dry and cold,
but on June 16 the fungus was observed in the field in full develop¬
ment on overwintered leaves. Thus, it is evident that the fungus
may, and perhaps regularly does, overwinter without subsequent
formation of a perfect stage. Early in July abundant infection of
the new 1961 leaves was noted, completing the cycle. Dr. Roderick
Sprague has studied this material and considers that is is very close
to, but perhaps not identical with, Sporotrichum peribebuyense
Speg. which occurs in North America on species of Setaria and
which Sprague has discussed in his “Diseases of Cereals and
Grasses in North America”.
FOREST CUTTING AND SPREAD OF SPHAGNUM
IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN^
Theo. Keller and K. G. Watterston^
University of Wisconsin, Madison
A large total area in northern Wisconsin is now occupied by
semi-swamp soils of a rather unusual morphology and uncertain
origin. The surface “mor'' layer of these soils is largely made up
of live bog moss, comprising the ‘‘stratum superficiale’' or S-horizon
or Forsslund (1945). This layer, attains a thickness of 7 inches and
is underlain by a narrow zone of dark-brown, nearly black macer¬
ated organic remains (H). The substratum consists of a leached,
usually water-logged silty clay loam with pronounced mottling (G).
Whether these soils are of a “climax’ ’nature, or temporary post¬
logging developments is a matter of conjecture.
A solution to this problem, however, was suggested by observa¬
tions of effects of partial cuttings of spruce and balsam fir stands
on fine textured gley-podzolic soils, initiated in the late forties in
the Gagen Forest Management Unit of the Consolidated Water
Power & Paper Co., Oneida County. After a few years, the results
of these cuttings indicated that a heavy opening of the canopy in¬
vites an invasion of mosses, particularly Sphagnum spp. Alteration
of this kind threatened a deterioration of site conditions and sub¬
sequent decrease of increment of the thinned stands. Therefore, as
a reconnaissance measure, in the spring of 1955 four 7 by 7 feet
plots were staked out on a fine textured gley-podzolic soil, underlain
by a ground water at a depth of 2% feet. The soil was supporting
an open, 40-year old stand of volunteer black spruce with sporadic
small patches of Sphagnum, Polytrichum, Hypnum, Hylocomium
and Dicranum spp., and a rather dense cover of Vaccinium myrtil-
loides, Cornus canadensis, Clintonia borealis, Equisetum silvaticum,
Ledum groenlandicum and Maianthemum canadense. Two of the
plots were placed under a fairly dense canopy of trees, and two in
1 small openings where the timber was partly removed. The existing
cover of Sphagnum was carefully mapped on cross-hatched paper
, 1 Contribution from Soils Department, University of Wisconsin with financial sup¬
port and cooperation from the Wisconsin Conservation Department and the Consolid-
■ ated Water Power and Paper Company. Publication approved by the Director of the
Wisconsin Agricultural Experimentation Station, Madison, Wisconsin.
2 Forest Physiologist, Swiss Forest Research Institute, and Research Assistant in
■ Soils, University of Wisconsin. The authors are indebted to Mr. John W. Macon, Dr,
J. G. Iyer, and Prof. S, A. Wilde for assistance in different phases of this study.
79
80 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
by subdividing the plots into quadrats measuring 144 sq. inches
each.
The results of a re-survey of these plots in summer of 1961 re¬
vealed no changes in the distribution of bog moss under dense cover
of trees, but an appreciable enlargement of its area in the thinned
stand, as shown in Figure 1. This indicated that at least some gley-
podzolic soils of northern Wisconsin upon the removal of forest
cover are being converted into semi-swamps of “moss-moF' soils in
Figure 1. Effect of forest cover on the distribution of Sphagnum: a and b plots
were established under the canopy of trees, c and d plots were established in
open area. Cross-hatching indicates the spread of bog moss during the period
7.1955-6.1961, Open and block circles denote live and dead trees, respectively.
1962] Keller & Watterston — Sphagnum in Wisconsin 81
a manner similar to soils of Scandinavian countries (Hesselman,
1928; Malstrom, 1931).
The spread of Sphagnum on this site proceeded at a rather slow
rate. Within a 6-year period it invaded about 6 square feet in each
of the squares and at this rate it would take nearly 50 years to
occupy the entire area of 50 sq. feet.
This calculation, however, proved to be in discord with observa¬
tions made on an adjacent area where the basal area of a dense
stand of black spruce was reduced by thinning in 1954 to about 50
sq. feet per acre. Nearly all cut stems and branches, left on the
ground, were found to be covered with a 2. to 4 inch thick blanket
of Sphagnum. This proved that, under conditions favoring its dis¬
tribution, the Sphagnum can take over the area of a heavily thinned
stand in a period of less than 10 years.
The different behavior of bog moss may be attributed to the oc¬
currence of much more vigorous ground cover of low shrubs on
the study site in comparison with that of the thinned stand. This
would imply that the distribution of bog moss is checked not only
by the canopy of trees, but also by the competition of ground cover
plants ; blueberries with their powerful root systems which dry the
surface soil layer, are likely to present a particularly formidable
barrier to the encroachment of the water demanding Sphagnum.
Therefore, it can be assumed that areas of dense stands with no
understory of low shrubs would exhibit upon a heavy cutting a
much faster spread of bog moss than the areas on which its rate
of spread has been already slowed by competing plants.
Observations of the ground water level in soils of fully stocked
and periodically cut stands suggested that the process of swamp
formation or paludization is accomplished by a combined influence
of the true or phreatic ground water and puddled or vadose water.
The bog moss is known to exert several unfavorable effects on
the growth of most higher plants: it imparts to the surface soil
layer a strong acidity, produces a local saturated condition which
impedes soil aeration, and impoverishes the invaded soils by storing
nutrients in its accumulating tissues ; it possesses a high insulating
capacity which keeps the underlying soil at a temperature below 60°
F even when the air temperature exceeds 85° F, and thus interferes
with the normal transpiration of trees. According to previous ob¬
servations (Wilde et ah, 1954), the invasion of Sphagnum can re¬
duce the annual increment of black spruce on podzolized soils from
0.4 to a mere 0.1 cord per acre.
Consequently, in localities vulnerable to invasion of bog moss,
considerable caution should be exercised in partial cuttings of
stands on soils underlain at a shallow depth by the ground water
82 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
table or possessing inadequate permeability. The higher cost of
conservative cuttings, precluding the spread of Sphagnum, is likely
to be fully compensated by a higher increment and better quality of
wood. In some instances, the use of herbicides may attain far-reach¬
ing importance in silvicultural management of stands on gley-
podzolic soils.
Eeference
F0RSSLUND, K. H. 1945. Studier over det lagre djurlivet i nordsvensk. Medd.
Skogsfdrsdksanst, 34:1-283.
Hesselman, H. 1928. Versumpfung, Rohhumus und Waldbau in Nord-
schweden. Forstwiss, ZtbL, 509.
MalmstroM, C. 1931. The danger of water-logging of the forest soils of
north Sweden. Medd. Staf. Skogsforsoks., 26:1-162.
Wilde, S. A., G. K. Voigt, and R. S. Pierce. 1954. The relationship of soils
and forest growth in the Algoma district of Ontario, Canada. Jour. Soil
Sci., 5:1-17,
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN.
NO. 47. THE ORDERS THYMELAEALES, MYRTALES,
AND CACTALES^^
Donald Ugent
Herbarium of the University of Wisconsin
This treatment includes all the families in Wisconsin with free
petals and inferior ovary, or ovary superior and enclosed by a tubu¬
lar or campanulate persistent calyx, except the Nyssaceae, Arali-
aceae, Umbelliferae and Cornaceae, The Haloragidaceae and the
Hippuridaceae, although included, have been treated in greater de¬
tail by Fassett (1930). Nomenclature and descriptions generally
follow The New Britton and Brown Illustrated Flora (Gleason,
1952) and Gray’s Manual of Botany, Ed. 8 (Fernald, 1950).
Distribution maps, habitat data, and flowering dates are based
on specimens in the following herbaria : University of Wisconsin
(WIS) ; Milwaukee Public Museum (MIL) ; University of Minne¬
sota (MINN); Northland College, Ashland; Platteville State Col¬
lege; and Saint NorberPs College, De Pere. Other sources of infor¬
mation are cited in the text. Dots indicate specific location, triangles
county records without specific locality. Small dots in Lincoln
County represent sight records of Frank C. Seymour. Triangles in
Illinois counties are based on Jones and Fuller (1955). Numbers in
the enclosures on the maps indicate the number of specimens in
flower and fruit. Specimens in bud, very young fruit, or vegetative
condition are not included. These figures give a rough, though low,
estimate of the amount of material that was available for this study
and an indication of when a species is apt to flower or fruit in Wis¬
consin.
Grateful acknowledgement for the loan of their Wisconsin speci¬
mens are due to Albert M. Fuller and Emil P. Kruschke, Milwaukee
Public Museum ; Thomas Morley, acting curator, University of Min¬
nesota; Peter J. Salamun, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ;
Henry C. Greene, curator, Cryptogamic Herbarium, University of
Wisconsin; Russell D. Wagner, Platteville State College; and Frank¬
lin C. Lane, Northland College. Thanks are also due Mrs. Katherine
S. Snell, herbarium assistant, for her cheerful encouragement and
assistance; Miss Kathryn L. Wollangk who assisted in the prepara¬
tion of Epilohium scatter-diagrams; Mrs. Janice Paynter for illus-
^ Published with the aid of the Norman C. Fassett Memorial Fund.
83
84 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Frontispiece. Water-Willow {Decodon verticillatus var. laevigatus) , of the
Lythraceae, forming a solid border along Allequash Creek, on Trout Lake in
Vilas County, photographed by H, H. litis in June, 1962. Later in the summer,
the branches elongate and arch into the water, where they root. Eventually
they break off, and overwinter to start a new plant next spring. The species is
well-known from the Pleistocene fossil record of Europe, but to day only occurs
in Eastern North America.
trations of Oenothera and Epilobium; and especially to Dr. Hugh H.
litis for his assistance and advice in the preparation of this report
as well as for his critical reading of the manuscript.
This project was supported during 1959-1961 by the Research
Committee of the University of Wisconsin on funds from the Wis¬
consin Alumni Research Foundation. The drawings of Oenothera
and Epilobium were prepared with the financial help of the J. J.
Davis Fund.
1962] Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No, U7 85
Contents
Page
Order THYMELAEALES _ 85
Thymelaeaceae (Mezereum Family) _ 85
Elaeagnaceae (Oleaster Family) _ 86
Order MYRTALES _ 87
Lythraceae (Loosestrife Family) _ 87
Melastomataceae (Melastome Family) _ 93
Onagraceae (Evening-primrose Family) _ 93
Haloragidaceae (Water milfoil Family) _ 127
Hippuridaceae (Mare’s tail Family) _ 128
Order CACTALES _ 128
Cactaceae (Cactus Family) _ 128
ORDER THYMELAEALES
Trees or shrubs with alternate or opposite, exstipulate leaves.
Flowers commonly 4~5-merous, perfect or unisexual, regular, peri-
gynous, petalous or apetalous. Stamens usually as many or twice as
many as the sepals. Ovary superior, 1-celled, carpels 2-many, with
a single suspended ovule. Fruit a nutlet or drupe.
KEY TO FAMILIES
A. Leaves green; flowers perfect, the calyx bearing 8 stamens
and free from the ovary, which forms a berry-like drupe in
fruit _ THYMELAEACEAE, page 85
AA, Leaves silvery-scurfy with stellate hairs or scales; flowers
perfect or dioecious, the calyx bearing 4 or 8 stamens and in
the perfect or pistillate flowers becoming pulpy and berry-like
in fruit, strictly enclosing the achene _
- ELAEAGNACEAE, page 86
THYMELAECEAE— MEZEREUM FAMILY
Small trees or shrubs with simple, alternate, entire leaves. Flow¬
ers regular, perfect, perigynous, X~5-merous. Petals lacking or rep¬
resented by scales. Sepals often petal-like, united into a tube at least
at the base, and bearing usually twice as many stamens as its lobes.
Ovary superior, 1-celled, 1-ovuled, Fruit a drupe.
1. DIRCA L. Leatherwood
1. Dirca PALUSTRis L. Leatherwood ; Rope-Bark. Map 1.
Shrub 1-3 m high; branchlets jointed, the bark fibrous and very
tough (hence common name). Leaves alternate, broadly oval-
obovate, entire, 2-9 (-11) cm long, on very short petioles 1-3 mm
86 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol, 51
long, their bases concealing the dark-hairy buds of the next season.
Flowers light yellow, 5-10 mm long, preceding the leaves. Petals
none. Stamens 8, exserted, the alternate ones longer. Drupe ellip¬
soid, pale green or yellowish, often drying red, 5-11 mm long( see
McVaugh, 1941).
Throughout the state, though most common north of the ‘Ten¬
sion zone”, in rich mesic Northern Hemlock Hardwood and Maple-
Basswood forests, in the east in Oak-Beech and Beech forests, spor¬
adic in southern Wisconsin in rich Oak or Maple woods, occasion¬
ally in moist or wet thickets. Flowering from late March through
May (mid-June), and fruiting from late April to mid-June.
The remarkably pliable and strong bark was used by the Indians
for thongs in making canoes, bow strings, and fish lines. The bark
is poisonous, acting as a violent emetic.
ELAEAGNACEAE— OLEASTER FAMILY
Trees or shrubs covered ivith silvery or golden-brown peltate or
stellate scales. Leaves entire, alternate or opposite. Flowers small,
perfect or dioecious, regular, perigynous, in axillary clusters or
rarely solitary. Petals none. Sepals often petal-like, 2^4-lobed, al¬
ternating with as many or twice as many stamens. Ovary 1-celled,
1-ovuled, becoming fleshy in fruit.
Represented in our area by one native species and two intro¬
duced ornamentals: Shepherdia argentea Nutt., the Buffalo Berry,
an occasionally cultivated shrub, has dioecious flowers, thorny
branches and opposite leaves silvery-lepidote on both sides; Elaeag-
nus angustifolia L., the Russian Olive, a small tree, has alternate
leaves and perfect flowers.
1. SHEPHERDIA Nutt. Buffalo berry
1. Shepherdia canadensis (L.) Nutt. Soapberry. Map 2.
Thornless dioecious shrub 1-2 m high. Leaves opposite, elliptical
to ovate, 2-7 cm long, green and nearly glabrous above, densely sil¬
very-downy with scattered rusty scales beneath. Flowers greenish-
yellow, in small clusters on twigs of the previous season, the pistil¬
late with a 4-cleft calyx, the mouth of the hypanthium closed by
dense hairs. Staminate flowers with a 4-parted calyx and 8 stamens.
Fruit berry-like, ovoid, yellowish-red, inedible. 2n=22 (Cooper
1932, ex Darlington, 1955).
Occasional and locally common along the shoreline of Lake Mich¬
igan and Lake Superior; on calcareous cliffs and shores, more or
less wooded sandy dunes, clay bluffs, or ravines along Lake Michi-
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. U7
87
gan, on sandy gravelly moraines (Sheboygan Co,, NE of Elkhart
Lake, Skinners 2960 [WIS] ) , and on wooded sandy or clay shores
of Lake Superior, in northern Wisconsin rarely in marshes (Ash¬
land Co., Loon Lake, Mellen, Bohh 2UU [WIS]), Aspen-Paper Birch
deeryards, or upland woods. Flowering from mid-April to early
June, and fruiting from early June through July (October).
ORDER MYRTALES
Aquatic or terrestrial herbs. Flowers regular, mostly perfect and
petalous, perigynous or epigynous, with a well developed hypan-
thium or “calyx-tube'' bearing the flower parts high above the
ovary. Stamens usually as many or twice as many as the petals.
Ovary superior or inferior, 1-several-celled. Fruit a 1-many-seeded
capsule or rarely indehiscent.
KEY TO FAMILIES
A. Ovary superior; flowers perigynous.
B. Leaves entire, with only one central vein; anthers dehis¬
cent longitudinally _ LYTHRACEAE, page 87
BB. Leaves sharply serrulate, prominently 3 veined; anthers
opening by terminal pores _
_ _ _ MELASTOMATACEAE, page 93
AA. Ovary inferior; flowers epigynous.
C. Leaves alternate or opposite, entire to serrate, or whorled
and pinnately disected ; stamens 2-8 ; aquatic or terrestrial
herbs.
D. Leaves alternate or opposite, entire to serrate ; style 1 ;
mainly terrestrial herbs _ ONAGRACEAE, page 93
DD. Leaves alternate or whorled, pinnately dissected ; styles
3 or 4; aquatic herbs__HALORAGIDACEAE, page 127
CC. Leaves whorled, entire, never pinnately dissected; stamen
1 ; aquatic herb _ HIPPURIDACEAE, page 128
LYTHRACEAE— LOOSESTRIFE FAMILY
Herbs (ours) with simple, entire, opposite or whorled leaves.
Flowers axillary or whorled, 4-7~merous, perfect, regular, perigy¬
nous, with a well developed hypanthium, dimorphic or trimorphic.
Calyx tubular or campanulate, often with appendages between the
lobes. Petals present or absent. Stamens usually as many as petals.
Ovary completely or incompletely 2-6-celled, the ovules several to
many per carpel. Fruit a capsule enclosed by the persistent hypan¬
thium.
88 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
KEY TO GENERA
A. Calyx with 4 teeth or lobes ; stamens 4 ; petals minute or none.
B. Calyx with appendages between the lobes ; leaves narrowed
to a petiole _ _ _ 1. ROTALA.
BB. Calyx-lobes without appendages ; leaves sessile ; small aqua¬
tic, rarely emergent _ 2. DIDIPLIS.
AA. Calyx with 5-7 teeth; stamens 5-12; petals conspicuous, red¬
dish-purple.
C. Hypanthium cup-shaped; flowers verticillate ; leaves oppo¬
site or in 3’s (the upper rarely alternate), tapered to a
petiole _ 3. DECODON.
CC. Hypanthium tubular; flowers in dense terminal spikes or
solitary in axils of upper leaves; leaves all opposite or al¬
ternate, sessile _ 4. LYTHRUM.
1. ROTALA L.
[Fernald, M. L. and Griscom, L., Rhodora 37:169, 1935.]
1. Rotala ramosior (L.) Koehne. Tooth-Cup. Map 3.
Small annual herbs, branched or simple, depressed to erect, gla¬
brous, 5-20 cm high. Leaves opposite, linear-oblanceolate to spatu-
late, 1-3 cm long, 2-4 mm wide. Floivers U-merous, axillary, soli¬
tary, sessile. Calyx campanulate or globose, with minute triangular
appendages between the sinuses. Petals minute, white or pink, soon
deciduous. Capsule enclosed by the persistent calyx, 2.-4 mm long,
2-3 mm broad, sessile.
Sandy or muddy open shores of lakes, ponds, or rivers, often on
mudflats or sandbars, mostly in southwestern Wisconsin. Along
Lake Barney (Dane Co., Zimmerman SUUS [WIS] ) on low edge of
cornfield with Polygonum coccineum, P. pensylvanicum, Eleocharis
intermedia, E. engelmanni, Lindernia anagallidea, and Scirpus hal-
lii. Flowering from mid-July through September, and fruiting from
late July to mid-October,
Easily confused with Ludwigia palustris (p. 94) which has the
calyx-tube actually fused to the ovary and only the lobes free. Emer¬
gent Ludwigia generally roots at the nodes and has prostrate stems.
1962]
Ugent—Wisconsin Flora No, U7
89
SHEPHERDIA%
n CANADENSIS^
90 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
2. DIDIPLIS Raf. Water Purslane.
[Fassett, N. C., “A Manual of Aquatic Plants.” Rev. ed. p. 255,
1957.]
1. Didiplis diandra (Nutt.) Wood. Water Purslane Map 4.
Peplis diandra Nutt.
Small aquatic or mud dwelling herbs with opposite leaves and
minute greenish axillary flowers. Petals none. Hypanthium cam-
panulate, the calyx-lobes triangular, without appendages. Capsule
globose, indehiscent, about 1.5-2 mm long and broad, sessile. Leaves
of submersed plants quite different in aspect from the emersed.
A. Submersed aquatic with ribbon-like, thin, limp leaves not nar¬
rowed at base _ d. diandra forma aquatica (Koehne) Fassett.
AA. Emersed form with firmer broader leaves somewhat tapered at
the ends _ D. diandra forma terrestris (Koehne) Fassett.
Shallow water and muddy shores of pools in the Mississippi River
bottoms in Grant, Crawford, and Buffalo Counties; in Juneau Co.,
in reservoir at Potters’ Cranberry Marsh, 6 miles S. of Mather.
Flowering from July to early September, and fruiting from August
through October. A monotypic genus of the eastern United States,
resembling and easily confused with Callitriche, the Water-Star-
wort, which lacks a perianth and has flattened and deeply grooved
capsules.
3. DECODON J. F. Gmel. Swamp-Loosestrife
1. Decodon verticillatus (L.) Ell. Water-Oleander. Map 5.
Perennial herbs with arching stems 6-14 (-18) dm long, these
often rooting at the tip when reaching the water or mud, the mas¬
sive submersed parts ivoody, thickened ivith conspicuous, spongy
and soft, brown aerenchyma. Leaves short-petioled, opposite or in
whorls of 3 or 4, lanceolate, entire, 5-20 cm long, 1-5 cm wide.
Flowers trimorphic, verticillate in the axils of the upper leaves.
Calyx cup-shaped, the 5-7 teeth with slender appendages between
their sinuses. Petals 5, reddish-purple, lanceolate, cuneate at base.
Stamens 10, exserted, unequal. Capsule globose, 3-5-celled, loculici-
dal, on pedicels ca. 1 cm long. A monotypic North American genus,
known in the European fosil record from the Pleistocene, but there
now extinct.
In Wisconsin 2 varieties can be recognized differing only by
pubescence. Intergrading specimens are occasionally encountered.
1962]
91
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. U7
Key to Varieties
A. Stems, pedicels, and leaves glabrous, or nearly so
_ la. D, VERTICILLATUS var. LAEVIGATUS.
AA, Stems, pedicels, and lower leaf surfaces more or less downy
_ lb. D. VERTICILLATUS var. VERTICILLATUS.
la. Decodon verticillatus var. laevigatus T. & G.
Northern and eastern Wisconsin, in swamps, shallow pools, edge
of streams, lake margins, and cattail marshes with Zizania and
Sagittaria, mostly at the edge and trailing or arching into the water,
occasionally rooting in water up to 1 m deep, often forming exten¬
sive pure stands (e.g. in Allequash Creek, Vilas Co.). Flowering
from late July to early October, and fruiting from mid- August to
mid-October. The Sawyer Co. records are those reported by Fas-
sett (1932).
lb. Decodon verticillatus var. verticillatus.
Southeastern Wisconsin, on edge of lakes. Flowering dates as in
the above variety.
In Wisconsin, Decodon is not only completely lacking from the
Driftless Area, but appears to be restricted only to those glaciated
areas north and east of the Cary End Moraine of the Wisconsin
glaciation, which is indicated on map 5 by stippling. The signifi¬
cance of this distribution, if any, is unknown.
4. LYTHRUM L. Loosestrife
[Shinners, L. H., 1953, Synopsis of the U. S, species of Lythrum
(Lythraceae) . Field and Lab. 21 :80-89.]
Herbs with 4-angled stems and opposite, whorled, or alternate
leaves. Flowers often dimorphic or trimorphic. Petals 5-7, pink or
magenta (rarely white). Hypanthium cylindrical, striate, 5-7
toothed, with slender appendages between the sinuses. Stamens as
many, or twice as many as the petals, inserted on the calyx-tube.
Ovary 2-celled, the ovules numerous. Capsule septicidal, enclosed by
the persistent hypanthium.
Key to Species
A. Leaves alternate on the branches, on the stem either alternate,
or opposite, or rarely in 3’s; flowers solitary in the axils of the
upper leaves; calyx glabrous _ 1. L. alatum
AA. Leaves opposite, or in whorls of 3’s; flowers in long dense
spikes; calyx more or less downy _ _ 2. L. salicaria.
92 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
1. Lythrum alatum Pursh. Winged-Angled Loosestrife. Map 6.
Branched erect perennial 2-10 dm tall, glabrous, the stem angled
and often slightly winged. Leaves entire, sessile, linear-oblong to
ovate-lanceolate, acute, with a rounded or cordate base. Flowers
short-pedicelled, solitary, dimorphic, either the stamens or the style
exserted. Calyx-tube cylindrical, striate. Petals purple, obovate,
about 5 mm long.
Southeastern Wisconsin and Mississippi River bottoms, in moist
or wet sedge meadows, prairies, marshes, lake shores, river banks,
bogs, and wet ditches; at Ennis Lake (Marquette Co., litis 12681
[WIS] ) , on alkaline sedge meadows with Lobelia kalmii, Gentiana
procera, Solidago riddellii. Aster junciformis, Scleria verticillata,
and Potentilla fruticosa; and south of Kenosha (Kenosha Co.,
Kruschke s.n., 1941 [MIL] ) , on moist sandy prairies with Pycnan-
themum virginianum, Solidago graminifolia, S. riddellii, Liatris
spicata, Petalostemum sp.. Allium cernuum, and Lobelia kalmii.
Flowering from late June to early October.
A collection from Lincoln Co. (Merrill, moist shore, not common,
Goessl 2808 [MIL]) cited by Seymour (1960:254) is very likely
based on a mislabelled specimen, as are many other records of
Goessl. Seymour, who gathered nearly 10,000 specimens in that
county, never was able to relocate that species.
2. Lythrum salicaria L. var. tomentosum (Mill.) DC. Spiked
or Purple Loosestrife. Map 7.
Erect robust puberulent perennial 6-13 dm high. Leaves lanceo¬
late, opposite or in whorls of 3’s, sessile and cordate or clasping at
base. Flowers in dense terminal, interrupted spikes, trimorphous
in the relative lengths of the stamens and style. Appendages of
calyx-tube twice as long as the sepals, or longer. Petals reddish-
purple, showy, 7-10 mm long. 2n=30, 50, 60 (Shinke, 1929; Levan
& Love, 1942.; La Cour, 1945, ex Darlington, 1955).
Sporadic throughout the state, though often occuring in very
large colonies, in moist or wet ground, frequently along muddy lake
shores, river banks, ponds, cattail marshes, sedge meadows, and
roadside or railroad ditches. A native of Europe frequently culti¬
vated for its showy flowers, and established as an escape, it has
been rapidly spreading in recent years, the first record in the state
collected in 1928 (Milwaukee Co., Whitefish Bay, Throne s.n. [WIS,
MIL]). Flowering from late June to early September, and fruiting
in August and September.
93
1962] U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. U7
MELASTOMATACEAE—MELASTOME FAMILY
Herbs (shrubs or trees in tropical regions) with opposite or
whorled, prominently 3-9~rihhed exstipulate leaves. Represented in
our area by a single genus and species.
1. RHEXIA L. Meadow-Beauty
[James, C. W., A revision of Rhexia. Brittonia 8:201“230. 1956.]
1. Rhexia virginica L. Meadow-Beauty; Deergrass. Map 8.
Perennial herb with tuberous roots, 2-5 dm tall, sparsely glandu¬
lar-hirsute, with tufts of hairs on the nodes. Leaves opposite, ovate-
laceolate to ovate, 2-5 cm long, S-5~nerved, the margins serrulate-
ciliate. Flowers in cymes, perigynous. Calyx urn-shaped, persistent.
Petals Jf, showy, dark rose to purple, spreading, 8-17 mm long.
Anthers bright yellow, 5-7 mm long, linear, curved. Capsule 6-
celled; seeds coiled, papillose.
Central Wisconsin, mainly in the bed of Glacial Lake Wisconsin,
in moist sedge meadows, and sandy roadside and railroad ditches,
near Mauston (Juneau Co.), growing under Jack Pine along edge
of bog, and south of Princeton (Green Lake Co.), on a moist
meadow with Rynchospora and Poly gala. Flowering from July
through August, and fruiting from late August to early September.
The genus centers in the Atlantic coastal plain. The pine forests
of the Glacial Lake Wisconsin area markedly resemble those of the
coastal plain, being flat, sandy, and wet !
ONAGRACEAE— EVENING-PRIMROSE FAMILY
Annual or perennial herbs with (2-) U-merous, perfect epigy-
nous, and symmetrical flowers. Hypanthium-tube adhering to the
(1-) 2-4-celled inferior ovary, often prolonged beyond it and bear¬
ing the floral organs at its summit. Stamens 2, 4, or 8, often alter¬
nately unequal. Leaves simple, opposite or alternate.
Key to Genera
A. Petals 4 ; stamens 4 or 8 ; leaves opposite or alternate.
B. Hypanthium-tube scarcely or not at all extended beyond
the ovary.
C. Seeds without a tuft of hairs at the summit; calyx per¬
sistent on the fruit; petals minute or absent; stamens 4
_ _ 1. LUDWIGIA.
CC. Seeds with a tuft of hairs at the summit; calyx decidu¬
ous; petals conspicuous; stamens 8 __2. EPILOBIUM.
94 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
BB. Hypanthium-tube conspicously prolonged beyond the ovary.
D. Petals yellow, sometimes pink or white (then more
than 1 cm long) ; capsule eventually dehiscent, contain¬
ing several to many seeds. _ 3. OENOTHERA.
DD. Petals white, pink, or red (never yellow), less than 1
cm long; capsule indehiscent, containing 1-4 seeds —
_ 4. GAURA.
AA. Parts of flower in 2’s; leaves opposite; fruits indehiscent,
bristly _ 5. CIRCAEA.
1. LUDWIGIA L. False Loosestrife
[Munz, P. A., The American species of Ludwigia. Bull. Torr. Bot.
Club 71:152-165. 1944.]
Aquatic or marsh herbs with opposite or alternate leaves and
axillary Jf-merous flowers. Calyx-lobes persistent in fruit; petals
minute or absent. Capsule many-seeded, septicidally dehiscent, often
with two bracts near its base.
Key to Species
A. Leaves opposite ; stems creeping on mud or submersed _
_ 1. L. PALUSTRIS.
AA. Leaves alternate; stems erect or ascending __2. L. polycarpa.
1. Ludwigia palustris (L.) Ell. var. Americana (DC). Fern. &
Griscom. Marsh or Water Purslane. Map 9.
Plants weak-stemmed, nearly prostrate on mud or growing in
shallow water, with roots from all but the upper nodes. Leaves
lanceolate to ovate, 1-5 cm long, tapering to slender petioles. Flow¬
ers minute, axillary, solitary, and sessile, the petals wanting. Cap^ i
sule 4-sided ; bracteoles minute or wanting.
Submersed plants in deep water, with limp sterile stems, and
broad thin long petioled leaves, are known as forma elongata Fas- !
sett.
Throughout Wisconsin, though sporadic, on muddy or sandy ;
shores of lakes or rivers, along wet ditches, in marshes, and sub- i
mersed in shallow standing water of ponds and lakes. Flowering it
from July through September, and fruiting from July to mid- I
October.
Autumnal forms of this species are often minute and may flower
and fruit when only 1 cm tall. The aquatic phase of the species is
often sold as an aquarium plant.
1962]
Ugent‘ — Wisconsin Flora No, U7
95
96 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
2. Ludwigia polycarpa Short & Peter. Ludwigia, Map 10.
Stems erect, commonly much branched above, 4-angled, glabrous,
2-9 dm tall, the stem base often in standing water and then swollen
with thick soft spongy aerenchyma. Cauline leaves narrowly lanceo¬
late to oblanceolate-elliptic, acuminate to acute, tapering to a ses¬
sile or short petiolate base. Petals minute, yellowish, ca. 1 mm long,
or absent. Capsule 5-6 mm long, somewhat 4-sided, with 2 bracts
near its base. Completely submersed plants have thin, narrowly
lanceolate to linear leaves, and sterile weak stems.
Southern half of Wisconsin south of the ‘Tension Zone”, on
muddy or sandy lake shores, river banks, pond or bog margins,
marshes, swamps, and flowages, rarely submersed in stagnant pools
or ponds, as on the Kenosha Prairie. Flowering from Mid- July to
early September, and fruiting from late July through September.
2. EPILOBIUM L. Willow-Herb
[Fernald, M. L., Epilobium glandulosiim and E. adenocaulon.
Rhodora 20:31-35. 1918; The identities of Epilobium lineare, E,
densum, and E. ciliatum. Rhodora 46 :377-386. 1944. Trelease, W.,
The species of Epilobium occurring north of Mexico. Ann. Rept.
Mo. Bot. Card. 2:69-117. 1891.]
Perennial (rarely annual) herbs with alternate or opposite leaves,
and 4-merous flowers in terminal racemes or solitary in the upper
leaf axils. Petals purple to pink or white. Capsule slender, many
seeded. Seeds with a tuft of silky hairs (coma) at the summit.
Key to Species
A. Flowers in a terminal raceme; petals 8-17 mm long, very
showy; stigma 4-cleft _ _ 1. E. angustifolium.
AA. Flowers solitary in the upper leaf axils; petals 3-8 mm long.
B. Stigma 4-cleft ;stem glabrate; leaves entire, nearly linear,
rarely more than 3 mm wide; adventitious annual, rare__
_ 2. E. PANICULATUM.
BB. Stigma entire; stem variously pubescent; leaves narrowly
lanceolate, ovate-lanceolate, or elliptic, over 3 mm wide
(linear and often narrower in no. 4) .
C. Leaves entire or subentire, the margins often revolute ;
stem round, without decurrent lines from the base of
each leaf.
D. Stems softly pubescent with straight spreading
hairs _ 3. E. strictum.
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. A7
97
DD. Stems minutely pubescent or canescent with ap-
pressed or incurved hairs.
E. Upper leaf-surface densely pubescent with incurved
hairs _ 4. E. leptophyllum.
EE. Upper leaf-surface glabrous or with few remote in¬
curved hairs _ 5. E. palustre.
CC. Leaves conspicuously toothed, flat ; stem 4-angled, with
decurrent lines, angles, or strips of pubescence running
down from the leaf bases.
F. Mature seeds striate or striate-papillose (lOX),
often with a very short hyaline beak, the coma
white, tawny, or brown ; stem with spreading (often
glandular) hairs as well as smaller incurved egland-
ular ones, the sides and angles equally pubescent;
flower buds rounded or obtuse or with divergent
sepal-tips.
G. Mature seeds striate, the coma white or whitish ;
flower buds obtuse or rounded ; mature capsules
rarely containing an aborted seed; stem simple
or loosely branching (fig. 4) _6. E. glandulosum.
GG. Mature seeds striate-papillose, the coma white,
tawny, or brown, buds rounded, or divergent
tipped, or somewhat intermediate; mature cap¬
sules often containing many aborted seeds ; stem
bushy-branched at summit (%. 4 and 5) _
_ 7. E. X WISCONSINENSE.
FF. Mature seeds papillose, beakless, the coma brown
(white in immature capsules) ; stem minutely
pubescent with incurved hairs above, tending to be
pubescent in lines ; flower buds with divergent sepal-
tips (fig. 4) _ 8, E. COLORATUM.
1. Epilobium angustifolium L. Great Willow-Herb; Fireweed,
Map 11.
Erect perennial from creeping rhizomes, 0.2-2 m high, with nu¬
merous flowers in a terminal raceme. Leaves alternate, 3-20 cm long,
lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, acuminate, entire or minutely dentic¬
ulate, very short petioled. Petals 8-17 mm long, pink to purple or
white in forma alhiflorum (Dumort.) Haussk. Mature capsule 3-8
cm long, canescent. Seeds smooth or nearly so, the coma whitish or
tawny. 2n=36 (Michaelis, 1925, ex Gaiser, 1926).
98 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
Very common throughout Wisconsin in almost any habitat and
often weedy, on roadsides, railroad tracks, abandoned fields, prair¬
ies, open woods, bracken-grasslands and edge of swamps and bogs,
especially abundant in recently cleared or burned woods (hence the
common name). Flowering from mid-June to early September, and
fruiting from late- July to mid-October.
2. Epilobium paniculatum Nutt. var. subulatum (Haussk.)
Fern. Panicled Willow-Herb.
Slender dichotomous-paniculate branched annual. Stem glabrous
or glabrate with exfoliating “bark” near the base. Leaves alternate
or opposite, nearly linear, rarely more than 3 mm wide. Petals
purple, 5 mm long. Capsule spindle-shaped, about 2 cm long, 2n=36
(Johansen, 1929, ex Gaiser, 1930).
Widely distributed in the Western States, collected but once in
Wisconsin, along a railroad siding in Milwaukee (Aug. 13, 1940,
Shinners 2569 [WIS]).
3. Epilobium strictum Muhl. Downy or Soft Willow-Herb.
Map 12.
Epilobium densum Raf.
Epilobium molle Torr., not Lam.
Perennial with erect stems 2-10 dm high, simple or branched
above, pubescent throughout with soft, dense, straight, spreading
or somewhat ascending hairs. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, 1-6 cm
long, 2-7 mm wide, entire or minutely denticulate. Petals pink, 5-8
mm long. Coma becoming very pale dingy brown.
Rare and scattered in Wisconsin, in Tamarack-Sphagnum bogs,
marshy or springy shores of lakes, at Ennis Lake (Marquette Co.,
litis 12666 [WIS] in alkaline edge meadows with Lobelia kalmii,
Gentiana procera, Solidago riddellii, Aster junciformis, Liatris spp.,
Lythrum alatum, and Epilobium leptophyllum. Flowering from late
July to mid-September, and fruiting from late July to early October.
4. Epilobium leptophyllum Raf. Linear-Leaved Willow-Herb
Map 13.
Epilobium densum, of Gray’s Man. ed. 7, not Raf.
Epilobium linear e, of authors, not Muhl.
Slender erect perennial 2-10 dm high, simple to much branched,
minutely pubescent with incurved hairs. Leaves linear or linear-
lanceolate, acute, with entire or subentire revolute margins, canes-
cent to sparsely pubescent above, 1-3 mm wide, or in forma um-
brosum (Haussk.) Fern, the thin and flat primary leaves 4-10 mm
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No, U7
99
wide. Flowers in the axils of the upper leaves ; petals pink or whit¬
ish, 4-6.5 mm long. Capsules 2-6 cm long, on pedicels 5-25 mm
long. Seeds with a minute beak, the coma pale dingy brown.
Throughout Wisconsin though most common in the northern and
eastern parts in almost any wet habitat both alkaline and acid,
such as Tamarack, Sphagnum or Spruce bogs, swamps, margins of
streams, ponds, lakes, Alnus-Salix thickets, wet prairies, sedge
meadows, cattail marshes, damp sandstone cliffs, roadside and rail¬
road ditches, wet Northern Hardwoods, and Conifer swamps. Flow¬
ering from mid-July to mid-September, and fruiting from late July
to early October.
5. Epilobium palustre L. Map 12.
Erect perennial 3-4.5 dm high with stems decumbent at base,
simple to few branched above, glabrescent below, minutely incurved
pilose above. Leaves linear to oblong-lanceolate, 1-4 cm long, 3-12
mm wide, entire to remotely denticulate, nearly or quite glabrous
above. Flowers solitary in the upper leaf axils, nodding in bud.
Calyx 3-4 mm long. Petals lilac to pink or white. Capsules 2-7 cm
long, on pedicels 15-35 mm long. 2n=36 (Bocher, 1938, ex Love,
1955).
A widely distributed boreal species extremely rare in northern
Wisconsin, forms of which may closely resemble Epilobium lepto-
phyllum forma umbrosum. The following collections, especially the
first, are placed here with considerable reservation.
Lincoln Co. : spruce bog, [flowering and fruiting] Aug. 2, 1953,
Merrill, Seymour 15A26 (WIS). Oneida Co.: shady mossy woods,
[flowering and fruiting] Sept. 1, 1915, Rhinelander, Goessl 2626
(MIL).
6. Epilobium glandulosum Lehm. Northern Willow-Herb.
Map 14.
Perennial with stems 0.3-10 dm high, simple to much branched,
glabrous below, with spreading (often gland-tipped) as well as
smaller incurved hairs above, the sides as well as the angles pubes¬
cent, Leaves varying from narrowly lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate,
1-10 cm long, 3-30 mm wide, shallowly denticulate to sharply ser¬
rulate, sessile or short petioled. Flower buds obtuse or rounded at
the summit. Petals lilac to pink (white), 1.5-6 mm long. Capsules
1.5-8. 5 cm long; seeds with a very short beak, striate, the coma
white or whitish.
Despite numerous integrading forms the following 4 poorly de¬
fined geographic varieties are recognized as occurring in Wisconsin
(see discussions under vars. “glandulosum” and perplexans) .
100 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Key to Varieties
[Modified from Fernald, M. L., Epilobium glandulosum and E. ade-
nocaulon. Rhodora 2*0 :34. 1918.]
A. Leaves crowded, not conspicuously decreasing in size into the
crowded inflorescence, the larger 6-10 cm long, 2-3 cm wide ;
stems 4-10 dm high _ 6a. var. “glandulosum.''
AA. Leaves remote, conspicuously decreasing in size into the loose
and open inflorescence; stems 0.3-10 dm high.
B. Leaves thin and rather flaccid, light green, 0.5-4 cm long,
3-15 mm wide, broadly rounded at base or tapering to a
slender petiole; stems weak, erect or ascending, simple or
branching from near the base, 0.3-3 dm high, tending to
become crisp-pubescent in lines below -
_ 6b. var. perplexans.
BB. Leaves firm, dark green, 1.5-10 cm long, rounded or barely
subcordate at base, sessile or with short petioles; stems
(except in dwarf plants) erect and strict, freely branching,
1-10 dm high, the pubescence not in lines.
C. Median leaves elongate-lanceolate, 2-6 cm long, 3-13
mm wide _ 6c. var. occidentale.
CC. Median leaves narrowly ovate or ovate-lanceolate, 1.5-
10 cm long, 4-30 mm wide _ 6d. var. adenocaulon.
6a. Epilobium glandulosum Lehm. var. “glandulosum."
Map 15.
Stems thick (hut soft), 4-10 dm high, relatively glabrous below
the inflorescence. Larger leaves broadly ovate-lanceolate, 6-10 cm
long, 2-3 cm wide, not conspicuously decreasing in size into the
crowded inflorescence. Mature capsules 4-7 cm long.
Rare in northwestern Wisconsin, with one specimen from the
Dells of the Wisconsin River (Coldwater Canyon) ; in moist woods.
Aspen stands, open low ground, and damp pastures. Flowering from
mid- July to early September, and fruiting from late August.
Our plants differ from those described by Fernald in his inter¬
pretation of the variety in having smaller flowers (petals 4-5 mm
long instead of 6-9) and laxer leaves more like those of var. ade¬
nocaulon. Fernald (Rhodora 20:32. 1918) discusses a similar situa¬
tion in the Gulf of St. Lawrence region, where these two varieties
freely intergrade. He found that in the colder northern parts of its
range, Epilobium glandulosum is fairly consistent in its large flow¬
ers and crowded leaves, whereas in the more southerly habitats,
the plants have smaller flowers and less crowded leaves, or exhibit
various other combinations of characters which approach those of
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. Jf7
101
102 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
var. adenocaulon. Prompted by the unstable characters of these
two taxa, Fernald reduced the Epilohium adenocaulon of Hauss-
knecht, and its two varieties named by Trelease, to separate varie¬
ties of Epilohium glandulosum Lehmann. The present study sug¬
gests that Fernald’s varieties may well be either “ecotypes,” or
phenotypic variants whose size and habit differences are due to a
combination of soil, shade, and climatic factors. When various
morphological characters are reduced to quantitative measurements
and graphed, the relationship is seen to be nearly linear, which
tends to support this hypothesis (see fig. 1). However, further
field and laboratory work is needed in order to establish the true
nature of these forms.
6b. Epilobium glandulosum var. perplexans (Trel.) Fern.
Map 15.
Epilohium adenocaulon Haussk. var. ? perplexans Trek,
sensu Robinson and Fernald, 1908.
Epilohium hornemanni Reichenb., of authors.
Epilohium ciliatum Raf., sensu Fernald, 1950.
Usually very small plants 3-20 (-30) cm, the stems weak, ascend¬
ing to erect, simple or branching from near the base, tending to
become crisp-pubescent in lines below. Leaves thin and rather flac¬
cid, light-green, ovate-lanceolate, 0.5-4 cm long, 3-15 mm wide,
broadly rounded at base or slightly tapering to a slender petiole.
Petals 1.5-4. 6 mm long. Mature capsules only 1.5-4 cm long.
Rare in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, on damp sandstone
cliffs, often in full sun, at the Dells of the Wisconsin River, near
Lone Rock and Barneveld (Iowa Co.), and Mauston (Juneau Co.),
near North Andover (Grant Co.) reported from a limestone cliff.
Flowering from late July through August, and fruiting from mid-
July to early October.
The nomenclature and the taxonomy of this taxon are so con¬
fused that only special studies beyond the scope of the present
could possibly untangle it (cf. Trelease 2:94, 96, and 106, 1891).
Therefore, it seemed best to recognize this variety even though
its distinctions are weak and often subjective. Concerning this spe¬
cies, the following comments were made by Hugh H. litis: “That
var. perplexans might represent a cliff ecotype is strengthened by
the fact that depauperate specimens, with only slightly firmer leaves
and sometimes stouter and more pubescent stems, have been col¬
lected from sandstone cliffs one yard above the waters of Lake
Mendota (Eagle Heights, Madison) and on the St. Croix River
(north of Houlton), in the latter case together with normal plants
of var. adenocaulon. On the other hand, the dwarfness of the plants
LEAF LENGTH MM
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. 1^7
103
FIG. 1. EPILOBIUM GLANDULOSUM
O
O
O
o
(D
O
uo
oL
o
ro
O
CM
O „
0
V
A A • • • •
A • :•
AA. .A. . ••
A*
A A* •
.A"Ai
A • • '
■ ■
V VAR. "GLANDULOSUM"
• VAR. ADENOCAULON
A VAR. OCCIDENTALE
■ VAR. PERPLEXANS
10 15 20 25
LEAF WIDTH MM
30 35
104 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
of var, perplexans, their weak stems, and their preference for cliffs
may indicate that actually we are dealing with a distinct species
perhaps with subarctic or Rocky Mountain affinities. A final taxo¬
nomic disposition here will have to await detailed cytological studies
and taxonomic monographing. It is, however, significant that these,
the most extreme plants are restricted to the Driftless Area (this
not too surprising, of course, since nearly all cliffs in Wisconsin
are found here!), and that, furthermore, var. perplexans grows in
moist habitats with other rare, evidently relictual species that have
decided western or northern affinities [see litis & Shaughnessy
1960:117]. Thus, across from Lone Rock (Iowa Co.), it grows on
a vertical north-facing sandstone cliff associated with Sullivantia
renifolia; at the Wisconsin Dells on a sunny west-facing sandstone
cliff, wet with seepage and not 50 feet from the only Midwestern
station of the arctic Rhododendron lapponicum, both overlooking
the waters of the Wisconsin River; while at nearby Blackhawk
Island, across the river from famed Coldwater Canyon, it was found
with roots wedged in tiny crevices of a sandstone cliff within a few
feet of the present level of the Wisconsin River. There, in the dense
shade of overhanging vertical cliffs clothed with Tsuga and Thuja,
the cool humid rock faces sheltered in addition such rarities as
Primula mistassinica, Asplenium trichomanes, and again Sulli¬
vantia renifolia”
6c. Epilobium glandulosum var. occidentale (Trek) Fern.
Map 16.
Epilobium adenocaulon Haussk. var. occidentale Trek
Epilobium occidentale (Trek) Rydb.
Stems 1-8 dm high, simple or commonly branched. Leaves elon¬
gate-lanceolate, sharply serrulate, 2-6 cm long, 3-13 mm wide.
Petals 3-5 mm long. Mature capsules 3.5-6 cm long.
Infrequent in the colder northern regions of the state in damp
ground grazed woods, clearing in woods, ledges, and burnt-over
land. Flowering from late June to early September, and fruiting
from early July through September,
6d. Epilobium glandulosum var. adenocaulon (Haussk.) Fern.
Map 16.
Epilobium adenocaulon Haussk. var. adenocaulon.
Stems 1-10 dm high, simple to much branched. Leaves narrowly
ovate to ovate-lanceolate, 1.5-8. 5 (-10) cm long, 4-25 (-30) mm
wide. Petals 2.6-6 mm long. Mature capsules 3-8.5 cm long (fig. 4) .
Throughout Wisconsin, though more common in the northern
parts, in swamps, bogs, marshes, moist woods, wet sedge meadows.
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. Jp7
105
and abandoned fields, along river banks, lake margins, springs,
roadside ditches, and on moist gabbro, limestone, and sandstone
cliffs. Flowering from mid-June through September, with a peak in
late July (generally about 2% weeks before Epilohium coloratum,
with which it may hybridize), and fruiting from late June to mid-
October,
7. Epilobium X WISCONSINENSE Ugent, in Rhodora. 1963.
Map 17.
{E. coloratum Biehler x E. glandulosum var. adenocaulon
[Haussk.] Fern. ; Holotype : Polk Co. : edge of road in wet
swamp, not common, West Sweden tp. sec. 36, Johnson s.n.
[WIS]).
Stems loosely bushy-branched, spreading glandular pubescent as
well as minutely pilose, the sides as well as the angles pubescent.
Larger leaves 3-6.5 cm long, 8-21 mm wide, narrowly lanceolate,
acuminate, closely and irregularly serrulate, on petioles 1-3 mm
long. Flowers solitary in the upper leaf axils; buds rounded, or
with divergent sepal-tips, often somewhat intermediate. Calyx 3-4.2
mm long. Petals purple or lilac, 3.5-6 mm long. Mature capsules
1-3.5 (-4,5) cm long. Seeds mainly aborted (fig. 5), the mature
ones 1-1.2 mm long, 0.2-0. 5 mm wide, striate-papillose, the coma
brown or tawny (white in immature capsules).
Southern and northwestern Wisconsin, very sporadic in dis¬
turbed sedge-goldenrod peat marshes, spring-saturated sedge mead¬
ows, and along wet swampy roadsides, river banks, and railroad
tracks. Flowering from early July to early September, and fruit¬
ing from mid- August to early September.
WISCONSIN: sine loc. [ca. I860?] Hale s.n. (WIS), Dunn Co.:
railroad tracks, Menomonie, Bachman & Patrick 7-10 (WIS).
Grant Co.: Potosi, Davis s.n. (WIS) ; along streams, Boscobel, Syl¬
vester 13590 (MIL), Jefferson Co.: disturbed sedge-goldenrod peat
marsh, Sullivan tp. sec. 13, Burger 152 (WIS) . Lafayette Co. : Fay¬
ette, Cheney s.n. (WIS). Polk Co.: St. Croix Falls, Baird s.n.
(WIS) ; near river bank, 8 mi. N. St. Croix Falls, Benner 363
(MINN) ; edge of road in wet swamp, not common. West Sweden
tp. sec. 36, Johnson s.n. (WIS). Walworth Co.: spring-saturated
sedge meadow, Delavan, Wadmond 17U39 (MINN, WIS),
This hybrid^ resembles Epilobium coloratum in the sharply and
irregularly serrulate leaves, the bushy-branched inflorescence
(lower branches longer and less crowded than usual), the papillose
nature of the seeds, and the often brown or tawny coma (fig. 4).
The pubescence and striate character of the seeds are features
106 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
definitely associated with Epilobium glandulosum. Some of the mor¬
phological inter-relationships of these plants are shown graphi¬
cally in fig. 2A. The shortness and slenderness of the hybrid cap¬
sules is no doubt due to the abnormally high amount of seed abor¬
tion, which on different plants may vary from 27% to 95%
(Fig. 3).
EPILOBIUM
OQO
CC
cc
<
z
CD
lO-
<
U nJ-
ro-
Q
O
• SEEDS MOSTLY ABORTED
O SEEDS MOSTLY FERTILE
O SEEDS striate
O- SEEDS STRIATE - PAPILLOSE
CHSEEDS PAPILLOSE
0 COMA WHITE
-O COMA TAWNY
PUBESCENCE GENERAL
COLORATUM
PUBESCENCE IN LINES
o o
o
WISCONSINENSE
O
O
GLANDULOSUM
var.ADENOCAULON
FIG. 2A,
5 6
CAPSULE LENGTH CM.
Epilobium glandulosum var. adenocaulon is frequently associated
with E. coloratum, and not uncommonly plants of both taxa have
been collected together and mounted on the same herbarium sheet.
When comparing the phenology of these plants, one can readily ob¬
serve that when Epilobium coloratum is in flower, E. glandulosum
var. adenocaulon is in fruit. As can be seen from the compiled flow¬
ering dates (Maps 14 and 18; Fig, 2B), var. adenocaulon flowers
about 21/2 weeks earlier. This seasonal isolation factor may be im¬
portant in keeping these taxa relatively distinct. It should be noted
that hybrids occur in a region where the ranges of both parental
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. U7
107
F!G. 2B. FLOWERING DATE
species overlap: Epilohium glandulosum var. adenocaulon has a
wide northern distribution, ranging from Alaska to Newfound¬
land, south to Delaware and Northern Illinois, and extending at
higher elevations along the Rocky Mountains to Colorado; while
Epilohium coloratum, a species with Eastern and Southeastern
affinities, extends from Georgia to Kansas north to Minnesota, and
across Northern Wisconsin to Southern Quebec.
Figure 3. Seed abortion in Epilohium x Wisconsinense.
108 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
GLANDULOSUM VAR. ADENOCAULON
WISCONSINENSE
FIG. 4 STEMS. BUDS. AND SEEDS OF SOME WISCONSIN EPILOBIUMS f
109
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. Jp7
ILLUSTRATION OF TYPE SPECIMEN
110 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Epilohium coloratum and E. glandulosum var. adenocaulon are
both known to hybridize with other species. The following hybrids
are reported in the Index Kewensis and the Gray Herbarium Card
Index : Epilohium coloratum X Epilohium lineare MuhL ; Epilohium
coloratum X Epilohium commutatum Haussk. ; and Epilohium ade¬
nocaulon Haussk. (E, glandulosum var. adenocaulon [Haussk.]
Fern.) X Epilohium canadense Levi.
8. Epilobium coloratum Biehler. Purple=Leaved Willow-Herb.
Map 18.
Erect perennial 2-10 dm high, bushy-branched at summit or
stems simple in small plants, minutely pubescent above with in¬
curved hairs (often in lines), glabrous below. Leaves elongate-
lanceolate, acuminate, closely and irregularly serrulate, the cauline
3-18 cm long, 1-3 cm wide, distinctly short petioled. Flowers axil¬
lary, buds with divergent sepal-tips (Plate I, fig. 3) petals pink to
lilac, 3-5 mm long. Capsules finely pubescent; seeds papillose, heak-
less, the coma brotvn (ivhitish only in immature capsulesl)
Throughout Wisconsin, though most common in the southern
parts, in wet ground along river banks, lakes, springs, ponds, sandy
beaches, on damp sandstone cliffs, often in bogs, swamps, moist
sedge meadows, marshes, damp willow thickets, wet woods, road¬
side and railroad ditches. Flowering from early July to early Sep¬
tember, with a peak in mid- August (generally about 21/^ weeks
after Epilohium glandulosum, with which it may hybridize), and
fruiting from mid-August through late October.
3. OENOTHERA L. Evening-Primrose.
[Munz, P. A., Studies in Onagraceae: A revision of the subgenera
Salpingia and Calylophis. Am. Jour. Bot. 16:707-715. 1929; the
subgenus Anogra. Am. Jour. Bot. 18:309-327. 1931; the sub¬
genus Kneiffia. Bull. Torr. Bot. Club 64:287-306. 1937 ; the sub¬
genus Raimannia. Amer. Jour. Bot. 22:645-663.
Cleland, R. D., Chromosome structure in Oenothera and its effect
on the evolution of the genus. Cytologia (Supplement Vol.) : Proc.
Internat. Gen. Symp. 1956:5-19; The evolution of the North
American Oenotheras of the “Biennis” group. Planta 51 :378-
398. 1958.]
Annual or biennial, rarely perennial, erect herbs, with alternate
leaves and yellow ( white or pink) flowers solitary in the upper leaf
axils or forming terminal racemes. Hypanthium-tuhe prolonged be¬
yond the ovary, deciduous, its 4 lobes reflexed at anthesis. Petals 4 ;
stamens 8 ; ovary 4-celled. Capsule dehiscent, many seeded.
1962] Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. U7 111
Key to Species
A. Capsules cylindric to 4-angled, never prominently winged ; sta¬
mens equal and plants annual or biennial (except no. 8).
B. Hypanthium-tube prolonged more than 1 cm beyond the
ovary; stamens equal; annual or biennial herbs from a
basal rosette.
C. Stem pubescent, variously colored ; flowers yellow, some¬
times aging reddish ; seeds in 2 rows in each locule.
D. Capsules 3-8 mm thick, 1.5-4 cm long at maturity,
slightly tapering from a thickish base, straight or
slightly curved ; seeds angled, horizontal in the
locules ( Subgenus Onagra) .
E. Sepal-tips of unopened bud strictly terminal
(flgs. 6A, 6C), closely parallel and forming a
tube, or the tips converging (character some¬
times poorly preserved in pressed specimens) ;
leaves lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate; petals 9-30
mm long,
F. Calyx glabrous to more or less villous or hir¬
sute, not densely canescent (fig. 6A) ; leaves
broad, thin, crinkled, bright green, mostly with
short erect hairs _ 1. 0. biennis.
(see also 2. O.erythrosepala) .
FF. Calyx densely canescent-strigose (fig. 6C) ;
leaves narrow, thick, grayish-green with a
dense pubescence of closely appressed short
stiff hairs - 3. 0. strigosa.
EE. Sepal-tips of unopened bud subterminal, the bud
apex therefore exposed (fig. 6B) ; leaves nar¬
rowly lanceolate to oblong-lanceolate ; petals 6-18
mm long; stems commonly simple and less than
1 m high - 4. 0. parviflora,
DD. Capsules 1-3 mm thick, 1-3.5 cm long at maturity,
cylindrical, straight or commonly curving inwards;
seeds not sharply angled, ascending in the locules
; (Subgenus Raimannia) .
H. Leaves subentire to remotely denticulate; flow¬
ers in a terminal raceme, forming a distinct spike
! in fruit; capsules 1-2 cm long, 1-3 mm thick,
often strongly curving inwards _
- 5. 0. RHOMBIPETALA.
112 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
HH. Leaves deeply lobed ; flowers solitary in the axils
of the upper foliage leaves, not forming a dis¬
tinct spike in fruit; capsules 2»-3.5 cm long, 2-3
33 thick, straight or slightly curving -
_ 6. 0. LACINIATA.
CC. stem glabrous, the silvery- white bark exfoliating
toward the base; flowers white, turning pink (in
pressed specimens often a dingy yellow) ; seeds in one
row in each locule (Subgenus Anogra) _
_ 7. 0. NUTTALLIL
BB. Hypanthium-tube prolonged less than 1 cm beyond the
ovary; stamens alternately unequal; plants perennial;
leaves sharply serrulate; flowers sessile in the axils of the
upper foliage leaves, not forming a distinct spike in fruit
(Subgenus Calylophis) _ 8. 0. serrulata.
AA. Capsules clavate to obovoid, with well defined wings ; stamens
alternately unequal; plants perennial ('Subgenus Kneiffia) .
1. Petals 4-9 mm long; hypanthium-tube 4-8 mm long, stems
strigose-puberulent ; leaves subentire _ 9. 0. perennis.
11. Petals 13-30 mm long; hypanthium-tube 13-25 mm long;
stems spreading-hirsute, the hairs 1-2 mm long; leaves
denticulate _ 10. 0. pilosella.
SUBGENUS ONAGRA Ludwig
Because of the peculiar genetic situation in this subgenus, with
innumerable true breeding and self-pollinating lines resulting in
numerous locally distributed geographic races or “biotypes” (which
then occasionally hybridize), delimitation of species has long been
a hopeless and confusing matter. The fact that scores of “mutants”
or local biotypes have been published as true “species,” not only
obscured the recognition of evolutionary trends but also made it
impossible to establish a useful taxonomy for the group as a whole
(cf. Gates, 1957, 1958). The present study takes into account the
extensive cytogenetical work of Cleland who considers the sub¬
genus Onagra to be composed of relatively few species, each of
which, in itself, is of hybrid origin and consists of many races.
Concerning the origin of the various species, Cleland (personal com¬
munication, 1961) says: “There is a great deal of variation within
the major groups that I have found to exist. This is owing, in the ;
first place, to the fact that, when two populations, each possessing „
internal diversity, met and crossed, many crosses took place, many i
hybrids were formed and these were somewhat diverse in indi¬
vidual characteristics. In the second place, new “races” have come
into existence from that day to this, by crossing between existent
“races,” thus multiplying the number of races and increasing the
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No, 47
113
diversity . . . there are multitudinous races, often with consider¬
able distinctions, but there are only a few major end-points of the
evolutionary process» By calling everything . « » that differs slightly
from what has been seen before a new species, completely masks
the true picture in Oenothera, ... It is essential to understand, of
course, that the Oenothera population consists of innumerable true-
breeding and self-pollinating lines and hence is compartmentalized
by the presence of innumerable reproductive barriers/’
1. Oenothera biennis L. Bastard Evening-primrose. Map 19.
Erect biennial, the stems stout, 7-21 dm tall, simple or branch¬
ing, commonly villous or hirsute. Leaves bright green, rather thin,
crinkled, lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, 3-20 cm long, 5-48 mm
wide, acute, dentate, short-petioled or sessile, glabrate to sparsely
pubescent with short erect hairs. Flowers in terminal racemes, the
bracts often markedly different from the leaves and shorter than
to slightly longer than the capsules. Calyx glabrous to sparsely vil¬
lous or hirsute, the sepal-tips terminal and parallel, closely adjoin¬
ing and forming a tube (fig. 6A), Hypanthium-tube 18-35 mm
long. Petals obovate, 9-27 mm long. Capsule 15-40 mm long, glab¬
rate to hirsute. 2n=14 (Cleland, 1958),
The following two races, recognized by Cleland (1956), are pro¬
posed as subspecies by Munz (see discussion) :
A. Floral bracts subovate _ la. “Biennis I”
AA. Floral bracts narrow-lanceolate _ lb. “Biennis IP’
la. 0. biennis L., “biennis I” race of Cleland (1956). Map 21.
Mainly in southern and western Wisconsin, .though sporadic, on
roadsides, railroad embankments, river banks and sandbars, lake
shores, moist meadows, and woods. Flowering from early June to
early September, and fruiting from early August to late September.
Cleland (1958:378-398), in his extensive cytogenetic study of the
Onagras, found the biennis complex to be composed of 3 genetically
distinct groups native to the eastern United States. In Wisconsin
and throughout the Middle West (extending to the Atlantic Ocean
in the Southeast) occurs the race known as biennis L A genetically
different population called biennis II occurs in the northeastern
U. S. and Quebec, and extends west to Wisconsin, The biennis III
race is confined to North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and
western New York, and its range overlaps both biennis I and bien¬
nis 11. Concerning biennis I, Cleland (1958 :380) says : “The various
lines show considerable diversity, but all races are mesophytic in
character, with thin, broad, crinkly, relatively hairless leaves, and
a tendency toward delicate, brittle stems.”
114 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Dr. Philip A. Munz has kindly examined our collections of Oeno¬
thera biennis and has been able to determine the majority of them
as to race or subspecies. Although the biennis I race is of sporadic
occurrence in Wisconsin, especially in the southern and western
counties, it is quite common in Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota,
Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Munz notes
that the biennis I race has subovate floral bracts, in contrast to the
narrow-lanceolate bracts of biennis II, and is about to publish for¬
mal subspecies names for these two taxa (personal communication,
1961).
lb. 0. BIENNIS L., “BIENNIS IP’ race of Cleland (1956). Map 20.
0. biennis L., var. nutans (Atkinson & Bartlett) Wieg.
0. biennis L., var. pycnocarpa (Atkinson & Bartlett) Wieg.
Throughout Wisconsin in a great variety of open, especially dis¬
turbed habitats, frequently along roadsides, railroad tracks, aban¬
doned or cultivated fields, lake shores, river banks, marshes, sedge
meadows, prairies, and open woods. Flowering from late June
through October, with a peak in late July, and fruiting from late
July to early October.
An abnormal plant from Shawano Co. has nearly linear petals
only 33 mm wide ( Goessel Jf826, 1916 [MIL] ) . Such forms have been
referred to in the past as Oenothera cruciata Nuttall. Concerning
this abnormality, Munz (personal communication, 1961) says “0.
cruciata has in my opinion no taxonomic status. The cruciate char¬
acter occurs in all the species mentioned above and behaves like a
single gene with imperfect dominance. It is conspicuous, but appar¬
ently of no more significance than differences in many other char¬
acters. For example, see Bartlett in Amer. Jour. Bot. 1 :238. What
he calls cruciata is in parviflora; so is venosa; so is atrovirens; so
is ostreae of Sturtevant. Stenomeres is in . . . [“the Biennis V’ race
of Cleland]. I have seen cruciate forms in depressa [0. strigosa']
likewise.” For statements pertaining to the genetic behavior of the
cruciate character consult Renner (1958), and Gates (1936).
2, X Oenothera erythrosepala Borbas Map 22.
[Munz, P. A., 1949. The Oenothera Hookeri Group. El Aliso 2:38.]
Oenothera erythrosepala Borb., Magyar Bot. Lapok 2:245, 1903.
Oenothera lamarckiana of de Vries, Die Mutationstheorie 1 :152-
378, 1901; Comptes Rendus 121:124, 1900; not Seringe, in
DC., Prodr. 3:47, 1828.
Biennial. Stems erect, simple or branching, rather stout, up to
1 m tall, villous-strigose, and commonly reddish-purple. Leaves
lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, 6-15 cm long, 15-40 mm wide, acute,
Ugent- — Wisconsin Flora No, U7
115
OENOTHERA BIENNIS
g: ALL COLLECTIONS
OENOTHERA ,
^^"BIENNIS 2 RACE'
NO|\ S
OENOTHERA
biennis I RACE'
OENOTHERA
ERYTROSEPALA
OENOTHERA
PARVI FLORA
OENOTHERA STRIGOSA
116 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
dentate, passing without evident interruption into the foliaceous
bracts. Calyx reddish-purple (drying pale green), more or less vil¬
lous, the sepal-tips terminal and parallel, closely adjoining and
forming a tube. Hypanthium-tube glandular, 30-40 mm long. Petals
yellow, often tinged with red, subrotund-obovate, 20-30 mm long.
Capsule oblong-ovate, enlarged below, sparsely pilose and glandular,
25-35 mm long.
Differing from O. biennis L. in the mostly larger showy flowers
and the reddish-purple sepals (a character observable only on liv¬
ing plants). Apparently escaping from cultivation. Our three col¬
lections, determined by P. A. Munz, are as follows : Burnett Co. :
Danbury, Aug. 26 [fl], 1916, Baird s.n. [WIS]. Marquette Co.:
alluvial soil along trout stream, township of Newton, 8 mi. n.e. of
Westfield, July 29-30 [fl], 1933, Wadmond 3275 [MINN]. Wau¬
shara Co. : marsh and now dry grassland, along Willow Creek,
T19N; R12E; Sec. 22, Sept. 30, 1956 [fl], Hagene s.n. [WIS].
FIG. 6 OENOTHERA
BIENNIS
PARVIFLORA
STRIGOSA
117
1962] Ugent- — Wisconsin Flora No, Jp7
3. Oenothera strigosa (Rydb.) Mackenzie & Bush Map 23.
Erect biennial, 5-9 dm high. Stem stout, simple or branched,
sparsely pubescent below, canescent to strigose-villous above, the
hairs mostly appressed. Leaves 4-17 cm long, 6-40 mm wide, ob¬
long-lanceolate to lanceolate, acute, remotely denticulate, grayish-
green with a dense pubescence of closely appressed short stiff hairs.
Calyx densely canescent-strigose, the sepal-tips terminal and paral¬
lel, closely adjoining and forming a tube (fig. 6C). Hypanthium-
tube commonly strigose-villous, 2-34 mm long. Petals yellow,
obovate, 10-22 mm long. Capsule 17-40 mm long, often finely pubes¬
cent with appressed hairs. 2n=14 (Cleland, 1958)
Throughout Wisconsin, though sporadic and rather rare, on road¬
sides, railroad ballast, abandoned fields, and dry lime prairies. Flow¬
ering from late June to mid- August.
An abnormal form from Kenosha Co, (Russel s.n., 1908 [MIL] )
has nearly linear petals only 3 mm wide. The nature of this ‘'cruci¬
ate’’ mutant is discussed under the treatment of the biennis I race
of O. biennis L.
Oenothera strigosa extends eastward from the Rocky Mts. and
the Great Plains to the Mississippi River and into Wisconsin, where
it is at its eastern limit, and northwestward to Oregon and Wash¬
ington. It is the predominating Onagra of the Great Plains. Cle¬
land says: “Phenotypically the strigosas tend to have thick and
rather narrow leaves, strigose hairs, a greyish-green color and thick
woody stems.” (1956:13). “These plants have . . . balanced lethals
and moderately small self-pollinated flowers. They are xerophytic in
character, but the various lines or races show a great diversity in
foliage characters, in the abundance of anthocyanin pigmentation,
etc.” (1958:380).
4. Oenothera parviflora L. Small-Flowered Evening-Primrose.
Map 24.
Stems simple or rarely branching, 1.4-13 (-20) dm high, glabrate
to strigose-puberulent. Leaves narrowly lanceolate to almost linear
or to ovate-lanceolate, 2-15 cm long, 3-35 mm wide, acute, denticu¬
late, glabrate to strigose, passing without obvious change into the
bracts of the fruiting spike. Calyx glabrate to strigose-villous, t/ic
sepal-tips subterminal, buds therefore open at apex. (fig. 6B). Hy-
panthium-tube 20-35 mm long. Petals yellow, obovate, 6-18 mm
long. Capsule 1.5-4 cm long, 2n=14 (Cleland, 1958).
Common throughout Wisconsin in sandy or gravelly soil, often
along lake shores, river banks, roadsides, railroad tracks, and cliffs,
frequently in abandoned or cultivated fields, pastures, sedge mead¬
ows, and prairies. Flowering from early June to mid-October, with
118 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
an extended peak lasting from mid- July through August, in latter
August and September the predominant Onagra in flower, and fruit¬
ing from early August to mid-October.
An abnormal plant has nearly linear petals only 3 mm wide
(Manitowoc Co. : Two Rivers, Burch s.n., 1885 [WIS] ). The nature
of this “cruciate” mutant is discussed under the treatment of the
biennis I race of O. biennis L.
Oenothera parviflora extends from New England into eastern
Quebec, and along the Great Lakes into Wisconsin. Cleland (1956:
14) divides the parvifloras into two distinct groups, their appear¬
ance depending upon the particular set of genes carried by the ma¬
ternal gamete, or alpha complex. Due to the “ring” formation of
chromosomes at meiosis (peculiar to the subgenus Onagra), only
two kinds of gametes are ordinarily formed, and a given set of genes
is transmitted intact from generation to generation. The maternal
set of genes is termed the “alpha complex,” the paternal the “beta
complex.” The following excerpt from Cleland’s paper (1956:14)
particularly applies to our Wisconsin plants.
“[The parvifloras'] share with the subgenus Raimannia certain
characters not possessed in noticeable degree by other groups of
Euoenothera [_Onagra], namely, subterminal sepal-tips and a pe¬
culiar type of stem tip structure, the tips bending downward and
then, at the very tip, upward again. These characters together with
a tendency toward smallness, narrowness and hairlessness of the
leaves are borne by the beta complexes. The alpha complexes are of
two types — in some races they carry genes for a biennis-lWe pheno¬
type, in others, genes for a strigosa~\W.e phenotype. There are there¬
fore two distinct categories of parvifloras — those with leanings to¬
ward biennis, and those which bear a resemblance to strigosa. In all
cases, however, the beta complex impresses upon the plant its ex¬
treme narrowness of leaf so that there is no danger of confusing
any of the parvifloras with biennis or strigosa.”
In Wisconsin parvifloras with biennis-like and strigosa-like
phenotypes occur, the latter more rarely.
SUBGENUS RAIMANNIA (Rose) Munz
5. Oenothera rhombipetala Nutt. Rhombic Evening-Primrose.
Map 25.
Erect biennial, 2-13 dm tall. Cauline leaves narrowly oblong-
lanceolate to lance-ovate, 2-9 cm long, 3-13 mm wide, subentire to
remotely denticulate, acute, passing up the stem into leafy lanceo¬
late bracts. Flowers numerous, crowded in a terminal spike. Buds
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No, W
119
narrowly cylindric, densely strigose. Hypanthium-tube sparsely
strigose, 15-35 mm long. Petals yellow, rhombic-obovate, 10-22 mm
long. Capsules often strongly curved, 1-2 cm long, 1-3 mm thick.
Southwestern Wisconsin, particularly common in the Central
Wisconsin, Wisconsin River, and Black River sand areas, in sandy
prairies and open Jack Pine-Oak woods, frequently in abandoned
sandy fields, sand barrens, “goat” prairies, river terraces, lake
shores, roadsides, and railroad ballast. Commonly associated with
Koeleria cristata, Monarda punctata, Euphorbia corollata, Liatris
aspera, Lespedeza capitata. Ambrosia psilostachya, Cenchrus pauci-
florus, Arabis lyrata, Helianthus occidentalis, Bouteloua curtipen-
dula, B. hirsuta, Opuntia compressa, and Selaginella rupestris. Flow¬
ering from early July through early October, and fruiting from
late July to early October.
6. Oenothera laginiata Hill. var. laciniata. Cut-Leaved Eve¬
ning Primrose. Map 26.
Low annual with villous or hirsute stems 1-3 dm tall, simple to
several stemmed and branching. Leaves oblanceolate to oblong-
lanceolate, sinuate-pinnatifid, 2-6 cm long. Flowers solitary and ses¬
sile in the axils of upper leaves. Calyx-lobes 5-12 mm long. Petals
yellow to whitish, drying red, 5-18 mm long.
Rare in Wisconsin, adventive from further south, growing in
railroad ballast, sandy farmyards, roadsides, and fallow gardens,
and along the “lake front” at Manitowoc. Flowering from late June
to early September.
Oenothera laciniata Hill. var. grandiflora (Wats.) Robinson., with
calyx-lobes 20-30 mm long and petals 20-35 mm long, a south¬
western form, has been collected once in Plymouth (Sheboygan Co.,
on railroad ballast, Goessl s.n., 1903 [WIS] ) . This report is ques¬
tionable.
SUBGENUS ANOGRA (Spach) Jepson
7. Oenothera Nuttallii Sweet. White-Stemmed Evening Prim¬
rose. Map 27.
Perennial with creeping underground rootstocks. Stems erect,
glabrous, 2-9 dm high, the white bark exfoliating toward the base.
Leaves linear to linear-oblong, acute, nearly entire, glabrous above,
strigose beneath, 2—12 cm long, 2—7 mm wide. Flowers showy
white, turning pink, with disagreeable odor; buds nodding. Calyx-
lobes glandular pubescent. Hypanthium-tube 2-3 cm long. Petals
obovate, 1-2 cm long. Capsules glandular, 1-2.5 cm long, the seeds
in one row in each locule.
120 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Rare and scattered in Wisconsin along railroad tracks, though
occasionally forming large colonies, adventive from the Northern
Great Plains. Flowering from late June to early September, and
fruiting from early August to early September.
SUBGENUS CALYLOPHIS (Spach) Munz
8. Oenothera serrulata Nutt. Toothed-Leaved Evening Prim¬
rose. Map 28.
Perennial. Stems thin, often woody, 2-5 dm tall, simple to much
branched from the base, glabrous below, the upper portion canes-
cent. Leaves linear to linear-lanceolate, 1-6 cm long, commonly
sharply serrulate, sessile or tapering to a short petiole. Elowers
solitary, sessile in the axils of the upper leaves. Hypanthium-tube
4^-8 mm long, roundly 4-angled, funnelform. Petals yellow, obovate,
5-10 mm long. Stamens alternately unequal. Capsule 1-3 cm long,
roundly 4-angled, straight or slightly curved.
Native in western-most Wisconsin, in dry steep “goat” prairies,
open sandy Juniper glades, on sandy prairies, or on sand terraces,
along or near the Mississippi River bluffs; near Mondovi (Buffalo
Co., litis & Noamesi 8078 [WIS] ) in a mesic railroad prairie on
deep sandy soil, with Andropogon gerardi, Hieracium longipilum,
Lithospermum croceum, Leptoloma cognatum, Solidago rigida, S.
speciosa, Potentilla arguta, Stipa spartea, Helianthus and Liatris
spp.. Aster ericoides, and A. azureus; elsewhere adventive mainly
along railroad tracks. Flowering from mid- June to early September,
and fruiting from July to mid-October.
SUBGENUS KNEIFFIA (Spach) Munz
9. Oenothera perennis L. Sundrops Map 29.
Slender perennial with erect stems 1-4 (-7) dm tall, simple or
few branched above, strig os e-pub erulent. Leaves linear-lanceolate
to oblanceolate, 1-6 cm long, entire or remotely denticulate. Inflores¬
cence a few flowered raceme, glandular-puberulent, the tip nodding
in bud. Sepals glandular-puberulent, reflexed in pairs or in 4’s at
anthesis. Hypanthium-tube 4-8 mm long. Petals yellow, obcordate,
4-9 mm long. Stamens alternately unequal. Capsule ellipsoid-clavate
or -oblong, winged, including the narrow stipe-like base 8-13 mm
long. 2n=28 (Valcanover, 1927, ex Darlington, 1955).
•Widespread in Wisconsin, in wet to mesic prairies, sedge mead¬
ows, pastures, sandy or muddy margins of marshes, shallow bogs,
streams and rivers, moist cliffs, sandy roadsides, and occasionally
1962]
Ugent= — Wisconsin Flora No. Ii.7
121
122 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
in open Oak-Hickory woods and along railroad tracks. Flowering
from late May to mid-September, with a peak in late June, and
fruiting from mid- June to September.
10. Oenothera pilosella Raf. Meadow Sundrops Map 30.
Perennial. Stems erect, 2-6 dm high, with spreading hirsute hairs
1-2 mm long. Leaves lanceolate to almost ovate, 2-7 cm long, obtuse,
minutely and irregularly denticulate, more or less hirsute. Hypan-
thium-tube 13-20 mm long. Petals obcordate, yellow, 2-3 cm long.
Stamens alternately unequal. Capsule sessile, linear-clavate, winged,
hirsute, 1-2 cm long.
Commonly cultivated for its showy yellow flowers, and occasion¬
ally escaped on roadsides, railroads and old gardens. Flowering
from mid-June to mid-July.
4. GAURA L. Gaura
[Munz, P. A., A revision of the genus Gaura. Bull. Torr. Bot. Club
65:105-122. 1938.]
Herbs with alternate, sessile leaves, and small white, pink or red
flowers in terminal spikes. Hypanthium-tuhe conspicuously pro¬
longed, beyond the summit of the ovary, deciduous. Petals 4; sta¬
mens 8; stigma 4-lobed, surrounded by a ring. Fruit indehiscent,
hard, and nut-like, 1-U seeded.
Key to Species
A. Ovary and spindle-shaped fruit pubescent with spreading
hairs; basal portion of fruit 4-angled; plants not ordinarily
branched from the base _ _ 1. G. biennis.
AA. Ovary and pear-shaped fruit pubescent with appressed or
incurved hairs; basal portion of fruit nearly round; plants
often branched from the base _ 2. G. coccinea.
1. Gaura biennis L. Biennial Gaura. Map 31.
Stems branched, 9-11 dm high or more, spreading villous as well
as short-pubescent. Leaves oblong-lanceolate to lance-ovate, acute
at both ends, remotely denticulate, 3-11 cm long. Flowers in slender
glandular pubescent spikes; opening in evening. Sepals often red,
reflexed in pairs at anthesis. Petals white, turning pink or red,
about 5 mm long. Fruit ivith spreading hairs, 4-angled, acute at both
ends, 6-8 mm long. 2n=14 (Bhaduri, 1942, ex Darlington, 1955).
Southernmost Wisconsin probably native from Grant to Wal¬
worth County, in mesic to moist prairies, rarely in open woods ; in
19G2]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. U?
123
the counties north of the five lowest adventive (?) with all but one
collection either from railroad tracks or roadsides ; near Monticello
(Green Co.; litis & Greene 6747 [WIS] ) growing in a rich deep
black soil prairie, between R, R» tracks and road, with scattered
Willows, Dogwoods, Bur Oak, Potentilla arguta, Eryngium yucci-
folium, Ratibida pinnata, Hypericum sphaerocarpum, and Galium
spp. Flowering from mid- July through September, and fruiting
from August through September,
2, Gaura coccinea Nutt, Scarlet Gaura. Map 32,
Perennial. Stems 2-4 dm high, canescent-strigose, often branched
from the base. Leaves oblong-lanceolate to nearly linear, entire or
remotely denticulate, finely and closely pubescent, mostly sessile,
1-3 cm long. Spikes simple, nodding at tips. Sepals gray-green,
often pink, reflexed separately at anthesis. Petals white to pink,
aging red, 3-6 mm long. Capsule pubescent ivith appressed or in¬
curved hairs, pear-shaped, tapering from near the base, the body
proper 4~angled, basal portion nearly round. 2n=14 (Johansen,
1929, ex Darlington, 1955).
Native of the southwestern U.S., a rare adventive in Wisconsin
along railroad tracks. Dane Co. : railroad, Yahara, N.E. of Madi¬
son, Thomson & Dailey s.n., 1955 (WIS) ; Madison, Denniston s.n.,
1916 (WIS). Outagamie Co.: R.R. ballast, Appleton, Goessl s.n,,
1915 (MIL, WIS). Waukesha Co.: Railroad track, Hartland, Cull
880 (WIS) ; garden, Waukesha, Finger s.n., 1908 (MIL), Flower¬
ing from June through July,
5, CIRCAEA L, Enchanter’s Nightshade
Perennial herbs with opposite, dentate, petioled leaves and small
white (pink) perfect flowers in terminal and lateral racemes. Petals
2 ; stamens 2, alternate with the petals ; ovary 1-2 celled. Hypanth-
ium-tube slightly prolonged beyond the ovary. Fruit indehiscent,
1-2-seeded, small and bur-like, bristly with hooked hairs, readily
sticking to clothing and animals like stick-tights.
Key to Species
A. Fruit with ridges separated by deep furrows, 3-5 mm thick
(inc, bristles), 2-celled; buds prior to anthesis 2. 5-4.5 mm
long; leaves rounded or barely subcordate at base, shallowly
(rarely sharply) sinuate-denticulate ; stem firm, 2-10 dm high ;
rhizome slender. _ __1. C, QUAdrisulcata.
124 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
AA. Fruit smooth, l-2;.5 mm thick (inc. bristles), 1 or unequally
2-celled ; buds prior to anthesis 1-3.5 mm long ; leaves truncate,
cordate, or rarely only rounded to base, sharply denticulate;
stem weak, 0.5-5 dm high.
B. Buds 2;-3.5 mm long; fruit unequally 2-celled (semi-ster-
ile), 1.2-2. 5 mm thick; larger leaves 4-11 cm long, stems
2-5 dm high; rhizome slender _ — 2. C. “canadensis.”
BB. Buds 1-2 mm long; fruit 1-celled, 0.6-1. 5 mm thick; larger
leaves 1-6 (-8) cm long; stems 0.5-3 dm high; rhizome
tuberously thickened _ 3. C. alpina.
1. CiRCAEA QUADRISULCATA (Maxim.) French & Sav. var. canaden¬
sis (L.) Kara. Southern Enchanter’s Nightshade. Map 33.
Stems firm, 2-10 dm high, from a slender rhizome. Leaves dark
green, rather firm, oblong-ovate, the larger 5-13 cm long, 2-7 cm
wide, shallowy (rarely sharply) sinuate-denticulate, rounded or
barely subcordate at base. Buds prior to anthesis 2.5~4.5 mm long.
Stigma shallowy 2-lobed. Fruit 2-celled, deeply grooved, 3-5 mm
thick including the stiff hooked bristles. Fruiting pedicels 3-12 mm
long, strongly refiexed.
Throughout the state except in the northern-most counties, in a
great variety of mesic to moist wooded habitats, especially in mixed
Sugar Maple-Basswood forests, often with Bitternut, Yellow Birch,
Hemlock, and Balsam Fir, frequently found in Beech-Sugar Maple,
White Pine-Oak-Red Maple, and Oak-Hickory woods; as well as
thickets, wooded ravines, and roadsides. Flowering from mid- June
through August, and fruiting from mid- July through September.
2. CiRCAEA “CANADENSIS Hill.”^ Map 34.
Stems rather weak, 2-5 dm high, from a slender rhizome. Leaves
light green, thin, ovate or oblong-ovate, the larger 4-11 cm long,
4-7 cm wide, sharply undulate-denticulate, rounded to subcordate at
base. Buds prior to anthesis 2-3.5 mm long. Stigma deeply 2-cleft.
Fruits unequally 2-celled (mostly sterile), smooth, 1-2.5 mm thick
including the soft bristles. Pedicels 3-4 mm long, spreading or
slightly reflexed.
Rare in Wisconsin, with all our specimens without habitat data :
Ashland Co.: Ashland, 1896, Cheney 5722 (WIS, MIL). Bayfield
Co.: Fish Creek Valley, 1932, Bobb 770 (WIS). Douglas Co.: oppo¬
site Fond du Lac, 1897, Cheney 7906 (WIS). Rusk Co.: Strickland,
1938, Fassett 22055 (WIS). Flowering in July.
2 This hybrid has recently been studied by Dr. Peter Raven (Stanford University),
who, in a forthcoming- publication, will rename it in honor of Prof. M. L. Fernald.
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. 1^7
125
CIRCAEA^^^
QUADRISULCATA
^CIRCAEA^^^f%,
^-"CANADENSIS" ^
r>^ J/Ji ^
'CIRCAEA ALPINA
t^OPUNTlA COMPRESSA
var. MACRORHIZA H
126 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The above plants have morphological characters intermediate to
those of Circaea aVpina and C. quadrisulcata, especially in height,
size of flowers, and fruit thickness. The sharply dentate leaves and
rather short racemes resemble those of Circaea alpina, while the
size and shape of the leaves are like those of Circaea quadrisulcata.
Similar eastern plants have been known as Circaea '‘canadensis
Hill.” (Fernald, 1917). There is a European equivalent of this
plant, Circaea intermedia, which has long been thought of as a hy¬
brid between Circaea alpina and Circaea lutetiana, the old world
vicariad of C, quadrisulcata (Hegi, 1908; Hulten, 1958). Rarity of
the intermediate plants, plus semi-sterile fruits, are conditions fre¬
quently associated with hybridization. Cooperrider (1962), in “The
Occurrence and Hybrid Nature of an Enchanter’s Nightshade in
Ohio,” reports that Circaea “canadensis” plants had less than 1%
fertile pollen, and were growing in deep “hemlock gorges” or
ravines together with C. alpina and C, quadrisulcata. Cooperrider
cites the low pollen fertility of these plants, plus their proximity to
C. alpina and C. quadrisulcata, as evidence of their hybrid nature.
• T ■ LEAF LENGTH 2-5 CM • ▼ ■ PLANTS 10-29 CM TALL i
LEAF LENGTH 6-12 CM PLANTS 30-85 CM TALL |
1962]
Ugent — Wisconsin Flora No. U7
127
The scatter diagram (fig, 7) reveals some of the subtle morpho¬
logical relationships that exist between the intermediate forms and
the good species. It should be noted that Circaea '‘canadensis” in
general has been collected in the broad area where the ranges of
both Circaea quadrisulcata and C. alpina overlap : Circaea alpina,
a species with boreal affinities, ranges from Alaska to Labrador,
south to New York, along the Appalachian Mountains to Georgia,
northwest to South Dakota and Washington and along the Rocky
Mountains to Colorado; while Circaea quadrisulcata, a species
mainly of the southern deciduous forest, ranges from Nova Scotia
to North Dakota, and south to Oklahoma and Georgia; Circaea
"canadensis” , has been reported from Southeastern Quebec to Min¬
nesota, south to Pennsylvania and the mountains of West Virginia
(Fernald, 1950). However, of the 4 Wisconsin collections, 3 are just
north of and beyond the range of Circaea quadrisulcatal
3. Circaea alpina L. Northern Enchanter’s Nightshade. Map 35.
Stems weak, 0.5-3 dm high, from a tuherously thickened rhizome.
Leaves thin, pale green, ovate or deltoid-ovate, 1-6 (-8) cm long,
1- 6 cm wide, sharply undulate-denticulate, truncate or commonly
cordate at base. Buds prior to anthesis 1-2 mm long. Stigma deeply
2- cleft. Fruit 1-celled, smooth, 0.6-1. 5 mm thick including the soft
hooked bristles. Pedicels 2-5 mm long, spreading or slightly re¬
flexed. 2n=22 (Levan & Love, 1942, ex Darlington, 1955).
In cool moist woods, swamps, ravines, limestone, sandstone, and
quartzite ledges, common in mixed Hemlock- Yellow Birch forests,
often with Balsam Fir, White Pine, Red Maple, Sugar Maple, Bass¬
wood, Slippery Elm, and Iron Wood. Often in cool moist Arbor
Vitae woods, then with Yellow Birch, Black Spruce, and Mountain
Maple; or Arbor Vitae swamps with Tamarack, Alder, or Yellow
Birch. Frequently growing on mossy rocks, decaying logs, and along
streams. Associated with Mitella nuda, Mitella diphylla, Coptis
groenlandica, Oxalis montana, Adiantum pedatum, and occasionally
with Circaea quadrisulcata; at Wildcat Mt. State Park (Vernon
Co.), in crevices on sandstone cliffs along with Sullivantia renifolia
and Cryptograma. Flowering from mid- June to early September,
and fruiting from late June to early October, this species about 2
weeks earlier than C. quadrisulcata, the two species to some extent
seasonally isolated.
HALORAGIDACEAE— WATER MILFOIL FAMILY
Aquatics (ours) with simple, opposite, alternate, or whorled
leaves and small 2-4-merous epigynous flowers sessile in the axils of
the leaves or bracts. Sepals wanting or minute; petals small or
128 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
none; stamens 1-8; ovary inferior, 3-Jf-celled with a single ovule in
each cell. Fruit nut-like, indehiscent.
Represented in our area by six species of the genus Myriophyl-
lum, which has 4-merous flowers and whorled or alternate, usually
pinnatifld leaves, and by Proserpinaca palustris L., with 3-merous
flowers and alternate leaves. The family has been treated by N. C.
Fassett, in the Preliminary Reports on the Flora of Wisconsin 10
(Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci., Arts, and Letters 25:201-203. 1930).
HIPPURIDACEAE— MARE’S TAIL FAMILY
Aquatic plants with simple, sessile, whorled, entire leaves and
minute, perfect or pistillate, epigynous flowers sessile in the upper
leaf axils. Sepals and petals wanting; stamen 1; ovary inferior,
l~celled and 1-ovuled. Fruit nut-like.
A monotypic family. Hippuris vulgaris L., its only member, has
been treated with the Haloragidaceae by N. C. Fassett (1930).
ORDER CACTALES
Flowers solitary, sessile, regular, perfect, epigynous. Sepals and
petals numerous, inserted on the hypanthium. Ovary inferior, 1-
celled, ovules numerous. Fruit a dry or juicy berry. Only the fol¬
lowing family.
CACTACEAE— CACTUS FAMILY
Characters of the order. Stems fleshy and thickened, jointed,
globular, or columnar, often spiny, mostly leafless.
A large family native (with a few questionable exceptions)
mainly to the arid and semi-arid regions of tropical and temperate
America and consisting of approximately 124 genera and 1200
species.
1. OPUNTIA Mill. Prickly Pear
[Benson, L., A revision of some Arizona Cactaceae. Proc. Cal. Acad.
Sci. 25:245-268. 1944; Britton, N. L. and Rose, J, N., ‘The
Cactaceae”. Carnegie Inst, of Wash. Pub. no. 248. 1919.]
Succulent plants with jointed greatly flattened to cylindric stems.
Leaves reduced to awl-like fleshy scales, soon deciduous, with clus¬
ters of detachable barbed bristles (glochids) and often elongate
spines in their axils (areoles) .
1962] U gent— Wisconsin Flora No, 1^7 129
Key to Species
A, Joints of stem strongly flattened, when full grown Z~2S cm
long; spines 1-4 per areole (more numerous in immature
joints), or none; fruit juicy* when ripe, spineless -
_ 1, 0. COMPRESSA.
A A. Joints of stem turgid, scarcely flattened, when full grown 1-4
cm long; spines 1-7 per areole; fruit dry, often spiny -
_ 2. 0, fragilis.
1. Opuntia compressa (Salisb.) Macbn Prickly Pear.
Joints orbicular to oblong, flattened, 3-23 cm long, 2-10 cm broad,
Areoles 8-18 mm apart, the glochids yellow or brown. Spines from
upper areoles only, or wanting, when present 1-4 per areole, of
which one is much the larger, white or gray, 4-43 mm long. Petals
yellow, the base often reddish, 2.5-4 cm long. Fruit obovoid or
clavate, spinless, juicy, green, aging red or red-purple, 3-8 cm
long, edible. 2n=22, 44 (Bowden, 1945, ex Darlington, 1955).
Key to Varieties
A. Stems forming circular mats 1-2 m in diam. ; central roots
tuberously thickened _ la. 0. compressa var. macrorhiza,
AA, Stems spreading for many meters, not forming distinct circu¬
lar mats; all roots fibrous _
_ lb. 0. COMPRESSA var. microsperma.
la. Opuntia compressa var. macrorhiza (Engelm.) Benson.
Map 36.
Opuntia macrorhiza Engelm.
Stems prostrate, the terminal portions ascending, forming mats
1-2 m in diameter from a central cluster of tuberous roots, these
sometimes 5 cm in diameter and resembling an elongated potato, the
peripheral joints frequently with fibrous roots only.
Var. macrorhiza, which extends from Arizona and Texas east¬
ward to Kansas and Missouri, and north through Nebraska, and
Minnesota, occurs in Southwestern Wisconsin in sand areas and
bluffs mainly along the Wisconsin and Black Rivers, in dry prairies,
open Jack Pine-Oak woods, and sand barrens. Commonly associated
with Monarda punctata, Euphorbia coroUata, Ambrosia psilos-
130 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
tachya, Liatris aspera, Lespedeza capitata, Asclepias verticillata,
Oenothera rhombipetala, Koeleria cristata, Selaginella rupestris,
and Cladonia cristatella. The joint surface is often infected by the
parasitic fungus Perisporium w^ightii B. & C., which forms large
black plaques 1 cm or more in diameter. Flowering from mid- June
through July, and fruiting from mid-July through October.
The Spring Rose Beetle, Strigoderma arhoricola Fab. (Scara-
baeidae) has been observed by me at several stations to visit the
flowers in great abundance, frequently forcing their way through
the numerous overlapping petals of the bud. Often, each flower will
have a dozen or more beetles coated with yellow pollen struggling to
gain access to the nectaries at the petal bases. The flowers are less
frequently visited by honey bees, wasps, and ants.
All of our plants grow either on Upper Cambrian Sandstone
ledges, or on sand or sandy soil derived from that parent material.
Frequently the sandstone ledges are capped by a layer of Lower
Ordovician Dolomite, the alkaline seepage of which permeates and
cements the underlying sandstone, causing the soil pH to vary from
fairly acidic to mildly basic (Table 1) .
Table 1. Soil pH, dry samples, Beckman meter. Soil samples taken from earth
immediately surrounding roots of Opuntia compressa var. macrorhiza.
Benson (personal communication, 1960) finds that var. macro¬
rhiza, in general, has much broader seed margins than var. micro-
sperma. The seeds of Wisconsin plants, while somewhat broader
margined, are not distinctive enough to be of much value in differ¬
entiating between varieties.
3 Identified by Dr. Roy Shenefelt, Dept, of Entomology, University of Wisconsin.
1962]
U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. Jf7
131
lb. Opuntia compressa var. microsperm a (Engelm.) Benson.
Map 37.
Opuntia humifusa Raf .
Opuntia rafinesquii Gray.
Differing from var. macrorhiza by its habit of spreading irregu¬
larly over large areas (rarely forming small well-defined mats),
completely fibrous root system, and somewhat smaller seed margins.
Var, mierosperma, a wide-ranging Middle- Western form differ¬
ing from the eastern typical variety only in its more spiny and
slightly larger joints and fruits, is apparently very rare in south¬
western Wisconsin in dry sand prairies and sandstone ledges. Flow¬
ering in early July.
The plant is known from only two localities, both in Dane County.
Near Daleyville (Looman s.n., 1960 [WIS] ) it occurs on a grazed
sandy south-facing slope (pH 6.72) leading up to crumbly ledges of
St. Peter sandstone, there thriving on the organically poor soil de¬
rived from weathering of the rock, which is encrusted with many
lichens, especially Physcia caena and Lecanora rubina. Near the top
ledge, Opuntia grows intermixed with spreading mats of Juniperus
horizontalis, while in the lower grazed slope it is associated with
Oenothera rhombipetala, Rubus and Rosa spp,, and scattered
Xanthoxylum americanum. Near Belleville it has been collected on
a crumbling sandstone bluff (Fassett 3100 [WIS]).
Optunia tortispina Engelm., which extends from South Dakota to
Texas and New Mexico, is reported for Wisconsin by Britton and Rose
(1:1313, 1919) and other authors, a record evidently based on a misiden-
tified specimen of Opuntia compressa. No specimens referable to this spe¬
cies have been seen by the writer.
132 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
2. Opuntia fragilis (Nutt.) Haw. Brittle Prickly Pear. Map 38.
Stems prostrate or decumbent, forming loose mounds up to 5 dm
in diameter and to 2 dm high. Joints dark green, easily detached,
usually turgid, orbicular to ohovate, 1-U cm long, 6-22 mm thick,
Areoles crowded, filled with white wool and yellow glochids, nearly
all armed with 1-7 spines, 1-22 mm long. Petals yellow, 24-26 mm
long. Fruit dry, spiny, inedible. 2n=66 (Bowden, 1945, ex Darling¬
ton, 1955).
Opuntia fragilis, extending from British Columbia eastward to
Manitoba, and south to Texas and Arizona, is rare though locally
abundant in central and northwestern Wisconsin, on thin rocky soil
of granite or quartzite outcrops and occasionally in sandy soil or on
sandstone ridges; SE of Grantsburg (Burnett Co.; Schlising 1647
[WIS] ) in dark rich soil (pH 4.6) in cracks and crevices of an ex¬
posed grazed granite outcrop with scattered Quercus macrocarpa,
Juniperus virginiana, Rhus glabra, Xanthoxylum americanum, Sel-
aginella rupestris, Rhus radicans, Monarda fistulosa. Campanula
rotundifolia, and Silene antirrhina, sharing the rock space with
many lichens, especially Parmelia conspersa, Parmelia stenophylla,
Cladonia pyxidata; near New London (Waupaca Co.: Fuller s.n.,
1931 [MIL]) abundant on granite outcrop (pH 4) : and SW of
Adams (Adams Co., Fuller s.n., 1925 [MINN]) in sand barrens
with Selaginella rupestris and Polygonella articulata. Flowering in
mid- June.
Opuntia polyacantha Haw., which extends from southern Alberta and
Saskatchewan to Texas and Arizona, and reportedly to Wisconsin (Gleason
2:570, 1952), has not been seen from Wisconsin, the report probably based
on a misidentifled specimen of Opuntia fragilis. The only specimen that
might possibly be included in O. polycantha is one Green Lake County
specimen, which has tentatively been determined by Benson as O. fragilis
(on map 38 with a ? mark). Though further field work may resolve this
question, it is worth noting that this collection is well within the geo¬
graphic range of O. fragilis in Wisconsin.
Bibliography
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25:245-268.
Billington, C. 1949. Shrubs of Michigan. Cranbrook Press, Bloomfield Hills,
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U gent— Wisconsin Flora No. ^7
133
_ 1958. The evolution of the North American Oenotheras of the ''Bien-
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— - . 1918. American variations of Epilobium, section Chamaenerion. Rho¬
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MINERAL DEFICIENCY SYMPTOMS ON TURFGRASS^
1. MAJOR AND SECONDARY NUTRIENT ELEMENTS
James R. Love
University of Wisconsin, Madison
It is well documented that the lack of an essential mineral ele¬
ment can cause physiological disease (e,g., chlorosis) in plants.
Descriptions of the deficient symptoms in various agronomic and
horticultural plants have been reported by numerous investigators,
including Bear et al (1949), DeTurk (1941), Hewitt (1943, 1944),
McMurtrey (1948), and Wallace (1953). However, in none of these
publications have the deficiency symptoms for any of the nutrient
elements been described using a turfgrass as the indicator plant.
It was the purpose of this study to determine the deficiency symp¬
toms of the major nutrient elements: Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus
(P) and Potassium (K) and the secondary nutrient elements: Cal¬
cium (Ca), Magnesium (Mg) and Sulfur (S) in three grass spe¬
cies: Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis, Merion) Creeping Bent-
grass (Agrostis palustris, Seaside) and Creeping Red Fescue (Fes-
tuca rubra, Pennlawn).^
Duplicate treatments of each of these grass-nutrient combina¬
tions were grown in acid-washed quartz sand under controlled con¬
ditions in the greenhouse. A modified Hoagland’s solution was used
to maintain the plants in a healthy state until each grass was vig¬
orously established. Prior to initiating the differential nutrient
treatments, each sand culture (including the controls) was leached
under suction with approximately three liters of distilled water to
remove any accumulation of soluble salts. The plants were then
managed as before except for the withholding of the particular
nutrient element under investigation. The harvested tissue from
each treatment was saved for chemical analyses.
That the visual symptoms noted in this study were due to a
shortage of the major and secondary nutrient elements is evidenced
first by the fact that the deficiencies were elicited three times, i.e.,
twice the deficient nutrient was added to the growth medium and
1 This study was made possible by a grant from the O. J, Noer Research Founda¬
tion and is published with the approval of the Director of the Wisconsin Agricultural
Experiment Station, Madison, Wisconsin. The author wishes to thank Mr. K. M. Shah,
former graduate student in Soils, for his assistance in caring for the plants and to
Messrs. C. G. Wilson and J. M. Latham of the Milwaukee Sewerage Commission for
their unstinting labor in photographing the grasses.
^ A study is also underway to establish the minor element deficiency symptoms in
these same grass species.
135
136 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
the grass permitted to recover and secondly by the lower content
of the deficient nutrient in the harvested leaves (Table 1). These
steps are important because unless verified the possibility exists
that the appearance one is diagnosing as a mineral deficiency may
in actuality prove to be the result of some disease, lack of sufficient
sunshine, too much or too little water, unfavorable temperatures,
or some other condition. In all instances the visual symptoms were
found to be reproducible.
Table 1. Major and Secondary Nutrient Content of
Variously Treated Turfgrass
As in other studies of this kind, it was noted that the mineral
deficiency symptoms varied according to the extent of the shortage
and the stage of growth at which the deficiency manifested itself.
It was found that unless some amount of the nutrient in question
was added initially, the small seeded bent- and bluegrass died from
starvation either too small to clearly exhibit the deficiency sym-
toms (this was especially seen in those plants lacking N, P, K) or
else without showing the same signs that characterize the deficienc}^
in the more mature stage of growth.
An example of the latter can best be illustrated in grass receiv¬
ing no additional Ca. In these plants the blades of adjacent leaves
stuck to one another in a manner somewhat resembling that in corn
as described by DeTurk (1941). The roots were extremely stunted,
black and very gelatinous. In no case were these signs observed in
Ca deficient plants that were permitted to become established prior
to withholding the Ca from the growth medium. That the shortage
of Ca in these older plants was critical is demonstrated in the fact
that one of the duplicates in the bluegrass series failed to recover
after the deficiency was elicited for the second time.
1962]
Love — Mineral Deficiency Symptoms
137
Finally it should be emphasized that while the criteria establish¬
ing the essentiality of the nutrient elements have been well outlined
by the plant physiologists (Arnon, 1950), describing the visual
symptoms of the nutrient deficiencies still remains a matter of indi¬
vidual judgment and, as such, the following descriptions should
perhaps best be prefaced by the old admonition: Say not, this is
so ! But say, so it seems to me to be as I now see the thing I think
I see.
Nitrogen Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. Plants are thin and erect, with little if any
tillering. The leaves are short and small, developing a pale green
color in the early stages of the deficiency. As the starvation pro¬
gresses the older leaves take on a yellow hue until the entire blade
is a yellowish-green color. This chlorotic condition is followed by a
tanned or fired effect that appears at the tips of the older leaves.
The manner in which the firing progresses down the leaf is similar
to that seen in oat plants, in a more or less horizontal fashion, as
opposed to the v-shaped pattern that characterizes the firing seen
in corn.
Merion Bluegrass. Similar to that described above except that
there is less copper tone to the firing than is seen in the Seaside
bentgrass.
Pennlaivn Fescue. Similar to that noted in Seaside bentgrass.
Phosphorus Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. The first sign of P deficiency in Seaside bent¬
grass, as indeed in nearly all plants, is the appearance of a dark
green coloration in the leaves. Associated with this is a restriction
in growth and while the plants tend to be spindly the shoots are
not as short and thin as that seen in plants lacking N. If the defi¬
ciency persists, the leaves take on a dull bluish-green color, with
purple discolorations appearing along the entire margin of the blade
and in the main veins near the base. Gradually these colors give
way to reddish-bronze tints which first appear near the leaf tips
and progress down the blade. At its climax the entire leaf appears
scorched and the leaf tip withered.
Merion Bluegrass. While the initial symptoms of P deficiency
resemble that seen in Seaside bentgrass, namely the dark green
coloring of the leaves accompanied by restrictions in growth, the
foliage of Merion bluegrass does not pass through the dull blue-
green to purplish stages that normally characterize the advanced
conditions of P starvation in other grasses, including the cereals.
138 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
In the case of this grass, the dark green color of the leaves gives
way to an intense tanned condition. The latter appears first at the
tips of the older leaves and progresses slowly down the blade.
It is at this stage that P and N deficiencies in Merion bluegrass
are most similar in appearance. There are, however, several ways
of distinguishing these two deficiency symptoms : first, the tanning
effect in the case of no P is more intense than that seen in N starva¬
tion and secondly, a comparison of the color of the grasses at the
base of the blades offers another clue in differentiating the respec¬
tive causes. In the case of no N, the color of the blade below the
firing is a very pale green to yellowish-green, whereas for the same
plant part in the case of no P the color is dark green.
Pennlawn Fescue. Similar to that described for Seaside bent-
grass.
Potassium Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. In the early stages of development, K defi¬
ciency in Seaside bentgrass is generally characterized by one or
more of the following symptoms : the soft feel and drooping appear¬
ance of the leaves, with many blades horizontally inclined ; a tend¬
ency toward excessive tillering; moderate chlorosis of the inter-
venal areas in the older leaves; rolling and withering of the leaf
tips which retain blotches of green coloring. In the more advanced
stages the chlorotic area extends to the midvein which still remains
green, while the leaf margins are scorched and the tips severely
withered.
Merion Bluegrass. Similar to that noted in Seaside bentgrass
except for the early loss of chlorophyll in the leaf tips and the
delayed appearance of tip firing and marginal scorching of the
blades (note the absence of the latter symptoms in spite of the
severe chlorotic condition of the leaf that extends almost to the base
of the folded blade).
Pennlawn Fescue. Similar to that noted in Merion bluegrass.
Calcium Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. As noted earlier, the symptoms of Ca defi¬
ciency in young plants are quite different from those observed in
older plants. The first diagnostic sign that characterizes the short¬
age of Ca in established Seaside bentgrass is the appearance of
reddish-brown discoloration in the intervenal tissue along the mar¬
gin of the blade in the upper (newer) leaves. If allowed to progress,
this condition gradually extends inward to the midvein and the
1962]
Love — Mineral Deficiency Symptoms
139
colors fade to lighter shades of red, predominately rose red. Ter¬
minally the leaf takes on a fired and withered appearance.
Merion Bluegrass. Similar to that observed in Seaside bentgrass,
Pennlawn Fescue. Similar to that observed in Seaside bentgrass.
Magnesium Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. The general appearance of Seaside bentgrass
lacking Mg closely resembles that seen in Ca starvation and to the
casual observer they may appear to be identical. However, a careful
examination of the symptoms (together with a chemical test of the
soil and/or plant tissue to confirm the visual findings) will generally
yield the proper diagnosis. In contrast to Ca deficiency symptoms,
those of Mg usually appear first in the lower (older) leaves and
the initial discoloring is more cherry red. Also, in approximately 30
to 50 per cent of the affected leaves the coloring is blotchy, giving
rise to a banded appearance that was never observed in the Ca defi¬
cient plants.
Merion Bluegrass. Similar to that noted in Seaside bentgrass.
Pennlawn Fescue. Similar to that' noted in Seaside bent grass.
Sulfur Deficiency
Seaside Bentgrass. As with Ca and Mg, the deficiency symptoms
of S in well established turf are late to develop and as a conse¬
quence have only a slight effect on growth. However, in appearance
the signs of S starvation more closely resemble those seen in plants
lacking N or K than in those deficient in either Ca or Mg.
The initial symptoms of S deficiency in Seaside bentgrass is the
general paling of the leaves. If the chlorotic condition is allowed to
progress, the blades take on a pale yellow-green cast. Accompany¬
ing this is the appearance of a faint scorching at the tip of the blade
that advances toward the leaf base in a thin line along each margin.
Gradually the border enlarges until finally the entire leaf blade be¬
comes fired and withered.
Merion Bluegrass. In Merion bluegrass the shortage of S mani¬
fests itself in two distinct ways : first, as the chlorotic condition de¬
velops the veins, especially the midvein, remain green, similar to
that seen in cotton, giving the leaf a pale striped appearance.
Eventually, however, even the midvein loses its color and the entire
blade fires. The second characteristic sign of S deficiency noted re¬
peatedly in Merion bluegrass is the enhanced susceptibility of these
plants to powdery mildew.
Pennlawn Fescue. Sirnilar to the described for Seaside bentgrass.
140 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
References Cited
Arnon, D. I. ‘‘Trace Elements in Plant Physiology.” Chronica Botanica, Wal¬
tham, Mass., pp. 31-39 (1950).
Bear, R. E., et al. “Hunger Signs in Crops.” Pub, by Amer. Soc. of Agron. and
Nat. Fert. Assoc. Wash,, D. C., (1949).
DeTurk, E. E. Plant Nutrient Deficiency Symptoms. Ind. Eng. Chem., 33:648-
653 (1941).
Hewitt, E. J. Experiments in Mineral Nutrition, Long Ashton Res. Sta. Ann.
Rep. pp. 33-53 (1943) and pp. 50-60 (1944).
McMurtrey, J. E. Jr, Visual Symptoms of Malnutrition in Plants. Chapt. 3,
Diagnostic Techniques for Soils and Crops. Pub. by Amer. Pot. Inst. Wash.,
D. C. (1948).
Wallace, T. The Diagnosis of Mineral Deficiencies in Plants of Visual Symp-
tons. Chem. Pub. Co., Inc., N. Y. (1953).
STUDIES ON THE IRON, MANGANESE, SULFATE AND
SILICA BALANCES AND DISTRIBUTIONS FOR
LAKE MENDOTA, MADISON, WISCONSIN*
G. Fred Lee
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The purpose of this paper is to present some results of unpub¬
lished investigations on Lake Mendota. The data presented are
taken primarily from reports to the University of Wisconsin's
Lakes Investigation Committee and from theses on file in the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Library.
Since 1948, the University of Wisconsin’s Lakes Investigation
Committee has sponsored, directed and coordinated investigations
on the fertilization of lakes and streams. One phase of these investi¬
gations was directed toward finding the amounts of plant nutrients
entering Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin. In addition, studies
were conducted on the distribution of these compounds in the Lake.
This paper summarizes some of the unpublished results of these
investigations on the amounts of iron that enter this lake, how iron
is distributed in the water and sediments, and the amounts of iron
that leave the lake. In addition, data are presented for manganese,
sulfate, and silica distributions and balances.
Location and Description
Lake Mendota is a hard water eutrophic lake located on the
northwestern limits of the city of Madison, Wisconsin. The lake
has a surface area of 15.2 square miles and average depth of 40
feet with a maximum depth of 84 feet, a volume 15 x 10® cubic feet
(Domogalla 1926). The lake has a cumulative drainage area of 265
square miles. The runoff from this watershed enters the lake
through ten tributaries and leaves the lake principally by the
Yahara River. The watershed is devoted principally to farming
with the tributaries passing sluggishly through marshes before
entering the lake.
The lake occupies a pre-glacial valley system excavated by
streams in sand stones and sandy dolomites of upper Cambrian age
(Hanson 1951, 1952). It has a theoretical detention time of five
years based on the mean annual tributary flow of 3 x 10® cubic feet
(Belter and Calabresa, 1950).
* Presented before the Division of Water and Waste Chemistry, American Chemical
Society, Washington, D. C., March, 1962. University if Wisconsin Engineering Experi¬
ment Station paper number 565.
141
142 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Water Balance and Sampling Stations
In July 1948, stream gaging and sampling stations were estab¬
lished on the ten tributaries to Lake Mendota and on the Yahara
River at the outlet of the lake. These stations are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Map of Lake Mendota showing sampling stations.
A water balance for Lake Mendota for the year October 1, 1948
to October 1, 1949 is presented in Table 1 (Belter and Calabresa,
1950).
Chemical Analysis
Grab samples were collected at each sampling station once every
three weeks. The chemical analysis performed on these samples in¬
cluded determination of pH, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen, biochemi¬
cal oxygen demand, nonfilterable and total phosphorous, ammonia,
organic nitrogen, nitrite, nitrate, sulfate, silica, manganese, and
iron. These analyses were performed according to the procedures
in Standard Methods (1946). This paper is limited to a presenta¬
tion of the results of the analysis of iron, manganese, sulfate, and
silica.
143
1962] Lee — Inorganics in Lake Mendota
Table 1. Water Balance of Lake Mendota — October 1, 1948-October 1, 1949
tributaries. These computed values were based on the assumption
that the concentration of the compound remained constant at the
mean value between the sampling periods. The mean concentration
value for a sampling period was used to convert the concentrations
to pounds of compound per day based on the recorded discharge of
each tributary.
Table 2. Summary of Data — October 1, 1948-October 1, 1949
(Belter and Calabresa, 1950)
144 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Table 3 presents a summary of the iron, manganese, sulfate, and
silica apparent balances based on inflow-outflow for Lake Mendota
for the period October 1, 1948 to October 1, 1949.
Examination of this table shows that 20,640 pounds of iron en¬
tered the lake during this water year with approximately twice as
much iron entering the lake during winter flows as compared to
summer flows. During the same year, however, only 3,955 pounds
of iron left the lake via the Yahara River Outlet. These data show
an 80 per cent iron retention in the lake, or that iron was carried
out of the lake by some other means.
The data for manganese show that a fairly good balance was
obtained with a difference of inflow-outflow or less than 50 pounds
for the year. During this same period 18 per cent of the sulfate and
90 per cent of the silica was apparently retained in the lake.
Table 3. Iron, Manganese, Sulfate, and Silica Apparent
Balance — Lake Mendota
Stations 1-10 inlet, 11 outlet, (after Rohlich and Lea, 1949)
1962]
Lee— -Inorganics in Lake Mendota
145
Emelity and Hanson (1948) present data on the flux of these
compounds at the Yahara River outlet station 11 for a period that
coincides in part with the previously reported data of Belter and
Calabresa (1950). These data are presented in Table 4 for the
period July 1, 1948 to April 1, 1949 and grouped according to peri¬
ods when the flow was reasonably constant. They are based, how¬
ever, on a grab sample taken every week.
Examination of this table shows that the iron flux has a range
of 0.6 to 69 pds/day. Also, that during certain three week periods,
particularly in Spring, large changes took place in the amounts of
these compounds leaving the lake.
It is of interest to compare these data of Emelity and Hanson
(1949)— -one sample every week — with that of Belter and Cala¬
bresa (1949) — ^one sample every three weeks — for the winter period
October 1, 1948 to May 1, 1949. Belter and Calabresa (1950) re¬
ported for this period 2,350 pounds of iron and 16,150 pounds of
Table 4. Amounts of Iron, Manganese, Sulfate and
Silica Leaving Lake Mendota
(Emelity and Hanson 1949)
manganese leaving the lake with an 84 per cent iron and 9 per cent
manganese apparent retention. These same computations based on
the data of Emelity and Hanson (1949) show 2^,950 pounds of iron
with 79 per cent retention and 10,470 pounds of manganese — -60
per cent retention during this winter period. The sulfate leaving
146 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
the lake was 946,229 pounds — 26 per cent retention. This same
agreement was obtained in the silica data with 72,092 pounds pass¬
ing the Yahara river sampling point based on a one week sampling
period — 93 per cent retained as compared to 92 per cent retention
based on the three week sampling period. Therefore, the only major
discrepancy between the two sets of data occurs with manganese.
It should be pointed out that the comparison of the two sets of
data is based on samples taken from the outlet of the lake and that
the variability of these data may not be as large as the data from
the Lake Mendota tributaries.
The transport of these elements past the Yahara River outlet of
Lake Mendota is presented in Table 5 for 1949 and 1950. These
data were obtained by Haggerty (1950).
Table 5. Transport of Elements — Yahara River Outlet — 1949-1950
The data clearly show the importance of the high spring flows
and lake circulation on the flux of elements past the Yahara River
outlet of the lake.
Data were available for a comparison of the transport of these
elements over several years. Table 6 presents these data.
The concentration data for this period are presented in Table 7.
Examination of Table 6 shows that for any one season the year
to year variation in the amount of an element carried out of the
lake by the Yahara River is highly variable even though Table 7
shows that concentrations are essentially constant from year to
year for one season. The cause of this variability cannot be ex¬
plained without further data. However, these data do show that a
balance based on one year’s inflow-outflow record should not be used
to predict the long-term accumulation of an element in the lake.
1962]
Lee— Inorganics in Lake Mendota
147
Table 6, Seasonal Transport of Elements Yahara Eiver
Outlet of Lake Mendota
These data were obtained by Emelity and Hanson (1949, 1950), Fuller (1949), Hag¬
gerty (1950), Darrow and Jackson (1949), Levihn (1951).
Based on the seasonal variations in the transport of these ele¬
ments in the outlet of Lake Mendota, it may be expected that the
concentration of these elements should show similar variations in
the lake. From July 1948 through May 1949, Belter and Calabresa
(1950) and Emelity and Hanson (1950) performed analyses on
the element content of Lake Mendota. Sampling stations were estab¬
lished at various locations in the lake. These stations are shown in
Figure 1 as circles on the map of the lake. Samples were taken once
every three weeks at each of these stations; at the surface, at the
thermocline or at a depth of 10 meters, and at one half meter from
the bottom.
Examination of these data with respect to horizontal location did
not reveal any significant trends. However, when the data are
pooled for all horizontal sampling sites for any particular depth
and season, significant variations do occur. These data are pre¬
sented in Table 8. Examination of the table shows that the standard
deviations are rather large and, in general for iron and manganese,
are of the magnitude of the mean. These data show, as would be
expected, low surface iron concentrations during the summer ; while
in the fall, winter, and spring, the lake is fairly well mixed. With¬
out additional information the low values (0.02) near the bottom
during the spring are not explainable. If these data are compared
in Table 7 on the mean concentrations in the Yahara River outlet,
it is apparent that it is difficult to predict Yahara River Concentra¬
tions based on Lake Mendota concentrations.
148
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
[Vol. 51
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1962]
Lee — Inorganics in Lake Mendota
149
Table 8 shows that this lake has considerably greater concentra¬
tions of manganese as compared to iron concentrations. The sea¬
sonal and vertical distribution of manganese is as would be
expected.
The sulfate data displays a typical picture of a relatively unre¬
active compound in the lake with concentrations increasing during
the winter during periods of ice cover and decreasing during spring
melting and runoff.
The silica data are interesting in that the summer and winter
periods display minimums in vertical periods at the 10 meter station.
Other Studies on the Iron and Manganese Cycle. Dugdale (1956)
reported in a study of the emergent crops of diptera found, that
during the spring and fall of 1954, the net weight of emergent
larva was :
Spring 203 metric tons
Fall 632 metric tons
for a total 835 metric tons of emergent insects leaving
Lake Mendota. In comparison, it is interesting to see that the esti¬
mated annual crop of perch taken from the lake is 140 metric tons.
Nees (1954) from a knowledge of the amounts of insects leaving
the lake and the iron and manganese content of these insects, esti¬
mated that the annual loss of iron and manganese due to insects
was 1.9 metric tons and 0.15 metric tons, respectively. Therefore,
the amounts of iron transported by insects out of Lake Mendota
in 1954 was of the same order of magnitude as the amount of iron
transported out of the lake by the Yahara River outlet. Nees also
estimated that about 5 per cent of the net apparent gain in iron,
Table 3, is lost via removal of fish. Therefore, the iron balance for
Lake Mendota may be computed from 1948-1949 data on amounts
of iron that enter this lake as: loss via Yahara River Outlet, 15%,
1948-1949; loss via Emergent Insects, 15%, 1954; loss via Fish,
5% ; Total 35% ; net annual retention of iron; approximately 65%.
Bottom Sediments. The previously presented data show that ap¬
proximately 50-60 per cent of the annual inflow of iron is retained
in the lake. Therefore, it is of interest to examine the iron content
of the bottom sediments. Hanson (1951, 1952), in a report to the
University of Wisconsin Committee on Lakes and Stream Investi¬
gation, re-examined and summarized the previous work (Twen-
hofel 1933) on the bottom sediments of Lake Mendota. Parts of the
report are presented here as background information.
The near-shore sediments consist of sand and gravel. The deeper
portions of the lake are covered by a black sludge, 1-14 inches
thick, which is underlain by a lighter-colored siliceous marl. The
sludge is composed of a mixture of precipitated calcium carbonate,
organic matter and clastic grains, silica, with smaller amounts of
Table 8. Concentration of Iron, Manganese, Sulfate, and Silica in Lake Mendota — 1948-1949
150 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
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1962]
Lee — Inorganics in Lake Mendota
151
magnesium carbonate and alumina. It is highly flocuated and is
moved on the lake bottom by wind=generated currents strong
enough to destroy any evidence of cylic deposition. The underlying
marl, and the organic matter decreases from an average of over 20
per cent in the sludge to 11 per cent in the marl.
Judson and Murray (1956) and Murray (1956) studied in
greater detail the sediments in Lake Mendota They concluded that
the sedimentation in Lake Mendota has changed abruptly in the
recent past. This change is recorded in cores by a buff marl over-
lain by 1-14 inches of black sludge. They observed that the inter¬
face between the two types of sediment is very sharp. The change
in sedimentation is ascribed to increased deposition of clastic mate¬
rials in the lake as the result of drainage from farm lands and
urban areas. The black color of the sludge results from the pres¬
ence of ferrous sulfides deposited under conditions of oxygen defi¬
ciency and not from the organic content of the sludge as previously
supposed.
Their analyses have shown a hydrocarbon content of the sludge
and marl of 120 to 225 ppm with 10-12 per cent organic matter
based on three reported analyses.
Iron Content of Bottom Sediments, Kaneshige (1952) and Levihn
(1951) collected samples of the bottom sediments with an Eckman
dredge and analysed them for the non-filterable and total phos¬
phorous, ammonia, total organic nitrogen, nitrite, nitrate, and total
iron of the period, winter 1950 to the summer 1952. The results of
their investigations are presented in Figure 2. This figure shows a
plot of the isoiron contours for the summer 1951. These contours
were established by sampling at 67 different sampling sites. In gen¬
eral, the high concentrations of iron correspond to the deeper parts
of the lake. The variations at the mouth of the Yahara River Inlet
to the lake may be attributed to suspended material brought in by
the river during high flows. Figure 3 compares the iron content of
the bottom sediments for University Bay for the winter 1950 and
summer 1951. It is readily apparent upon examination of the figure
that marked changes take place from season to season in iron com¬
position of this sludge. These changes can be attributed to move¬
ment of the floculate sludge by currents in the lake. Hanson (1952)
determined that the floculate sediments had a settling rate equiva¬
lent to particles in a grain size range of 1/16 to 1/14 mm. and that
based on the current meter measurements of Bryson and Soumi
(1952), the lake currents near the bottom are sufficient to trans¬
port the sludge. The investigations of Bryson and Soumi (1952)
found that current velocities up to 3 meter/min. were quite com¬
mon in the lake with some up to 13 meters/min. Bryson and Kuhn
152 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51 ;
(1955) made some measurements of the bottom stress in the lake
and found an estimated bottom current velocity of 3-10 cm/sec.
during the summer of 1951. From their analyses, Bryson and
Soumi (1952) and Bryson and Kuhn (1955) conclude that these
currents are due to wind-driven circulation of the epilimnion which
results in circulation of the hypolimnion. With respect to circula- j
tion within University Bay, Bryson and Ragotzkie (1955) found [
that the wind-driven water replacement time for the bay varied j
from about 3 hours to more than 600 hours for wind velocities 3 to 5
15 miles per hour. |
Figure 2. Lake Mendota Bottom Muds, Summer 1951. Iron quantities in thou¬
sands of P.P.M.
1962]
Lee — Inorganics in Lake Mendota
153
Figure 3. University Bay Bottom Muds, 1950-51. Iron quantities in thousands
of P.P.M.
In another study by Bryson and Soumi (1951), it was found that
following a very rainy period in the summer of 1950, dissolved
oxygen temporarily reappeared in the hypolimnion of Lake Men- ^
dota. They proposed that this oxygen was introduced by density
currents of cold, silt-laden, well-oxygenated run-off water. The
highly varying, wind-induced currents and density- turbidity-cur-
rents can possibly explain the movement of the bottom sediments
154 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
and also possibly account for some of the apparent deviation in the
data observed in the chemical analysis of the lake water and Yahara
River outlet.
Discussion of the Iron Data. The results of the investigation on
iron permit a better understanding of the iron cycle for Lake Men-
dota. These studies have shown that over a one year period approxi¬
mately 20,000 lbs. of iron entered the lake through the tributaries
while only 4,000 lbs. of iron left the lake via the Yahara River out¬
let. The iron content of the lake water was found to be approxi¬
mately 0.03 mg/1 with a general pattern of increasing iron concen¬
tration with increasing depth.
These investigations have shown that 80-85% of the iron that
enters the lake each year settles to the bottom and becomes part of
a floculant black sludge. Some 15-20% of the annual inflow iron is
carried out via the Yahara River outlet.
Analyses of the bottom sludge have shown that it has a highly
variable iron concentration with a range of a few thousand parts
per million to 16,000 ppm. A general pattern was observed in which
the sludge in the deeper parts of the lake had a greater iron con¬
centration. Considerable evidence exists pertaining to the move¬
ment of bottom sludge by wind induced currents. This movement
of the sludge eliminates any evidence of cyclic deposition, also caus¬
ing marked seasonal changes in the iron content of the sludge at
any one location.
This iron rich sludge serves as a hatching ground for a large
emergent Diptera population. These emergent insects have been
shown to play an important role in the iron balance of the* lake.
Estimates have been made that as much iron leaves the lake by
emergent insects as leaves the lake by the Yahara River outlet.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of members of
the Lakes and Streams Committee of the University of Wisconsin,
especially Professor Sarles, coordinator of the Lakes and Streams
Investigation Committee; Professor Rohlich, Department of Civil
Engineering; Professor Easier and Professor Nees, Department of
Zoology; Dr. Fitzgerald, Department of Civil Engineering, Pro¬
fessor Bryson and Ragotzkie, Department of Meteorology ; and spe¬
cial recognition is given to former students of the Department of
Civil Engineering with the hope that their work presented in part
in this paper will bring them their due recognition for the many
hours of sample collection and analysis.
1962]
Lee— Inorganics in Lake Mendota
155
References Cited
Belter, W, G., and Calabresa, T„ A. 1950. The Origins and Quantities of Algal
Fertilizers Tributary to Lake Mendota (1959). M,S. Thesis, Univ. of Wis.
(Civil Eng.) Unpublished.
Bryson, R. A., and Soumi, V. E. 1951. Midsummer Renewal of Oxygen Within
the Hypolimnion. Sears Foundation /. Mar, Res. X, 3:263“269.
- — , and Kuhn, P, M, 1955. On the Measurement of Bottom Stress in Lakes.
Trans. A.G.U. 36:612-614.
- - — , 1952. The Circulation of Lake Mendota. Trans. A.G.U. 33:707-712.
— - - , and Ragotzkie, R. A. 1955. Rate of Water Replacement in a Bay of
Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. Amer. Jour, of Science 253:533-9.
Darrow, R. A. and Jackson, H. H. 1949. A Sanitary Survey of the Yahara
River. B.S. Thesis. University of Wisconsin. (Civil Eng.), Unpublished,
Domogalia, B. P, 19'26. Treatment of Algae and Weeds in Lakes at Madison.
Eng. news. Res. 97:950-954.
Dugdale, R. C. 1956, Studies in the Ecology of Benthic Diptera of Lake Men¬
dota, Ph.D. Thesis, Univ. of Wis. (Zoology), Unpublished.
Emelity, L. a., and Hanson, R. J. 1949, A Sanitary Survey of the Yahara
River, B.S. Thesis, Univ. of Wis. (Civil. Eng.) Unpublished.
Fuller, R. P, (1959) A Sanitary Survey of the Yahara River. B.S. Thesis.
Univ. of (Civil Eng.). Unpublished.
Haggerty, J. R, 1950. A Sanitary Survey of the Yahara River. M.S. Thesis.
Univ. of Wis. (Civil Eng.). Unpublished.
Hanson, G. H. 1951. A Re-examination of the Bottom Sediments of Lake
Mendota, Wisconsin. Report to Univ. of Wisconsin Lakes Inves. Comm.
Unpublished.
— - - , 1952, Observations on the Sediments of University Bay, Lake Men¬
dota, Madison, Wisconsin. Report to the Univ. Comm, on Lakes and
Streams Invest. University of Wisconsin, Unpublished.
JUDSON, S., and Murry, R, C., 1956, Modern Hydrocarbons in Two Wisconsin
Lakes, Amer. Assoc. Pet. Geol. Bull. 40:147-150.
Kaneshige, H. M., 1952. Chemical Analysis of Bottom.. Muds of Lake Mendota,
M.S. Thesis. Univ. of Wis. (Civil Eng.). Unpublished.
Levihn, P., 1951. A Sanitary Survey of the Yahara River and the Bottom
Muds of Lake Mendota. M.S. Thesis, Univ. of IFis. (Civil Eng.). Unpub¬
lished,
McCaskey, Jr., A. E., 1955. Hydrological Characteristics of Lake Mendota
Drainage Basin. Ph.D. Thesis, Univ. of Wis. (Civil Eng.), Unpublished.
Murray, R. C., 1956. Recent Sediments of Three Wisconsin Lakes. Geol. Soc. of
America. Bull. 67:883-910.
Nees, J, C,, Personal Communication. Univ. of Wis, (Zoology).
Rohlich, G. a., and Lea, W, L., 1949. The Origin and Quantities of Plant Nu¬
trients in Lake Mendota. Report to the Univ. of IFts. Lakes Invest. Comm.
Unpublished.
— - , 1946, Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Sewage.
APHA.
Twenhofel, W. H., 1933. The Physical and Chemical Characteristics of Lake
Mendota, a Fresh-Water Lake of Wisconsin. Jour. Sed. Pet. 3:68-76.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
“BRICK^^ POMEROY AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES :
A STUDY IN CIVIL WAR POLITICS*
Frank L. Element
Marquette University, Milwaukee
Marcus Mills Pomeroy drifted to La Crosse in April, 1860, to
invest his small capital and his extraordinary talents in a Demo¬
cratic newspaper which needed an editor and a purpose. He brought
with him some newspaper know-how, the sobriquet “Brick,” and
a devotion to Stephen A. Douglas. He purchased a one-third inter¬
est in the La Crosse Union and Democrat. Soon “Brick” Pomeroy,
champion of Douglas doctrines, feuded with one of the other part¬
ners who liked President James Buchanan’s views. The feud led
to a sheriff’s sale, stock transactions, and the birth of the La Crosse
Democrat, debt-encumbered and with Pomeroy as sole proprietor
and editor.^
Pomeroy lost no time in gaining the attention of friends and foes.
He was witty and fearless, vindictive and vain. He wrote in such
a readable and interesting style that “even his enemies could not
resist buying his newspaper.”^ He knew the role of the press in
shaping public opinion, and he tried to convince his subscribers that
they should hate President Buchanan as intensely as he. Irritated
by Buchanan’s “weak-kneed” policy and “vacillating tactics,” Pom¬
eroy waged a campaign of abuse against the President. “What a
weak and imbecile old fool Jim Buchanan is,” he editorialized.
“Buchanan,” added Pomeroy, “is a traitor to his Country — a traitor
to his party — -a traitor to his word.” He suggested to his readers
that they add a postscript to their prayers: “Save our Country,
but damn our President.”^
Pomeroy’s strong language seemed to be due more to his hatred
of Buchanan than to his desire to see the federal government coerce
South Carolina. In fact, Pomeroy justified his anti-coercion views
by quoting Horace Greeley’s statement about allowing the erring
* Paper read at the 92nd annual meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters.
1 Marcus Mills Pomeroy, Journey of Life; Reminiscences and Recollections of ^‘BricU^’
Pomeroy (New York, 1890) is the best single source for Pomeroy’s early life, Mrs.
Mary E. Tucker combines fact and fiction indiscriminately in her Life of Mark M.
Pomeroy . . . (London, 1868).
2 Benjamin P. Bryant, Memoirs of La Crosse County (Madison, 1907), 116.
3 La Crosse Democrat, Dec. 24, 1860, quoted in Charles Seymour, “The Press,” in
History of La Crosse County, Wisconsin (Western Historical Company, Chicago, 1881),
550.
159
160 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
sisters “to go in peace.” “We are opposed,” he editorialized, “to
forcing a State to remain where she is determined not to.” He
viewed coercion as “a pretty thing to talk about,” but impractical,
impossible, and froth with danger.^
Like Douglas and most Democrats, Pomeroy hoped that com¬
promise would ease the crisis and reunite the quarrelsome sections.
Compromise was an historic American process. The Constitution
had been evolved out of a series of compromises. Furthermore, com¬
promise had resolved national crises in 1820, 1832-3, and 1850.
When the compromise efforts in Congress and at the National Peace
Convention came to naught in 1861, Democrats blamed Republicans
for adhering to their no-slavery-in-the-territories principle — no
matter what the consequences. There was a genuine fear, among
some of Douglas’ followers, that an inter-sectional struggle might
bring an end to the American experiment in democracy. European
civil wars had ended in dictatorships, and there was some fear
that a Napoleon or Cromwell might emerge in America.®
After Fort Sumter fell, Pomeroy wrote and talked like a zealous
patriot. He penned an editorial polemic entitled “The Stars and
Stripes Forever.” He wanted the insult to the flag avenged and he
wanted the rebellion speedily crushed. He endorsed the sentiments
of a fellow-Democrat, Stephen D. Carpenter of the Madison Wiscon¬
sin Patriot: “Let blood flow until the past is atoned, and a long
future secured to peace, prosperity, happiness, and honor.”® Pom¬
eroy even tried to organize a company of volunteers, the “Wiscon¬
sin Tigers,” to do business in “Marion’s style. But Pomeroy had
neither the friends, funds, nor influence to make his dream of mili¬
tary glory come true.
His patriotic binge endured for several months. The Union
debacle at First Bull Run served as a spirituous stimulant. When
some opponents of the war raised their voices in La Crosse, Pom¬
eroy promised vigilante action to quash the talk of “treason.”® He
did not advocate civil action nor educational means to convert the
recalcitrants, but threatened to use extra-legal measures as patri¬
otism stirred his spirit.
^ La Crosse Democrat, Jan. 11, 14, 1861.
“ Democratic interest in compromise is revealed in such works as : Mary Scrugham,
The Peaceable Americayis of 1860-1861 (New York, 1921) ; Robert Gunderson, Old
Gentlemen’s 'Convention ; The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, 1961) ;
and George Fort Milton, “Stephen A. Douglas’ Efforts for Peace,” Journal of Southern
History, I (August, 1935), 261-75. Kenneth Stampp, And the War Came: the North
and the Secession 'Crisis (Baton Rouge, 1950), offers an explanation of why coercion
replaced compromise. Robert Schwab, “Wisconsin and Compromise on the Eve of Civil
War” (M. A. thesis, Marquette U., 1957), reveals that Wisconsin helped defeat com¬
promise efforts.
6 Madison Wisconsin Patriot, May 4, 1861.
La Crosse Democrat, April 26, May 2, 1861.
8 /bid., Aug. 19, 1861.
1962]
Klement— Civil War Politics
161
Time tempered Pomeroy’s patriotic passions, aided somewhat by
political opportunism and the prophecies of the abolitionists. The
approach of the fall elections of 1861 gave Democratic editors like
“Brick” Pomeroy a chance to substitute partyism for patriotism.
The “howls of the abolitionists,” who wanted the war turned into
an antislavery crusade, also chilled the patriotic passions of Demo¬
crats. Pomeroy, ever bold and blunt, put his protests into print:
There is not today half the enthusiasm in the country there was two
months since. ... A chill has already set in, ... We are willing to fight
till death for the common good of a common people, but will not be forced
into a fight to free the slaves. The real traitors in the North are the
abolitionists, and they are the ones who will do more to put off the day of
peace than all the soldiers of the South.®
Republican party strategists, meanwhile, launched the Union
Party movement to take advantage of the tidal wave of patriotism.
“Brick” Pomeroy, unwittingly, got tangled in the Union Party net.
He endorsed a non-partisan slate in the county elections and gradu¬
ally retreated from supporting bipartisanship on the state level. By
September he had reached the conclusion that even in wartime it
was desirable to keep the two-party system functioning. He also
reached the conclusion that the Union Party movement vv^as really
“a Republican swindle” — a political feast in which the Republicans
took the loaves and gave the Democrats the crumbs.® The Union
Party stratagem paid dividends to the Republican sponsors — they
elected their candidate, Louis P. Harvey, over Benjamin Ferguson,
nominee of the straight-line Democrats. Pomeroy claimed to have
learned a valuable lesson. He pledged never to be caught again in
a game “where the Republican cat was well concealed under the
Union meal.”^®
Pomeroy, erratic on many counts, hewed a steady line in opposing
abolitionists and abolitionism. He learned to hate those who favored
freeing the slaves and he turned his sarcasm and intemperance upon
them full force. He detested Sherman M. Booth, Wisconsin’s best-
known abolitionist, and applied a string of epithets to him. “He is
to respectable people,” Pomeroy wrote one day, “what a blooming
pole cat would be in a ballroom.”^^ Pomeroy also condemned Gen¬
eral John C, Fremont for trying to free the slaves of rebels within
his military district. Pomeroy did not defend slavery as a desirable
institution, but he argued that constitutional guarantees were bind¬
ing upon the people North and South. He believed that it was un¬
constitutional for Congress or political generals to tamper with
^Ibid., Sept. 6, 20, Oct. 4, 11, 1861.
Sheboygan Journal, Oct. 7, 1861; Madison Wisconsin Patriot, May 10, 1862; La
Crosse Democrat, Nov, 15, 22, 1861 ; Pomeroy, Joumiey of Life, 122.
La Crosse Democrat, Sept. 27, 1861.
162 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
slavery where it existed. Pomeroy’s antipathy toward abolition be¬
came more intense with each passing month — it would help to
transform him into a violent critic of the Lincoln Administration.
Pomeroy’s aversion to abolition also helped him to become a
critic of New England. That section of the country was the home
of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the two best-
known abolitionists. New England fanaticism had helped drive the
South out of the Union. It wanted the Morrill Tariff which was
anathema to Western farmers. Pomeroy believed that New England
mouthed pious platitudes while stuffing its pockets with money.
It furnished fewer soldiers and it pursued a policy which would
make the Great West the slave and servant of New England. Pom¬
eroy spoke the language of a Western sectionalist — it was good
politics to condemn New England in many sections of the Midwest.^^
One of Pomeroy’s fellow Democrats and fellow-editors sarcastically
suggested that Republicans could best support a mistaken president
by “drinking lots of coffee at thirty and thirty-five cents a pound.”^^
Pomeroy did not hew to a narrow partisan line during the fall
campaign of 1862. He considered the Democratic party “Address”
of September 3, 1862, too narrowly partisan and too critical of the
war. He refused to publish the “Address,” the handiwork of Ed¬
ward G. Ryan of Milwaukee, in his newspaper. He also brought
Matthew H. Carpenter, a self-styled “War Democrat” who was
both a personal and professional rival of Ryan’s, to La Crosse to
talk to a “Union rally.”"^ He even gave support to the Union Party
movement which he had denounced a year earlier — partisan Demo¬
crats thought Pomeroy sought a spot on the state Union slate. On
the other hand, he denounced Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation
of emancipation (September 23, 1862) as “indiscreet,” unnecessary,
and unconstitutional. He believed it “would be powerful in produc¬
ing evil results.” He accused Lincoln of giving way to abolitionist
pressure and perverting a war to save the Union into one to free
the slaves.^®
The election returns revealed a strong Democratic trend and
emboldened Pomeroy. He blasted President Lincoln’s removal of
General McClellan, condemned presidential suspension of the writ
of habeas corpus, and criticized arbitrary arrests made during the
fall of 1862. To Pomeroy it seemed that the President had scrapped
the Constitution, had assumed the role of despot, and had “bungled”
and “experimented” too much.^® He even regretted his support of
^Ihid,, Feb, 7, 1862.
Sheboygan Journal, Feb. 18, 1862,
11 1.«a Crosse Democrat, Sept. 8, Oct. 7, 1862.
i3/bi(Z., Nov. 18, 25, 1862, Jan. 6, 1863.
16 Ihid.
1962]
Klement— Civil War Politics
163
the Union Party movement. He told Republicans that they had
abused the Union Party principle. “In the past/' “Brick" Pomeroy
wrotCj “they [the Republicans] were not willing to divide their vie-
tories-— in the future we will not share their defeats."^^
After the election post-mortems were over^ Pomeroy took a three-
week trip to St. Louis to see how the war was going in that sector.
His Quaker blood curdled at what he saw and he recorded his im¬
pressions for his readers. Hospital ships were described as “boat¬
loads of pain and agony." War produced “mangled bodies/' sorrow,
and death. War contractors and army quartermasters made money
“by the cord,""^® Pomeroy lost some of his enthusiasm for the war.
His three-week tour of the St. Louis sector was followed by a two-
month visit to Helena, headquarters of the Army of the Southwest.
He held a first lieutenant's commission signed by Governor Edward
G, Salomon, but it was little more than a newsman's pass. He was
“assigned" to no regiment, company, detachment, or duty and on
the margin the Governor wrote: “By request of M, M. Pomeroy
no pay chargeable against the State under this commission. Pom¬
eroy sought the commission so he could stay at the headquarters of
General Willis A. Gorman, a friend from Minnesota, He occasion¬
ally accompanied army units pursuing guerrillas, hunting for cot¬
ton on outlying plantations, or sloshing through Arkansas mud. In
time General Gorman was assigned elsewhere and General Ben¬
jamin S. Prentiss took over command of the Army of the South¬
west. Pomeroy wrote exposes of army life for the Chicago Times,
the Milwaukee News, and his own La Crosse Democrat. Each week's
epistles became more critical of the war, the Lincoln Administra¬
tion, and the army's Arkansas activities. He called the war “a
murderous crusade for cotton and niggers," he plumped for peace,
and he insulted his host.^'® General Prentiss, in turn, banished the
La Crosse newsman from his sector, threatening to arrest him as a
spy if he returned.^^
Pomeroy returned to the editorial offices of the La Crosse Demo¬
crat, hating General Prentiss and disillusioned with the war. He
wanted political compromise substituted for military coercion. War
was a “frightful" thing. “Its glories," he wrote, “are those of death
and grief---its pomp and vanities, those of crazed ambition ; of sor¬
row and ruin."^^
Nov. 11, 1862,
mUd., Dec .9, 16, 23, 1862.
Pomeroy, Journey of Life, 182-83.
La Crosse Democrat, Feb, 27, March 3, 1863.
21 “General Orders, No, 19,” March 24, 1863, District of Arkansas, Volume XDIV,
Records of the War Department, The National Archives.
22 La Crosse Democrat, April 18, 1863.
164 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Pomeroy became a bitter critic of the Lincoln Administration in
the months that followed. He condemned the Conscription Act of
March 3, 1863, as a measure which would crush “the sovereign
power of the States’’ and make Lincoln the “permanent ruler of the
nation.” “The late Conscription act,” he editorialized, “ ... is one
that elevates Abraham Lincoln to the position of MILITARY DIC¬
TATOR . . .” He believed federal conscription violated American
principles and tradition. Furthermore, the provision which excused
from service those who paid $300 in commutation money, favored
the rich at the expense of the poor.^^
Pomeroy viewed the arrest of Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio
by General Ambrose E. Burnside as an extension of presidential
tyranny. He also deplored General Burnside’s suppression of the
Chicago Times as proof that Lincoln was a despot — Burnside was
his “western satrap.” The President was “intoxicated and en¬
tranced by the whirl of the mighty events around him.” Pomeroy
called Lincoln “a tyrant,” and Vallandigham and Storey (editor of
the Chicago Times) “martyrs” to free speech and free press. It
seemed, to Pomeroy, that a despotism was enveloping the govern¬
ment and that civil liberties retreated as Lincoln & Company ruled
the land.2^ When President Lincoln set aside August 5, 1863, as a
day of fasting and prayer, the editor of the La Crosse Democrat
composed a “prayer” which he recommended to his readers: “Re¬
move by death the present Administration from power and give us
in their place Statesmen instead of clowns and jokers — honest men
instead of speculators — military ability instead of conceit and ar-
rogent assumption.
Democratic critics of Lincoln made a distinction between the
government and the Administration. They insisted they were loyal
to the first, critical of the second. They spoke of the government
and the Constitution in the same breath. They viewed themselves as
the defenders of the Constitution and of civil rights against the
usurpations of a “mistaken Administration.” They emphasized the
primacy of the Constitution, arguing that “when the Administra¬
tion violates the Constitution, loyalty to the Administration may
become disloyalty to the Union.”-® “We revere the Constitution,”
wrote Pomeroy, “but we have no faith in those administering it.”^^
23 /bid., Feb. 17, April 14, 1863.
2Wbid., June 2, 9, 16, 1863.
23 /bid., July 28, Aug. 12, 1863.
23 “Address to the People by the Democracy of Wisconsin, Adopted in State Conven¬
tion in Milwaukee, September 3, 1862” (Milwaukee, 1862), 11.
2^ La Crosse Democrat, Aug. 25, 1863.
1962]
Klement — Civil War Politics
165
Later Pomeroy stated his mistrust of the Lincoln Administration
more boldly and bluntly:
Abraham Lincoln is the traitor. It is he who has warred against the
Constitution. We have not. It is policy — his Administration which has
prolonged the war. We have not. It is his proclamations — not our editorials
— which have disgusted the country. . . . Abraham Lincoln was elected
President by the People; he has been President for the Republican party.
He has broken his oath — lent himself to corruptionists and fanatics. . .
Pomeroy received, in full measure, criticism of the same kind
which he dispensed so generously in the columns of the La Crosse
Democrat, Some Republicans boldly denounced him as a ‘‘Copper-
head,'’ a “secessionist,” and a traitor whose newspaper was “a
mouthpiece for damnable treason. ”^9 The La Crosse Democratic
Journal condemned “the treasonable doctrines of those who sym¬
pathize with the rebellion.”^® Indignant La Crosse patriots threat¬
ened Pomeroy with bodily harm and mob action. Members of the
Third Minnesota Regiment, while passing through La Crosse, at¬
tempted to “clean out the Democrat office” via mob action, but
prompt action by Mayor Pettibone kept things in hand. Soldiers,
writing from the war front, threatened to “get” Pomeroy when they
returned home.^^ Patriotic businessmen quit advertising in Pom¬
eroy's paper and some subscribers told the intrepid editor to cross
their names off the mailing list. The circulation of Pomeroy's Demo¬
crat dropped to 360 copies — publishing the paper became a money¬
losing venture.^^ Members of the Union League, partiotic arm of
the Republican Party, even organized a social boycott.
Pomeroy walked the streets of La Crosse defiantly and unafraid
-—like a true curmudgeon. He returned taunt for taunt. When they
called him a “Copperhead,” he retorted “Blowsnake!” He carried a
gun when he went out at night. He advised his Democratic friends
how to react to threats of arson :
Matches are cheap. If fanatics and fools seek mob law and anarchy, by
all means let them have it. Burn down and destroy theirs as they have or
may yours. By dark or by daylight — by fire or by powder — feed those who
may injure you the dish they prepare. On no account inaugurate violence
or excitement, but for every dime of your property destroyed by political
opponents, destroy a dollar’s worth in return.^
Later, when defiant patriots again talked and threatened, Pomeroy
repeated his warnings. He would fight fire with fire: “When this
Oct. 27, 1863.
Milwaukee Sentinel^ April 1, 1863.
s® La Crosse Democratic Journal, July 8, 1863.
81 La Crosse Democrat, October 3, 1864.
^History of La Crosse County, Wisconsin, 546.
88 La Crosse Democrat, Feb. 19, 1864.
166 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
office is destroyed, a hundred buildings in this city will keep it
company. Matches are cheap and retaliation sweet. If anyone wants
a little riot, they shall have a big one — one to last them forever.”^^
“When they ignite the match,’' he again admonished his fellow
Democrats, “let us apply the torch.”®®
Pomeroy and his fellow Democrats insisted that the government
could not expect loyalty from its citizens if it failed to give them
protection. One prominent Midwestern Democrat, arbitrarily ar¬
rested in the fall of 1862, stated that thesis:
Allegence [sic] is that fidelity or obedience which a citizen owes to the
Government. . . . But it is reciprocal. The Government owes to the citizen
or subject protection. Without protection, no allegence [sic] can be due.
Such is the nature of the contract — our allegence [sic] is due, where our
protection is secured,^®
President Lincoln countered by contending that critics of the Ad¬
ministration wanted protection from the Constitution which their
policy was helping to destroy. He defended arbitrary measures “as
indispensible to the public safety.” He insisted that the carping
critics damaged the country rather than the Administration.®"^ There
seemed to be a no-man’s land between loyalty and treason as defined
by the Constitution.
When Pomeroy learned that Lincoln was seeking re-nomination
in early 1864, the bumptious editor cut the cords of restraint. His
shower of epithets showed that he had discarded moderation for
madness. “May Almighty God forbid,” he wrote angrily, “that we
are to have two terms of the rottenest, most stinking, ruin-working
small pox ever conceived by fiends or mortals in the shape of two
terms of Abe Lincoln’s administration.”®®
As the election campaign of 1864 gained momentum, Pomeroy
became more abusive and more intemperate. Entangled in his own
web of hate, he spewed forth frothy editorials. He wrote of “widows
in black” who were “living monuments of Lincoln’s imbecility,” He
called Lincoln “clown,” “buffoon,” “teller of smutty jokes,” “orphan
maker,” and “the poorest apology for a chief magistrate the world
ever saw.” He suggested to Republicans that they “Shout for Abra¬
ham — for taxes — for Fort Lafayette — for the draft — for usurped
power — for suspension of sacred writs — for a nigger millennium —
for worthless currency — for a ruined nation — and for desolate
^ilbid., April 2, 1864.
Oct. 10, 1864.
3® “Dissertation upon Constitutional Rig-hts” (mss.), n.d., in Madison Y. Johnson
Papers, Chicago Historical Society.
3"^ Letter, Lincoln to Erastus Corning et al, June 12, 1863, Robert Todd Lincoln
Papers, Library of Congress.
33 La Crosse Democrat^ July 5, 1864,
1962]
Klement — Civil War Politics
167
cities/' He contended that Lincoln was “hell's viceagent on earth,"
the “fanatical tool of fanatics," “flat boat tyrant," and “the lurer
drunk with madness." He claimed that the people wanted peace in
a land filled with “fear and mourning."^® In the August 23, 1864,
issue of the La Crosse Democrat, Pomeroy placed a picture of Lin¬
coln on the front page and above it put the caption: “The Widow
Maker of the 19th Century and Republican candidate for Presi¬
dent." That day's editorial rantings reached an all-time low :
The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer. He who,
pretending to war for, wars against the constitution of our country is a
traitor, and Lincoln is one of these men. . . . And if he is elected to mis¬
govern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his
heart with dagger point for the public good.^°
The intemperate editor even suggested an epitaph for Lincoln's
tomb-stone :
Beneath this turf the Widow Maker lies.
Little is everything; except in size.^’^
The adamant editor conducted a negative campaign. He seldom
said what McClellan (Democratic candidate for the presidency) and
the Democratic Party stood for. He just abused Lincoln and tried
to scare voters from casting their ballots for the incumbent. He
appealed to the spirit of Negrophobia and to Western sectionalism
- — antipathy to New England. He sought votes in the field of war
weariness and he spoke the language of the defeatists. “It can
never be done," he editorialized. “The south can never be sub¬
jugated"^^
Consistently he revealed that hating Lincoln had become an ob¬
session. He tabbed Lincoln “a usurper who wears a No. 5 hat and
No. 14 boots." He insisted that President Lincoln had ignored his
oath of office, spit upon the Constitution, and “woven the chains of
slavery about the people." “Lincoln," wrote the self-styled cur¬
mudgeon, “has been a worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher
than has existed since the days of Nero. He has listened to the
counsels of fools ; and millions of mourners weep over the result of
his incompetency."^^ Pomeroy even turned his wrath against the
provost marshal in La Crosse— the representative of the “slaughter¬
ing machinery." Pomeroy wrote that the provost marshal was “unfit
for duty," a “captain in the widow maker's service."^^
Aug. 2, 9, 16, 24, 1864.
^lUd., Aug. 23, 1864.
'*'1 Ibid. Pomeroy reprinted the epitaph from the Appleton Crescent , but he did not
state from what paper he clipped it.
^Ihid., Sept. 5, 19, Oct. 10, 17, 1864.
^Ibid., Oct. 17, 1864.
iilbid., Oct. 10, 1864.
168 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Pomeroy’s putrid propaganda failed to halt the Republican tide
which swept Lincoln back into office. The editor, then, appeared
dispirited and disconsolate. He wrote that he regretted Lincoln’s
election “more than words could tell.” He blamed fraud and intimi¬
dation for Lincoln’s re-election, and he refused to accept the verdict
in good grace. “For the first time in the history of our country,” he
rationalized, “a corrupt and ambitious President has abused his
office by making it a source of terror and fraud to influence politi¬
cal opponents.”^^^ He suggested that those who voted for “Lincoln
and the war” should volunteer for army duty. “Election being over,”
he noted, “we look to those who voted for Lincoln and the continu¬
ance of the war, to go to the front. He spoke the language of the
appeasers, predicting that the Union was “lost forever” and stating
that the South could “never be subjugated.” He supposed that the
Northwest might break away from the East, establishing its own
confederacy. He wrote that more “thieving generals” would fill
their pocketbooks and that more widows and orphans would be
“created.” The sullen scribe added a prophecy: “There is no hope
for the Union now.”^'
When the editor of the Republican newspaper in La Crosse wrote
that Pomeroy talked boldly and sought attention but would not dare
assassinate Lincoln, the saucy editor retorted : . if Old Abe ever
comes into our office to tell one of his stories, or crosses our path,
we’ll go for him with a culvereen [sic] of corn cider. Dare not
assassinate Lincoln ! We’d shoot him quick as any man.”^®
When Lincoln met death at an assassin hand there were some
who pointed a finger of guilt at Pomeroy, suggesting he was in¬
volved in the conspiracy. Some spread rumors of his impending ar¬
rest and they quoted from Pomeroy’s most vicious editorials.^^
The editor of the La Crosse Democrat shed crocodile tears when
he decked his newspaper in mourning grab— he turned the column
rules — and reported that the country had lost a statesman. Several
months later Pomeroy supposed that “God generously permitted an
agent to make a martyr of the late president . . He followed
with remarks even more villifying. “We deprecate assassination,”
he wrote, “yet we feel to thank God for calling Lincoln home, wher¬
ever that may be.” Then the defiant Democrat suggested that the
act of assassination “gave the country a statesman for a President”
and “halted the advance of usurpation most effectively.”®^
i-Ibid., Nov. 9, 1864.
^^lUd., Nov. 14, 1864.
^mhid., Nov. 21, 1864.
Ibid.
Milwaukee Sentinel, May 8, 1865; La Crosse Democrat, May 8, 1865.
La Crosse Democrat, June 19, July 3, 1865.
^Ibid., Oct. 2, 1865.
1962]
Klement — Civil War Politics
169
Having drunk deeply from the cup of self-righteousnessj Pom¬
eroy believed that time would vindicate him and would treat Lin¬
coln harshly, 'They may denounce me/' he wrote of his contem¬
poraries, "but their children will not, for they shall know the
truth,®^ Pomeroy's cross-town rival gave posterity an evaluation
which found its way into history: "He out-jeffed Jeff Davis in trea¬
sonable utterances and out-deviled the Devil in deviltry/'®®
Little did Marcus Mills Pomeroy realize that a century later his¬
torians would classify him as a carping critic, a man who preached
the doctrine of a free press and ignored the responsibilities such a
principle imposed upon editors. He claimed that democratic proc¬
esses must function, even in times of civil war, yet his practices and
preachments did more to endanger the processes than to preserve
them.
52 Quoted in Tucker. Life of Mark M. Pomeroy, 91.
53 Charles Seymour, “The Press,” History of La Crosse County, Wisconsin, 545.
I
THE WISCONSIN IDEA AND SOCIAL CHANGE*
Martin L, Cohnstaedt
University of Wisconsin— Milwaukee
The Wisconsin Idea
The Wisconsin Idea known as 'The boundaries of the campus are
the boundaries of the state'' is a comprehensive concept. Yet, in
stating that a University of the people must be taken to the people,
its originator. President Van Hise, identified only one of the areas
of concern for enlightenment. Simultaneously, the University of
Wisconsin became one of the great graduate schools of the nation
and the world. This dual development needs to be kept in mind when
considering what became known as the Wisconsin Idea. Many of
the state universities around the turn of the century concentrated
on services to the people of their states since their financial support
depended upon the legislators of these states. In Wisconsin, hovw
ever, as in the ivy covered private institutions of the East, great
stress was also placed upon academic excellence and scholarly re¬
search. Therefore one immediate objective of scholarship practiced
at Wisconsin was involvement with significant public concerns.
As teacher, researcher, and extension lecturer, the professor’s
concern with the public interest was intimately intertwined with
his academic investigation in his subject area. This integrated ap¬
proach without sacrifice of vigorous research methodology was pos¬
sible in the days before specialization and fragmentation. Today,
public service is associated merely as extension education.
Under Van Hise, a group of scholars influenced by German Uni¬
versities with stress on scholarship and participation in decisions of
public policy came to Wisconsin. These scholars under the leader¬
ship of this great president appreciated the importance of making
all the resources of the University available beyond the college
walls,^
In Wisconsin, Agricultural extension and general University ex¬
tension became enriched by this broader dimension of the Wisconsin
Idea. Around the turn of the century, the spirit of co-operation be¬
tween the two domes, the Capitol and old Bascom Hall, at each end
* Paper read at the 92nd annual meeting of the Academy, May 5, 1962.
1 Cf. Dr. William Cohnstaedt, *‘Die Universitaet von Wiskonsin,” Frankfurter Zeit-
ung, Prankfurt-am-Main, Germany, September, 1909 ; “The great inner and outer mod¬
ernization of the German professor in both personality and attitude toward life in
recent years became surprisingly evident on this side of the Atlantic. The German
professor is more ‘Americanized’ than the American.”
171
172 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
of State Street, promoted public service. This emphasis required an
off campus extension faculty to supplement the resident scholar who
also served as extension lecturer. The later development of an Ag¬
ricultural Agent in each county was a mere expansion of this con¬
cern to be of service. For a longer period of time Agriculture Ex¬
tension rather than general extension, was able to preserve a closer
identification of public service linked with vigorous resident scholar¬
ship. Specialization within agricultural subject fields enabled con¬
tinued public contacts while a separation became sooner inevitable
in the humanities and the social sciences. Political and institutional
conditions within the College of Agriculture enabled a longer pe¬
riod of direct co-operation between research scholar and public.
Even today the role of the College of Agriculture within the Uni¬
versity is unique among the University’s family of schools.
Social Change in Wisconsin
A Population of Consumers. The majority of the citizens of Wis¬
consin, once predominantly engaged in farming, are now defined as
urban residents by the 1960 census. The services offered to the
farming population, the distribution, processing and transporting
of farm products and supplies are no longer the predominant serv¬
ices among the state’s activities. Consumers irrespective of occupa¬
tion or residence, dominate the economic scene and demand the
major portion of the state’s resources. Of course this shift from a
producer 'to a consumer economy in Wisconsin is not unique for
it is similar to the national trend.
Technology and Production. Many social changes are directly at¬
tributable to the expansion of our industrialized society with its
technological improvements and steady increase in mechanization.
The change in farming methods due to mechanization is well known.
Fabulous improvements in technology now enable a small number
of agricultural producers to satisfy the total national food demand
creating severe economic, social, and not least of all, political
problems.
Metropolitanization. The most complex of all the changes can be
traced to the current trend of metropolitanization. Starting as a
small tendency concerned with concentration of peoples in cities, it
presently is a major problem, both economically and culturally. An
additional change, a counter movement of the urban population
results in the dispersion of large numbers throughout the adjoining
country-side of the central cities. An entirely new pattern of hu¬
man habitation has come into being with the emerging suburbs.
Older, established suburbs, like the city proper, had characteristics
of internal organization and community cohesion which are not
found in many of these new subdivision developments. Ip these re-
1962]
Cohnstaedt — Wisconsin Idea
173
cently developed areas innumerable physical and material problems
now clamor and press for solution. However, the necessary knowl¬
edge and information upon which to base social and political deci¬
sions are not yet available.
Communication Breakdown as Social Change
Today’s society requires scientific knowledge for the basis of
intelligent decision making. The presence of a multitude of experts,
all specialists in their respective areas of professional training,
would seem to assure the availability of all needed scientifically
arrived knowledge. Yet, in a democratic society it is assumed es¬
sential that all people make the decisions affecting their own way
of life. However, the delegation of decision making has now denied
many the opportunities for critical thinking. Also, narrow routines
which channel men’s lives today do not enable comprehsion of
the ‘‘whole” of society.
In an urban society social contacts are no longer geographically
oriented. Place of work and residence are usually in two separate
areas of the city, while the man who controls one’s employment
lives in still a third part of the community. The latter may be more
significant to the employee’s total life than the neighbor next door.
Similarly, friends with whom one shares in common special and
significant interests may live in ever widening circles throughout
the metropolitan area. The geographic neighborhood seldom repre¬
sents a meaningful environment, that is to say, becomes significant
in the life of families, until their relationships outside this re¬
stricted area become meaningful and comprehensible. Successful
Neighborhood Councils are found only when the people concerned
are adjusted to their larger economic and political environment. The
immediate geographic community cannot be “developed” until there
is this functional adjustment.
The loss of territoriality, that is the shift of social ties from the
geographic neighborhood, and the change of significance of the local
community does not necessarily mean the malfunctioning of a
pluralistic society. If people were to participate in a plurality of
special interest organizations in which they presently hold mem¬
bership, alternative ties and social relationships would replace those
found in a more community-oriented older society. There are so¬
ciologists who consider social organization in the existing mass so¬
ciety possible without the presence of community organization.^
However this may be, the development of a mass society means a
2 James S. Coleman, “Community Disorganization,’’ Contemporary Social Problems,
Robert K. Merton and R. A. Nisbet, New York: Harcourt, 1961, p. 591.
174 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
withdrawal from responsibility of citizenship. What brings about
such withdrawal? The breakdown of communication accompanying
‘VithdrawaF’ results from the difficulty citizens have in identifying
personal or community problems. For instance, the wide-spread
abstention from participation in the making of decisions affecting
public affairs usually takes place initially as apathetic non-partici¬
pation in the citizens’ associations of special interest groups. Time
does not permit an analysis of the causes for the much lamented and
little understood reasons for “lack of participation.” It is a theoreti¬
cal presupposition of this discussion that there are lags and malad¬
justments in the social structure of our contemporary society. To
make issues, values, and practices in the community visible to
those who need to be concerned is the problem of a mass society.
The structure of a social organization needs to provide occasion to
those variously located in that structure to perceive the norms ob¬
taining in the organization. Also, it needs to provide relative ease
in perceiving the “character of role-performance” by those who run
the organization.
The Urban Agent
A clearer perception of the interrelatedness of social structure
with institutional requirements of the culture is needed. An inade¬
quate analysis of the existing social structure may account for some
of the shortcomings of currently practiced community development,
here and abroad. The prevailing practice of “accepting” the local
culture and then attempting to get change introduced by “innova¬
tors” or “change-agents” leaves institutional adjustment to a
“laissez-faire” condition of unguided change. Local institutions and
their persistence have proven a chief stumbling block to lasting,
that is, not temporary, acceptance of change.
In an “advanced” society the abundance of experts and the avail¬
ability of professional services have not prevented the disintegra¬
tion of urban community processes or the breakdown of communi¬
cation. This has given rise to a recent search for a new kind of
adult educator: the Urban Extension Agent.^
The agent would serve as a communication link. The results of
urban research findings with respect to community-wide activities
and problems would be translated by the urban agent into terms
meaningful to the various components of the urban population.
While thus serving as “implementor,” the agent might simultane¬
ously bring the needs of this urban population into focus for the
researcher if the two were brought into a relationship, such as a
university-based Urban Extension Service.
3 Martin L. Cohnstaedt, “Exploring- a Model of an Urban Extension Agent,” Adult
Leadership, February, 1962.
1962]
Cohnstaedt — Wisconsin Idea
175
The function of the urban extension agent is to clarify, assist
and to enable people to function more adequately in a complex,
specialized, technically oriented society, of which their community
and their neighborhood are parts. With this aid citizens may gain
understanding of the forces impinging upon them and an awareness
of a fuller life. Fundamental to the work of the urban agent is the
assumption that public and private services available will be drawn
upon more meaningfully when their potential users have greater
clarity and understanding concerning those services.
The agent serves as a communicator between the community and
all professions, enabling urban residents to make more effective use
of the services offered by professions and organized agencies. With
the emerging sense of community, individual citizen will join to¬
gether to provide for common unmet needs.
The Future
For a people dedicated to democracy there are a number of en¬
couraging trends. Recently a distinguished group of adult educa¬
tors from throughout the nation, under the chairmanship of Dean
Adolf son of Wisconsin, prepared a statement on Today’s Critical
Needs and University Extension. Their document states that Uni¬
versity Extension has become an intimate and essential aspect of
the total enterprise of the modern public university. As a philoso¬
phy, they contend university extension sees the campus as a com¬
munity of scholars making itself as useful as possible to the total
society from which the institution draws its inspiration and sup¬
port. Due to the high degree of specialization essential for explor¬
ing the frontiers of knowledge this philosophy may clash with pre¬
vailing pressures of academic life. Advancement in many profes¬
sions is at the cutting edge of knowledge. This dilemma to be re¬
solved by the universities demands courage and insight. In their
statement of critical needs, the adult educators identify the func¬
tion of university extension in much the same manner as the func¬
tion of the Urban Agent; University extension seeks to identify
public problems and public needs, to interpret these concerns to the
university, to focus university skills and resources upon them, and
thence to translate university insights into educational progress
throughout a state or region. This statement implies that a city can
be a more powerful teacher than formal classrooms. Many ap¬
proaches to urban problems ignore this and become managerial.
Much can be lost when educators seek to manipulate people and
resources to solve urban problems. When that occurs little attention
is paid to human values, whether people understand their prob¬
lems or participate in seeking a solution.
176 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The Wisconsin Idea was begun by scholars exploring their subject
matter within the framework of public policy and the needs of the
residents of Wisconsin. Following social change one must go for¬
ward avoiding unimaginative revival. Therefore, in our day of ex¬
treme specialization it is not possible to expect the contemporary
scholar to imitate an earlier generation, however distinguished and
successful. However, it may be worth while to identify institutional
conditions which prevailed when state-wide university education
achieved its fame and made a place for itself. In Wisconsin, few
would question the position the University’s College of Agriculture
has had in the development of the state and the respect and affection
earned by it for the state university. It may not be unreasonable to
propose that in our day of urbanization the University’s urban col¬
lege, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, may achieve such an
enviable place in the minds of the people of the state and the entire
nation. In order to learn from the past and to guide widely the fu¬
ture, it should be remembered that the College of Agriculture per¬
formed its service not as an independent unit. The Agricultural
College was merely one integral unit drawing systematically on all
the other resources a great University had to offer. Within the
family of colleges on the University campus it had a much closer
relationship to the state and its practical problems than the other
schools. While it engaged in both pure and applied research in some
fields of knowledge it did not aim to duplicate activities and facil¬
ities in other parts of the University. The College of Agriculture
was dedicated to the constant improvement and development of its
constituents. Thereby political support was gained which was of
considerable importance to the entire University. With the rapidly
expanding political power due to fairer apportionment the urban
voter needs to identify his needs with that of his University.
In the past, first through the organizational support of county
agents and later through the fiscal policies of direct farm subsidies
the American farmer has been assisted in economic and technol¬
ogical adjustments within an ever changing industrial and corpo¬
rate economy. At this time in our national history very complex
social and economic problems arise from ever increasing state and
municipal expenditures, as but one example. The rapidly rising
costs of urban living stagger the taxpayer. Let it be said in the
future that the University found in its Milwaukee unit an institu¬
tion serving diverse but ever so practical problems of the people in
an urban state.
MIDWESTERN “TOWN-MEETING^’— AN EVALUATIVE
STUDY OF ORAL DECISION-MAKING IN
SHOREWOOD, WISCONSIN*
Goodwin F. Bbrquist, Jr. and Ted J. McLaughlin
University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee
I. Scope and Framework of the Study
Authors of contemporary textbooks concerned with oral decision¬
making display marked unanimity. It would not be too much to say
that their key assumptions have become articles of faith in Ameri¬
can collegiate classrooms. Although generally stated and held, the
principles of oral communication in a democratic society are seldom
challenged. Even less often is an attempt made to compare speech
axioms with oral practice.
The schism between theory and practice is surprising when the
first assumption is considered. This primary assumption postulates
an oral communication continuum for the processes of oral decision¬
making in a democratic framework.^ Leaning heavily on the “re¬
flective thinking pattern” proposed by social philosopher John
Dewey, the continuum recognizes that “the scientific method cannot
be applied, in toto, in the solution of public problems. Rather it is
the employment of a series of speech activities or functions relying
on scientific procedures which should be used “to maintain a free
society.”^ As Baird reminds us, we “live under a government of
public opinion ... a government by talk.”^ The threefold oral com¬
munication continuum involves (1) investigation of public prob¬
lems through discussion, (2) systematic clash on specific issues or
proposals through debate, and (3) individual advocacy of solutions
or actions through persuasion.
A second assumption concerning oral decision-making is less a
matter of what processes are followed by those in a democratic
government that it is a prescription of how the “functions of in¬
quiry and persuasion” can best be served.^ A conventional list of
* Portions of this study were jointly presented by the authors at the 92nd annual
meeting’ of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
1 Waldo W. Braden and Earnest Brandenburg-, Oral Decision-Making (New York,
1955), pp. 8-15.
2 Henry L. Ewbank, Sr. and J. Jeffrey Auer, Discussion and Dehate (New York,
1947), p. 20.
3 William A. Behl, Discussion and Debate (New York, 1953), p. 3; Ewbank and
Auer, Discussion and Debate, 1951 edition, pp. 31-34.
^ A. Craig Baird, Argumentation, Discussion, and Debate (New York, 1950), p. 4.
^William S. Howell and Donald K. Smith, Discussion (New York, 1956), p. 263.
177
178 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
elements or characteristics of “government by talk” would include
(1) reliance upon human intelligence and good will, (2) willingness
to suspend judgment during the initial phase of inquiry (3) ability
to deliberate cooperatively, (4) equal opportunity for participation
in all phases of the communication continuum, (5) respect for
minority opinions, and (6) acceptance of majority rule determined
by voting rather than decree or default.®
Method and Data of the Study. This study reports the results of
a descriptive evaluation of oral communication practices of the vil¬
lage board of Shore wood, Wisconsin. The writers have compared
the theoretical assumptions discussed above with the actual oral
decision-making processes of the governing body of Shorewood. In
arriving at the conclusions and recommendations stated at the end
of this report, the authors have used three major categories of
information: official publications (including the Village Code, agen¬
das and minutes of board meetings, press reports, public notices,
studies sponsored by the board, and state statutes) ; structured,
tape recorded interviews with Village Manager Robert Duncan and
Violet Dewey, a local newspaper reporter; and critical observations
of nine regular board meeings from August 7 through December 18,
1961.
11. Historical Background and Overview of Village Government
One way to understand the present is to view it in terms of the
past. An examination of local government in Shorewood, Wisconsin,
therefore, may be better understood if such government is viewed
historically.'^ Because many of the early settlers in Shorewood were
refugees from political persecution in Europe, the desire for self
government was strong among them. When the city of Milwaukee
was established in 1846, Shorewoodites joined with other eastsiders
in forming the town of Milwaukee. Home rule began in the Shore-
wood area, then, one hundred and sixteen years ago.
The township form of government must have suited the citizens
well for it continued in effect until the end of the century. Perhaps
this form of government would still be in effect today had it not
been for the presence in Shorewood of a large amusement park
known in 1900 as Coney Island.
At the turn of the century, Shorewood was a small rural hamlet
with only 345 inhabitants. It was a community whose population
had remained almost the same as long as anyone could remember.
Although there were four miles of paved street in Shorewood, mud
8 Pour of these six elements of democracy are ably treated in Braden and Branden¬
burg-, Oral Decision-Making, pp. 4-8.
The following historical sketch is based upon material found in the first two vol¬
umes of the four volume Research History of Shorewood, ed. by Ernest G, Henkel
(Works Project Administration, 1937-38).
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern ‘'Town Meeting” 179
made the main road virtually impassable from spring until late fall.
Local citizens recognized the fact that improved streets would at¬
tract new residents. The problem was how to finance such improve¬
ments. Licensing fees from Coney Island offered a credible solution.
Consequently in March of 1900, a small group of progressive-
minded citizens petitioned the court for the formation of a new
village to be known as East Milwaukee. To the men of Shorewood,
it made no sense that park revenues should be spent on improve¬
ments elsewhere. Naturally Milwaukeans did not relinquish this
source of revenue without a fight. For five months, city attorneys
contested the corporation petition. But in August of 1900, the battle
came to an end ; East Milwaukee became a legal entity.
Village status brought with it a number of advantages. Coney
Island revenue was at once appropriated for local improvements —
first streets, and later street lights, water, parks, etc. Village gov¬
ernment brought with it also opportunity for hungry office seekers.
Whereas the former township government had only six elected
officers in 1900, the new Village of East Milwaukee found need
for twice that number. As one observer commented, ‘Though these
jobs were not highly remunerative, the work in most cases was not
to [sic] onerous.” Village government also brought with it the
power to license taverns. Three such establishments already existed
in the Shorewood area. No more need be allowed if the village did
not desire it. Prohibiting further taverns would please local inn¬
keepers who wanted things kept pretty much as they were.
Three specific forces appear to have influenced the early develop¬
ment of government in Shorewood. The desire to regulate ones own
affairs manifested itself in the formation of the village; thus an
earlier tradition of home rule was continued. Progressivism was
evident in the community’s emphasis upon local improvements, an
emphasis which would in time change Shorewood from a rural out¬
post of farmers of limited means to a prosperous middle class sub¬
urb. Preservation of a village image became increasingly important
as both suburb and city grew.^
Perhaps it is not too surprising to find these same three forces at
work in the years since the turn of the century. Home rule was to
meet two major tests during this period. In the village election of
1928, an entire slate of annexation-minded candidates for the vil¬
lage board was defeated. And in 1934, a county-wide referendum on
8 The village founders rigidly adhered to the provisions of Wisconsin law in estab¬
lishing their new form of government. Cf. the Shorewood Village Code — The General
Ordinances of the Village of Shorewood, rev. ed. (published by authority of the Vil¬
lage of Shorewood, Shorewood, Wisconsin, 1957) and Revised Statutes of the State of
Wisconsin, 1878 (Madison, Wisconsin), pp. 291-95.
180 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
the consolidation of metropolitan governments was voted down in
Shorewood by a vote of nearly three to one.®
Civic progressivism emerged from time to time in several differ¬
ent ways. In 1917, for example, officials succeeded in getting the
village name changed from East Milwaukee to Shorewood, thereby
increasing the sense of local identity while at the same time estab¬
lishing a more descriptive and attractive-sounding name. In 1928,
an important new office was created in Shorewood, that of village
manager. This position brought efficiency and order to the govern¬
ment of the swiftly growing community. Most recently, the village
board employed a firm of professional consultants to plot the future
of Shorewood.^® Once more an emphasis upon progressive planning
was apparent.
Preservation of the village form of government has usually
been more prominent in village thinking, however, than either home
rule or civic progressivism. When it appeared to the village board
in 1932 that the village manager had too much to say in the hiring
and firing of employees, the manager's powers were sharply cur¬
tailed.^^ In 1939, the Shorewood '‘image’’ was described in these
terms : "because its development has been recent and frankly sub¬
urban, the village has no factories and wants none, limits its busi¬
ness area to a small shopping district, and self-consciously devotes
its civic energies to making itself a pleasant place in which resi¬
dents may live and spend their leisure.”^- This description would
be equally appropriate in 1962.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of conservativism in Shore-
wood was the action taken recently by the village board regarding
the consultants’ report on the future of Shorewood. When it became
apparent that the consultants foresaw grave economic problems
ahead for the village, the board insisted on editing the preliminary
report before its release to the press,
Home rule, civic progressivism, the conservative preservation of
a village image — these are the forces which have been influential
in Shorewood village government since the turn of the century.
III. Oral Decision-Making in Shorewood, Wisconsin
Physical Setting for Board Meetings. Regular meetings of the
Shorewood village board are usually convened in the courtroom on
the second floor of the village hall. When only a few citizens are
present for participation or observation, meetings are moved to
^Shorewood (American Guide Series: compiled and written by the Federal Writers’
Project of Wisconsin, 1939), pp, 63—4.
Shoreivood Herald, January 19, 1961, p. 16. See also “Proposals for Tomorrow:
Digest of a Preliminary Plan for Shorewood, Wisconsin,” May 9, 1962.
11 Research History, II, n. p.
12 Shorewood, p. 11.
13 The Milwaukee Journal, September 21, 1961, p. 2.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern '‘Town Meeting” 181
a smaller committee room adjacent to the judicial quarters. When
meetings are held in the courtroom, the board members are seated
three at a table at right angles to the audience and to the judge’s
bench behind which are seated the board president and the village
clerk. The rectangle of official participants is completed with a table
occupied by the village manager, his assistant, and village attorney.
These officials face the presiding officer with their backs to the ap¬
proximately fifty chairs provided in the audience area at the rear
of the room.
Elements of decor and placement tend to heighten the status
of the board and increase the psychological distance between meet¬
ing officials and citizen auditors. The higher elevation of the judi¬
cial “stage” and the presence of a wooden railing tend to enhance
the atmosphere of aesthetic detachment between the board and vis¬
itors. Indeed, many citizens with cause to address the board appear
awed as if standing before the bar of justice. Other courtroom ap¬
purtenances dramatize the formality of the setting : a large repro¬
duction of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, a cluster of
three small American fiags above each door to the rear right and
left of the bench, and even the gavel wielded by the board president
to punctuate the proceedings.
Roles Taken by Meeting Officials. A. The Village Manager. It is a
curious anomaly of village government in Shorewood that the
“chief administrative officer of the village”^^ is not legally an ex-
officio member of the chief deliberative body but is specifically per¬
mitted by law “to participate in all deliberations and actions by his
voice but without his vote”^® as an ex-officio member of all other
legal bodies appointed by the board or its president. For it is readily
apparent that no single individual exercises as much influence in
board meetings as does the village manager. Although technically
an administrative functionary whose job is to implement the poli¬
cies and actions of the board, in practice, the manager has assumed
the role of an impartial advocate in the deliberations of the board.
The present manager does not attempt to present specific proposals
but he does offer recommendations on particular issues when re¬
quested to do so by the board. In the majority of these cases, the
board accepts the manager’s appraisals.^®
The basis for the manager’s considerable impact on board deci¬
sions seems to be both quantitative and qualitative. Having pre¬
pared the agenda of items to be considered, he is in a strategic posi¬
tion to report the results of his research and evaluation. By virtue
Village Code, Art. 3, Sec. 3-302 (a).
Art. 3, Sec. 3-302 (c).
Tape recorded interview with Robert Duncan, Shorewood Village Manager, Janu¬
ary 17, 1962.
182 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
of the broad scope of his knowledge of village affairs in general and
in specific problems, the manager occupies a unique position of
dominance in board meetings. During the committee of the whole
period of a recent typical board meeting, Manager Duncan con¬
sumed over half of the entire elapsed time devoted to investigative
discussion.^' During public participation in board meetings, the
manager’s pre-eminent status as a kind of floor manager and expert
witness for consideration of public and private problems is equally
evident. For about fifteen minutes before a recent board meeting
was convened, the manager circulated among the audience prepar¬
ing the visiting citizens for participation in the meeting and antici¬
pating possible complications by asking for questions and complaints
in advance of the meeting.^^
B. The President. As chief executive officer of the village, the
president presides at all meetings of the board.^^ In addition to his
nominal role of ensuring that the . . deliberations of this board
. . . shall be governed by the manual of parliamentary practice com¬
monly known as ‘Roberts’ [sic] Rules of Order’ . . the presiding
officer in practice exercises leadership in promoting consensus on
issues and handling public relations during periods of informal
consideration.
C. The Clerk. The Village Code requires the clerk to record “. . .
in chronological order, full minutes of all proceedings . . Al¬
though the minutes are subject to review and approval by the
board, the clerk has sole responsibility for their preparation and
does not normally consult with the manager or president in the com¬
position of the content of the minutes.
D. The Village Attorney. By ordinance, the village attorney is
. . the chief legal advisor to the Village Board and to the Village
Manager and shall be responsible for preparing and drafting legal
opinions, ordinances, rules and regulations . . In practice, he
also acts as parliamentarian during formal sessions of the board.
The attorney participates in discussion and debate during meetings
with comments concerning legal precedents and opinions concerning
constitutionality and legality of proposed legislation.
E. The Committees. Members of the board constitute various
standing committees: finance and administration; police and fire;
streets, plats and buildings; judiciary; and parks. These committees
Authors’ observations, village board meeting of October 16, 1961.
Authors’ observations, village board meeting of August 7, 1961.
Village €ode. Art. 1, Sec. 1-103.
^^Ihid., Art. 1, Sec. 1-107.
^lUd., Art. 1, Sec. 1-110.
23 Duncan interview, January 17, 1962.
28 Village Code, Art. 4, Sec. 3-402.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern “Town Meeting” 183
are primarily study groups for further investigation of specific mat¬
ters referred to them by the board for their consideration. They do
not normally initiate proposals for board deliberation and action.^^
Much of the discussion and oral inquiry phase of oral decision¬
making which might be expected of committees is thus practiced by
the entire board sitting as a committee of the whole for informal
consideration of matters, de novo. In the absence of regularly pre¬
scribed meetings or procedures, committees operate somewhat
fortuitous upon call or felt need.
Sequence of Acts Followed by the Board. Each board meeting is
a public drama in two acts. In the first act, the board meets in an
extended committee of the whole session following the historical
precedent of the New England town meeting. Time is allocated for
the presentation of requests and complaints by citizens and for pub¬
lic consideration of agenda items. The second act is composed of a
brief formal business meeting later that same evening. Although
no conscious effort to arrive at mutual understanding during the
session of the committee of the whole is avowed or admitted, the
consistent pattern of subsequent unanimous votes suggests an effort
to avoid or minimize controversy. In fact, controversy is taken to
imply lack of information and an indication of undesirable internal
friction. The net effect of this total deliberative process is to dis¬
courage systematic debate on crystalized issues in favor of unor¬
ganized discussion.
Recurring Themes in the Dialogue of Board Members. Even a
casual examination of recent deliberations by the Shorewood vil¬
lage board will reveal the continued importance of those forces
which shaped earlier village development. Concern with commu¬
nity progress, the preservation of a village image, and local auton¬
omy continue to dominate official thinking.
Progressivism, for example, has been apparent recently in a
variety of instances. A new organization of business and profes¬
sional men was formed to supplement the efforts of the Shorewood
Neighborhood Improvement Council.^^ A housing code providing
minimum housing standards for the village was approved, and re¬
cently the village board voted to purchase its first “blighted house”
as a prelude to property improvement.^® Over twelve thousand dol¬
lars is being spent to finance a village improvement study by pro¬
fessional consultants. Two winters ago, an editorial appeared in the
village newspaper chastising public works crews for snow removal
“almost as bad” as Milwaukee’s.^^ And recently when a metro-
21 Duncan interview, January 17, 1962.
^Shorewood Herald, March 6, 1961, p. 1,
26 The Milwaukee Journal, February 6, 1962, Part II, p. 2.
^Shorewood Herald, March 16, 1961, p. 4.
184 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
politan newspaper predicted a dim economic future for Shorewood,
numerous citizens phoned the village hall offering to help in any
way possible.^®
The preservation of a unique village image has also been impor¬
tant locally. Village squad cars have been painted a distinctive
cocoa brown and patrolling policemen have been attired in uni¬
forms to match. Vine-covered lamp posts have been replaced by
green street signs as a distinctive Shorewood symbol. Several
months ago, the Shorewood Men’s Club awarded $25.00 to an art
student for designing an emblem which would further the idea of
Shorewood as ‘‘a community with city comforts and rustic
beauty.”^^ No article in the village newspaper concerning village
matters in 1961 has received such detailed treatment as the defense
of Shorewood by village officials, following the appearance of The
Milwaukee Journal’s controversial piece on Shorewood’s future.^®
The village attorney has opposed the board’s purchase of blighted
property on the grounds that state law has not yet been tested in
this sphere; nevertheless, the neighboring community of Whitefish
Bay has been buying up depressed property for several years now.^^
Perhaps the village board’s concern with imagery is most dramati¬
cally illustrated in the proposal of one member that “the meetings
on the Shorewood plan, while still in the discussion stage, be kept
closed not with any intention of hiding the facts but in seeing that
the right facts are presented.
Home rule is also a substantial and continuing force in board and
village thinking. In order to be sure that “everyone” would be in on
the planning of Shorewood’s future, a variety of steps were taken.
Several hundred village residents attended a program at the local
high school entitled “Shorewood Through a Microscope.” Questions
from the floor and answers by village officials were recorded and
later printed in serial form in the Shoreivood Herald, A question¬
naire dealing with “likes and dislikes” about the village and its
services was mailed to every fourth Shorewood resident. President
McLean of the village board joined a county unit of municipal ex¬
ecutives only after he had assured himself that Shorewood “would
not lose its local autonomy and home rule” by this act;^^ On the
occasion of Shorewood’s joint purchase with neighboring communi¬
ties of a garbage crusher. Village Manager Duncan was careful to
reiterate his dislike of metropolitan services “we don’t want.”®^
May 11, 1961, p. 12.
^Ibid., May 25, 1961, p, 1.
s^Ihid., May 11, 1961, p. 1.
^Ibid., May 18, 1961, p. 1.
Ibid., May 11, 1961, p. 12 ; italics by the authors.
^Ibid., January 12, 1961, p. 1.
^^Ibid., January 19, 1961, p. 1.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern ''Town Meeting” 185
A vivid illustration of the importance of local autonomy occurred
about a year ago when members of Shorewood’s planning commit¬
tee (a board appointed non-salaried group) agreed to meet in down¬
town Milwaukee during the noon hour to suit the convenience of
committee members. Under the banner heading “Let’s Have Meet¬
ings at Home” the Shorewood Herald alerted readers to the danger
of Shorewood’s becoming a “bedroom community.”'^^ “When meet¬
ings are held away from the village, it is almost like closing the
door to the public,” the editor warned. If members meet in the
Shorewood village hall, “the planning committee will be more aware
that its planning is for Shorewood and not some other community.”
Scenes of Oral Decision-Making. As a representative sampling of
the oral decision-making practices of the Shorewood village board,
the authors have chosen to analyze three specific problems the board
acted upon during the past year,'^® Each problem will be examined
to determine what actually happened, to evaluate the effectiveness
of the communication techniques used, and to estimate the degree
to which board members adhered to democratic communication pro¬
cedures. The problems chosen for analysis include 1) the purchase
of fire insurance for village buildings, 2) the regulation of com¬
mercial hours of business for chain stores, and 3) the lease by the
Shorewood Women’s Club of a public recreational facility.
1, Traditionally, the village of Shorewood has handled the prob¬
lem of fire insurance in a truly democratic manner. Within the
boundaries of the village live twenty-four insurance agents, each
of whom was alloted an equal share of village coverage. Since the
last appraisal of village properties had been made in 1940, every¬
one agreed that the village was now seriously under-insured.
In mid-March of 1961, one of the local agents presented a new
insurance plan for the board’s consideration. A “free” appraisal of
existing village properties would be made by this agent in exchange
for 40% of all village insurance coverage. The new plan stimulated
the board to call a meeting of all local insurance agents.
On May 22, twenty-one of the local Shorewood agents met with
the village board to discuss the problem of new insurance policies.
Since it was obvious to all that splitting coverage twenty-four ways
resulted in minimal commissions, the group agreed that only one
or two firms should handle the village policies. The Shorewood Her¬
ald hailed this decision as a change which would lead to easier book¬
keeping and easier management. Here was, according to the editor,
Ibid., May 11, 1961, p. 4.
Communication practices reg-arding village business do take place, of course, out¬
side of the board’s regularly scheduled public meetings. An examination of these non¬
public decision-making practices would involve a separate study.
186 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
a split with tradition which “will work to the better interests of the
village/’'®^
On June 8, one of the village trustees asked to have a state insur¬
ance fund representative speak to the village board. The matter of
fire insurance was then sent to committee for further study and
remained there throughout the summer. On October 2, the board
voted to place its entire coverage with the state insurance
representative.'^®
In terms of the three recurring themes which had previously
dominated Shorewood thinking, the affair went something like this.
The village image was one of equality; policies were split equally
among resident agents. This arrangement needed revision because
of an outdated insurance appraisal and a feeling among the agents
involved that their policy commissions were too small. Home rule
would have dictated placing the entire village coverage with one or
two local agents, a development the assembled agents in May prob¬
ably assumed would come about. Yet progress in a civic sense in¬
volved both an immediate reappraisal and minimum insurance
rates. When the state fund representative quoted premium rates
only half as high as those cited by local agents,®® the board’s deci¬
sion was greatly simplified ; the village of Shorewood is now insured
under the state insurance plan.
An analysis of communication techniques used during the con¬
sideration of the insurance problem is most revealing. According
to speech theorists, the first step in solving any public problem is
to inquire into the nature of the problem by means of group discus¬
sion. This the board proceeded to do. In May, village insurance
agents (those village residents most immediately concerned with
the problem) met in open session with the board.^® In June, the
board asked to hear from a state fund representative — an action
which would broaden the basis of the board’s review of insurance
options.^^ Again the board’s action was sensible and appropriate.
And in October, the board awarded the policy to the lowest bidder,
a traditional course of action for a body representing the public
interest to follow. In each of these instances, the village board
followed sound communication practice; members consulted those
persons most closely involved, brought in an outside expert, and
based their ultimate decision on economy.
37 Shorewood Herald, May 25, 1961, p .4.
38 The Milwauhee Journal, October 3, 1961, Part I, p, 28.
3» Ibid.
Shorewood Herald, May 25, 1961, p. 1,
Ibid., June 8, 1961, p, 4A.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin- — Midwestern ''Town Meeting” 187
As for systematic clash through debate— the second step the com¬
munication experts recommend — there was none for practical pur-
poseSo At no time during the eight months when insurance coverage
was being discussed did a public debate over the issues involved
in the board's decision occur. Such a debate between state and pri¬
vate insurance representatives might well have occupied the board's
attention during either of the two regularly scheduled September
meetings.
If debate was lacking, individual advocacy through persuasion
was surely not. The local agent who proposed a new village insur¬
ance plan in March was strangely absent when the board finally
acted in October. Yet even the most optimistic salesman would
hardly assume that a persuasive presentation to the board in March
would have sufficient lasting power to bring about the desired result
in October, seven months later. Another instance of personal per¬
suasion occurred in early June. The village attorney opposed invit¬
ing a state fund representative to speak to the board. Attorney
Hubert 0. Wolfe maintained that ‘The state has no business in the
insurance field;" according to Wolfe, state insurance constituted
unfair competition for private agents. Wolfe said further that
because the state loaned out its accumulated funds, it was some¬
times unable to pay fire losses without a long delay. The village
board ignored its attorney's arguments; board members sent for
the state fund agent. Again one wonders if the timing of the advo¬
cate was sound. A marshalling of these same arguments just prior
to the board's action in October would seem to make more sense
and to contain greater promise of success.
A third instance of persuasion, even more ill-conceived than the
first two, occurred after the board had made its decision to purchase
its insurance policies from the state. A letter signed by ten Shore-
wood insurance agents was sent to the board in which the board
was accused of raising the “small pink flag of socialism."^^ Aside
from personal pique, the letter served no discernible purpose. The
board had already made its decision. Persuasion that might have
influenced board members should have come before, not after, the
decision was rendered.
To what extent was the board democratic in its procedure? A
comparison with the six characteristics of “government by talk"
listed at the beginning of this report should reveal the answer. Was
there reliance upon intelligence and good will? By the board, yes.
The decision to purchase the least expensive insurance with a repu¬
table firm was logical enough. The behavior of the Shorewood insur-
^ lUd.
^ The Milwaukee Journal^ October 3, 1961, Part I, p. 28.
188 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
ance agents is questionable, however. Their use of name-calling and
their assertion that the board’s action was taken “under the guise
of ‘it’s cheaper’ ” was neither accurate nor productive of good will.
Was the board willing to suspend judgment during the initial
phase of the inquiry? Apparently so, with one exception. Halfway
through the period of deliberation, the village attorney attempted
to limit consideration of insurance companies to private firms.
According to Village Manager Duncan, board members follow the
legal opinions of their attorney “95% of the time.”^ The village
attorney is therefore an important figure at board meetings
although he, like the village manager, has no vote. The fact that
the board did not in this instance accept the attorney’s recommenda¬
tion is beside the point; the incident represented an unwillingness
to suspend judgment by a village official whose opinions are nor¬
mally listened to with care.
Did the board deliberate in a cooperative manner? Indeed they
did. They invited local insurance agents to meet with them in order
to present proposals and advice. The consideration of new insur¬
ance policies involved eight months of careful deliberation. Surely
none could accuse the board of hasty action or indifference to local
resource experts.
Was there equal opportunity for participation in all phases of
the communication continuum? Such opportunity was available,
though as noted earlier, there was no evidence of debate whatever,
and what persuasion did occur, was poorly timed and poorly
adapted to the audience for which it was intended.
Was there respect for minority opinions? The board listened to
the village attorney argue against sending for a state fund repre¬
sentative. And the village manager was instructed to read aloud
the insurance agents’ letter of condemnation in a public meeting of
the committee of the whole. There was ample opportunity for one
and all to be heard.
The board accepted the will of the majority by adopting the state
insurance plan by a vote of 4 to 3.^® In this respect, again, the board
acted in a democratic manner.
2. A second action of the Shorewood village board chosen for
detailed analysis involves the regulation of commercial hours of
business for chain stores. The problem centered upon the purchase
of food on Sunday.
On September 28, 1961, the village manager attempted to per¬
suade the two chain stores in Shorewood, the Atlantic and Pacific
Duncan interview, January 17, 1962.
^Authors’ observations, village board meeting of October 2, 1961.
Minutes of the regular board meeting, October 2, 1961, p. 3.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern ‘'Town Meeting” 189
Tea Company and Kohl’s, to close their doors on the Sabbath. The
A. & P. was willing to comply if its rival did. There was no village
ordinance on this matter, however, so the village manager was
simply requesting voluntary cooperation. The store manager at
Kohl’s refused to comply since chain store business was brisk in
Shorewood on Sundays.
At the board meeting on October 16, Village Trustee J. E. Palmer
asked the village attorney to draw up an ordinance which would
prohibit Shorewood chain stores from being open on Sunday. Mr.
Palmer was well known as the owner of the local “Palmer House
Delicatessen,” an independent food store customarily open on Sun¬
days and closed on Mondays.
In the ensuing discussion, the village attorney pointed out that
village barber shops and automobile showrooms were restricted
from Sunday operation by legislation. Attorney Wolfe noted that
Wisconsin “blue laws” had been outlawed in 1933; he predicted
that the ordinance requested by Palmer would be held discrimina¬
tory if challenged in the courts. Wolfe did say that such an ordi¬
nance would be permissible if not contested. The aforementioned
laws on barber shops and automobile salesrooms were cases in
point.
Mr. Palmer insisted that it was “immoral” for chain stores to
operate on the Sabbath. He alleged that he was speaking for all
small, independent businessmen in the village, and reiterated his
demand for a village ordinance.
Trustee Alvin Meyer asked why Shorewood residents who dis¬
approved of chain stores being open did not simply boycott these
stores on Sunday. He went on to reason that if one food store were
closed, all should be. As a lawyer, Meyer supported the opinion of
the village attorney that the proposed ordinance fell into the cate¬
gory of discriminatory legislation.
Mr. Palmer insisted that the ordinance vv^ould be constitutional.
“Shorewood is built on independent merchants,” Palmer said, “we
have the right to regulate things in our own village.”
Palmer’s ordinance was adopted at the next regular board meet¬
ing on November 6. Trustee Meyer cast the sole dissenting vote.^
Here was a case in which home rule and the preservation of the
village image won out over civic progressivism. Palmer’s key argu¬
ment was that the village had the right to regulate its own affairs ;
passage of this ordinance would clearly demonstrate the principle
of home rule in action. A second argument that open chain stores
The Milwaukee Journal^ November 7, 1961, Part II, p. 1.
« Ihid.
190 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
on Sunday were “immorar’ illustrated puritan ideals. Sunday was
a day of worship and rest, Mr. Palmer maintained. Shorewood had
long viewed itself as a “model village.'' Any behavior which marred
this image was behavior to be abolished. Curiously it seemed to
matter little to most board members that the main advocate of this
ordinance stood to gain from it by himself remaining open on
Sunday.
Presumably the progressive-minded citizen would wish to encour¬
age business in the village wherever possible. Yet the closing of
chain stores would clearly restrict the hours during which business
could be transacted. Government regulation of free enterprise was
the pattern the board was asked to follow in this instance.
An analysis of communication techniques used by board mem¬
bers in the chain store dispute is most instructive. The controversy
covered a five week period from late September to early November.
On October 2, Trustee Palmer called the board's attention to the
problem and asked the village attorney for a written opinion on the
legality of an ordinance to restrict hours of business. Attorney
Wolfe presented both sides of the picture. He explained that such
ordinances were usually declared invalid when challenged in court.
If the ordinances went unchallenged, as in the case of those regard¬
ing barber shops and automobile showrooms, they would be deemed
enforceable. Wolfe refused to register an opinion on the constitu¬
tionality of the proposed ordinance, a proper stand in view of his
non-voting and non-partisan position on the board.
Board members showed little inclination to discuss the closing
hours controversy in a regular meeting until the evening of No¬
vember 6. At this time, a debate occurred between Trustee Palmer
and Trustee Meyer. Palmer maintained that chain store activity on
Sunday was immoral, and that in his opinion the proposed ordi¬
nance was constitutional. Meyer noted the logical inconsistency in
Palmer's position — “if you close one food store, why not close all?"
—and assailed the ordinance as “discriminatory, bad legislation,
and a very bad precedent." The sides were clearly drawn.
On the surface it might seem that Meyer would have the edge
for logic and probability were clearly on his side. Yet the vote
later that evening showed that Palmer had won the day for he
secured all votes except Meyer's.
The deciding factor was Palmer’s use of persuasion, particularly
his adaptation to the beliefs of his listeners and his personal
strength as a speaker. To begin with. Trustee Palmer was a re¬
spected board member. Since board members seldom advocated pro¬
posals themselves, Palmer could count on an attentive hearing.
Furthermore, Palmer maintained that he was speaking for others ;
small businessmen, he said, had asked him to sponsor the ordinance ;
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern ''Town Meeting” 191
residents, he said, objected to excessive Sunday traffic at chain
stores; churches, he said, objected, too, although he refused to iden¬
tify any specific religious group. Naturally the board would want
to cooperate in a venture allegedly supported by so many residents.
Palmer himself appeared to be confident and forceful. His insist¬
ence that "we have the right to regulate things in our own village”
was a direct plea to those favoring home rule.
The Milwaukee Journal declared that Palmer had ‘'put himself in
an untenable position by using his public office to advance his per¬
sonal business interests.”^® Be that as it may. Palmer got his way
for chain stores are now closed on Sunday in Shorewood.
A comparison of the elements of democratic decision-making with
this decision of the village board suggests intermittent democracy.
The board chose to follow an illogical decision rather than the ave¬
nue human intelligence would suggest. On the other hand, the good
will of a fellow trustee and of village residents was foremost in the
members’ thinking. Attorney Wolfe scrupulously avoided value
judgments during the initial stages of the decision-making process,
but Trustee Palmer could hardly do so. Palmer played two roles at
once: that of an impartial representative of the people, and that
of an advocate for small business. From the time when the question
was first introduced until the eventual passage of the ordinance.
Palmer was persuasive; he made every effort to convince others.
It may even be that Palmer was asked to represent the independent
store-owners because these businessmen felt that he would be more
persuasive as a member of the board than any non-member. The
village manager sought to deliberate cooperatively with the store
managers involved. All factions had an equal opportunity to par¬
ticipate in all phases of the communication process. There was little
discussion but ample persuasion and debate. The absence of any
chain store representatives from any board meetings may have been
due to a concern about local public relations and the potential dan¬
ger of alienating customers. Minority opinion was never actually
clear until the time of the vote on the ordinance. Trustee Meyer
accepted the decision of the majority without further comment.
The ideals of democratic decision-making were sometimes
achieved and sometimes overlooked in this second illustration of
board behavior.
3. The third case of board action chosen for analysis involved
the lease of a village park facility by the Shorewood Women’s Club.
On August 8, 1961, blueprints for a projected addition to the
shelter house at Hubbard Park were approved by the village board.
For many years past, the Shorewood Women’s Club had been with-
^ Ibid., November 9, 1961, Part I, p. 22.
192 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
out a satisfactory club house. The new addition was designed, in
part, to meet this need.
At the next regular board meeting on September 5, the Women’s
Club lease again came up for discussion. The village manager talked
at some length on the connotation of the word ‘‘bar.’’”® The issues
were two: 1) whether or not beer should be served in the new
facility; and 2) who would receive concession rights for beverages
that were served. Manager Duncan noted that certain Milwaukee
parks permitted beer. He said further that the majority of groups
requesting use of the Hubbard Park facilities wanted beer. Tradi¬
tionally the park custodian served beer or “spiked punch” and re¬
ceived the commission therefrom.
The village manager became the focal point for this discussion on
alcoholic beverages. All persons participating in the discussion,
whether board members or residents, directed their comments to
Mr. Duncan. Duncan served as chairman, information-giver, and
principal speaker. Comments of board members and residents pres¬
ent were largely confined to praise for the manager’s handling of
the twenty-eight minute session; “very well explained” and “nice
to have an explanation” were typical examples. The Women’s Club
delegation of eight members frequently talked among themselves
but played little role in the discussion to which the board attended.
On September 18, Mrs. Skinner, current president of the Wom¬
en’s Club, asked about the progress of the Club lease.^^ She indi¬
cated that her group was anxious to start building the club house
addition before the frost set in. Again, everyone deferred to the vil¬
lage manager as spokesman. Mr. Duncan apparently grasped the
situation better than anyone else for his presentation was virtually
accorded the status of reverence. Again, the Women’s Club sent a
sizable delegation which took little part in the discussion. The vil¬
lage attorney was instructed to meet with the Women’s Club’s
attorney as soon as an appointment could be arranged.
On October 2, Trustee Abramson, a former president of the Wom¬
en’s Club, revealed a new obstacle in the negotiation of the club
house lease. Apparently the ladies desired to employ their own cus¬
todian and to serve their own beverages. Mrs. Abramson proposed
that the board instruct the village attorney to draw up a further
agreement specifically covering the duties and responsibilities of
the custodian. The matter of the lease agreement was left in the
parks committee for an entire month while the village manager,
village attorney and village board members sought to reach agree¬
ment with Women’s Club officials, officers of the corporate organi-
•'50 Authors’ observations, village board meeting of September 5, 1961.
SI Minutes of the regular board meeting, September 18, 1961, p. 1.
^ Ibid., October 2, 1961, p. 5.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin— Midwestern ''Town Meeting’^ 193
zation of the Women's Club, and the Club's attorney^ Construction
of the club house was postponed for the duration of this period.
Agreement was finally reached on November 6, thirteen weeks
after the board had approved construction plans. There would be
no park custodian in attendance when the Women's Club was using
the facilities but such a person would be in charge when other
groups were present. All concessions would be handled through the
park custodian as in the past. A large delegation of ladies again
appeared although the Women's Club attorney did all the speaking
on their behalf.®^
The final board action was progressive in that a long existing
need for a club house was now met. Home rule was preserved in
terms of village control of a village facility. The image of a coop¬
erative, responsive village board was upheld in that board members
and villagers reached a compromise agreement, suggested first on
September 5.®^
An examination of communication practices used in this transac¬
tion reveals some remarkable shortcomings. Each time the board
considered the lease agreement, the village manager did most of the
talking. These sessions can better be described as informative speak¬
ing and “interviewing the expert" than open and broadly based dis¬
cussion. Observers in the audience found it difficult to understand
why the Women's Club lease appeared on the board’s agenda week
after week.
There was no evidence of controversy at any of the board meet¬
ings. Yet agreement on the lease remained elusive. One problem was
the fact that the Club appeared to have no single spokesman since
the Club president confined her remarks to brief questions and a
plea for a speedy settlement. On October 2, it became clear that at
least a dozen people representing the village and the Women's Club
had to be contacted, convened, and convinced of a solution. It re¬
mains unclear as to why so large a group of active citizens was
needed to reach an agreement implicit early in the board's delibera¬
tion of the matter. Discussion, debate and persuasion may have
occurred on this topic but these processes did not occur during
regular board sessions.
Was the decision a democratic one? Largely so. Intelligence would
have dictated a much more rapid agreement to be sure. And good
will should have paved the way for at least some discussion from
the floor by the many interested ladies present. But perhaps the lat¬
ter feared they might be taking up the board's time unnecessarily.
Mrs. Abramson, who had an obvious interest in the proceedings,
refrained from persuasive appeals throughout the inquiry. The vil-
Authors’ obs-ervations, village board meeting of November 6, 1961.
^Authors’ notes, village board meeting of September 5, 1961.
194 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
lage board met with all the parties concerned and did its best to
deliberate cooperatively. There appeared to be an equal oppor¬
tunity for participation in all phases of the communication con¬
tinuum, even though, as mentioned earlier, little use was made of
this opportunity in regular board meetings. The final decision of
the board in this matter was a compromise satisfactory to all. Mi¬
nority opinions were respected and majority rule reigned : the Wom¬
en’s Club received the right to regulate its liquor consumption dur¬
ing its own meetings while the board protected the concession rights
of the park custodian.
IV. Conclusions and Recommendations
In an admittedly incomplete study of the oral decision-making
practices of the Shorewood village board, the authors have reached
a series of tentative conclusions. Each conclusion presented below
is accompanied by a specific recommendation for improving com¬
munication practices.
1. For over sixty years, the formulation of public policy in Shore-
wood, Wisconsin has been dominated by the three forces of civic
progressiveness, home rule, and the preservation of a “village
image.” Preoccupation with home rule and a village atmosphere
have at times prevented board members from considering proposals
on their own merits. A systematic use of the oral communication
continuum for all policy matters requiring board decision would
eliminate this problem. For example, if a set amount of time were
allocated to debate before the board of the key issues involved in a
proposal, the board would be better equipped to reach a logical
solution.
2. Although no attempt was made in this study to validate the
communication continuum recommended by speech theorists, the
study clearly shows that this recommended pattern of speech proc¬
esses is only partially adhered to in Shorewood board meetings. Pro¬
vision for the use of these three processes regularly in board delib¬
erations would aid the board members by providing them with a
systematic method of procedure. Such a requirement would also
help the citizens of the village in their understanding of the delib¬
erative process their representatives would follow.
3. The characteristics of democratic decision-making occur inter¬
mittently in the deliberations of the Shorewood village board. A
conscious effort on the part of board members and village officials
to suspend judgment during the inquiry phase of a question should
help in this connection. The prerogative of personal advocacy
should be denied board members in regular board meetings but
encouraged in committee meetings.
1962] Berquist & McLaughlin — Midwestern “Town Meeting” 195
4. Any complete estimate of Shorewood decision-making prac¬
tices must include studies of oral communication outside of regu¬
larly scheduled board meetings. Related studies of the communica¬
tion practices of persons who are influential in the village, neigh¬
borhood conversation groups, committee sessions, and even coffee
breaks would help to complete the picture of decision-making in
Shorewood.
5. The most influential participant in board meetings is the vil¬
lage manager, who is not officially a member of the board. Apparent
efficiency should be sacrificed for greater use of the democratic
process. The manager might better make materials available to
board members for study than report on them himself. For in sum¬
marizing such materials, the village manager must abstract from
them; his selection of what is important might be substantially at
variance with that which might be selected by the village trustees.
The authors suspect that board members take limited part in board
deliberations because they feel that their knowledge of specific
topics is limited.
6. Methods of recording minutes of board meetings are unsyste¬
matic and outdated. The use of tape recordings of both the com¬
mittee of the whole and regular board sessions should help to elimi¬
nate recording problems. Such tapes would serve as a valuable his¬
torical record if carefully preserved. Further, the authors recom¬
mend that consultation between the village clerk and the village
manager and/or the village president in the preparation of minutes
should be required.
7. Although this study was not primarily concerned with the
Shorewood board’s committee system, it soon became obvious that
the committee system is in need of review. Committees should meet
regularly to initiate studies and draft proposals in their own areas.
Thus, recommendations to the board for action would represent
carefully phrased group thinking rather than hastily composed
ideas of individuals.
8. Board meetings are inadequately structured from the stand¬
point of arousing interest among citizens as participants in village
government. The failure to begin sessions on time or to publicize
before the meeting the evening’s agenda, the judicial atmosphere
and the placement of important village officials with their backs to
the audience, inaudibility of board members at times and citizen
unfamiliarity with the steps of the deliberative process — all of these
factors contribute to a spectator rather than a participant interest
in village government. Added to these factors is the discouragement
of conflict, an element of natural interest which might attract
greater attendance. The village board has at its disposal the posi¬
tive means for correcting these deficiencies.
THE RETREAT OF AGRICULTURE IN MILWAUKEE
COUNTY, WISCONSIN
Loyal Durand Jr.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Milwaukee County, in common with other principal urbanized
counties of the Middle West-=-indeed of the nation — has experi¬
enced the impact of the urban sprawl and its accompanying rural
retreat. The impact has been hastened in the county, and elsewhere,
by the ''discovery” of hedgehopping by subdividers ; hedgehopping,
the placing of subdivisions in the midst of fields, and some distance
removed from continuous urban areas, results in the fracturing of
farm land, the shattering and even the elimination of the agricul¬
tural zones that surround a city, and in the creation of economic
pressures upon the farm land remaining in the interstices between
and among subdivisions.
Milwaukee County contains 239 square miles (162,960 acres) and
more than a million people within its borders. The post- World War
II advent of hedgehopping has resulted in subdivisions in all parts
of the county. The percentage of the county devoted to agriculture
has dropped, in twenty years, from 50 to approximately 10. More
than 1,250 farms were eliminated in the first fifteen years after the
War. But 237 true "commercial farms” remained in the county in
1961, as disclosed by a special survey. The 440 dairy farms of 1940
were reduced in number to approximately 50 by 1961, only 26 of
which still produced milk for the Milwaukee market ; a county that
at one time had the largest milk production per unit of farm area
in the state now gathers some of its milk supply from points as
distant as central Wisconsin. The former market gardens have been
virtually eliminated; only 35 remained in 1960, relicts of the nearly
300 of the recent past.
Milwaukee County was among the top 100 agricultural counties
of the nation in some items a generation ago. Today all of its area
lies within the limits, of incorporated places — Milwaukee, the
twelfth city in size in the United States, Milwaukee’s long-estab¬
lished suburbs, new suburbs, and "new cities”, these last the former
towns (townships) of the county. Thus every resident of the county,
farmer as well as urban dweller, is now a city resident and subject
to zoning ordinances of an urban type as well as to city taxes and
assessments.
197
198 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
This paper is concerned with the rural retreat, not with the urban
sprawl or the advancing contiguous urbanized areas. It is concerned,
too, with farmer resistance to rural retreat. The wave of German
settlers of the 1840’s occupied much of the farm land, although
some settlement of Eastern Americans and Irish occurred during
the 1830’s and 1840’s. The thrifty and hard-working German set¬
tlers cleared and developed the land. Many Milwaukee County farms
are or were “century farms”, having been in the same family for
100 years or more. Fathers established their sons in farm enter¬
prises, and a love of the land comparable to that of the Pennsylvania
Germans developed. Seven out of every eight farmers are land-
owners ; many of the renters are related to the owner by marriage.
Thus, the resistance of many individuals to loss of their land has
perhaps been more determined than in urban counties elsewhere
where a more speculative and mobile agricultural population resides.
This paper is based upon detailed field work undertaken in 1959-
61, upon other field work carried on in the county by the writer dur¬
ing several periods beginning with the early 1920’s, and upon various
statistical and historical records. The subject matter is confined to
Milwaukee County. The writer recognizes that the urban impact
and zone of rural retreat extends into three neighboring townships
(now cities) of Waukesha County (Menomonee, Brookfield, New
Berlin) and into one of Ozaukee (Mequon), and that some town¬
ships beyond these are experiencing rural retreat. Waukesha
County to the west has had a serious loss of farm land and of farms
during the decade since 1950, from 3,049 farms to 1,883; 864 dairy
farms disappeared, and but 904 total still operate. The county is no
longer near the top of the leading dairy counties of the nation. But
for historical, statistical, and field purposes the paper is held to a
county which has long contained one of the major cities of the
nation and yet has been important in agricultural production as
well.
Hedgehopping in Milwaukee County
The principal advent of hedgehopping in the United States has
occurred since World War II, even though some of the War-built
housing was at a distance from contiguous urban areas. Prior to
the War the “greenbelt towns”, sponsored by the Roosevelt ad¬
ministration, were placed in an outer ring; Greendale, the “green-
belt” community built southwest of Milwaukee was such a town.
At the time it was unique enough so that “tourists” gathered to
witness the operation of machines, the demolishment of large dairy
barns included within the planned area, and the razing of other
farm structures. The urban expansion of the present proceeds, in
Milwaukee County as elsewhere, by contiguous growth from the
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
199
existing urban margin, by growth along major highways, by the
familiar “additions’’ to a city near its borders, and by hedgehopping.
It is this last that creates additional economic pressure upon the
agricultural land near which the subdivision is placed.
Many real estate developers have adopted hedgehopping whole¬
heartedly. Land at a distance is less expensive. Taxes, at least
originally, are lower in the rural territory. The omnipotent automo¬
bile of office and factory workers, coupled with paved and main¬
tained roads, have made hedgehopping feasible and possible. Public
transportation need not be considered as a locative factor; the
resident provides his own transportation. In fact, his work may
follow him as factories, research laboratories, shopping centers, and
other enterprises move to a peripheral setting. The drilled well, the
electric pump, and the septic tank, ubiquitous features of nearly
all hedgehopped subdivisions or linear rows of new rural nonfarm
homes, likewise permit selection of site without regard to water or
sewer lines. Milwaukee newspapers, especially in their Sunday real
estate sections, now' carry many advertisements of well drillers,
and septic-tank cleaners — types of business whose services are not
needed in the city proper.
The hedgehopped subdivisions of Milwaukee County lie in a
semi-circle around the city. They extend, also, into Waukesha
County to the west, the southeastern corner of Washington County
to the northwest, and into Mequon of Ozaukee County to the north.
They differ in quality, landscape, and type of resident — differences
not within the scope of this study. In general those to the north
near Lake Michigan are of higher quality. Northward, too, are the
small and large estates, some of them of small-farm size, but not
operated as farms. The southern subdivisions are principally for the
worker. Westward and into Waukesha County there is a mixture,
but much high-quality property in the Lake Border Moraine, and
many subdivisions catering to the middle class. An original factor
in the westward placement, aside from propinquity to the western
urban edge very near the county line, was the existence of far lower
automobile insurance rates in Waukesha County than in Milwau¬
kee. Thus, no matter what the county unit the impact on farms is
existent. Broadly, the present general subdivision zone coincides
quite closely with the milkshed of the 1920’s. At that time Mil¬
waukee, of all the larger cities of the United States, possessed the
smallest milkshed in area, a reflection of the intensive dairying of
southeastern Wisconsin; the outer limits were only 25 miles from
the city center. The farms of Milwaukee County were then the larg¬
est producers of milk per unit of farm area in the state.
200 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The detailed pattern of subdivisions is markedly affected by the
mile-square grid of the road system. But, from the earliest days
diagonal roads led outward from the port of Milwaukee, for the
city was one of the principal points of disembarkment for settlers
who arrived from the East or from Europe via the Great Lakes.
These roads, originally plank roads, still constitute principal ar¬
teries along which, or adjacent to which, real estate subdividers
have placed many hedgehopped communities. Southward the
straight roads on the section lines, particularly two or three, are
principal arteries ; one of the section-line roads is the United States
Highway to Chicago, and carries an Interstate Highway southward
for 24 miles from the southern edge of Milwaukee County to the
Illinois state line.
The individual subdivision, within the confines of the original
road pattern, is commonly hit-or-miss in specific site. A realtor buys
a single farm, and ‘‘develops” it. A nearby farm, a mile or more
away, is purchased by another developer. Various builders and real
estate firms compete for locations; advertisement after advertise¬
ment appears in the city papers, farm-read papers or journals, the
gist of each advertisement being “lots and acreage for subdividing
wanted” or “wanted: farmland suitable for subdividing.” Specula¬
tors purchase or option other farms, hoping to sell at an increased
price to a builder, and meanwhile renting the land back to the
former owner. In fact the real estate sections of the Milwaukee
newspapers frequently contain articles on this practice : “ ‘Trading
Up’ Realty Properties Profitable if you Avoid Pitfalls.” These, and
associated activities, result in the specific location of many hedge¬
hopped subdivisions — all, however, being within the broader frame¬
work of the “subdivision zone” of urban-rural landscape.
The competition of real estate subdividers for farm land suitable
for development into hedgehopped subdivisions has bid up the price
of such land. Not only do the subdividers bid among themselves, but
operators of large farms — located on the outer fringe or beyond it
— have been purchasing land to enlarge their farms. This is owing
to their desire to provide a buffer zone between themselves and the
subdivisions, and to permit expansion and further mechanization of
their operations and increase of income. The small to medium-sized
farmer thus may have alternative opportunities to sell out. In many
cases the larger farmers have offered prices that are competitive
with those of the subdivider ; then the latter may choose to seek land
elsewhere, another factor in the hit-or-miss location of many sub¬
divisions. In any case the rising value of the remaining farm land,
a shortage item, results in increased taxes, even the tax rate is not
increased. Thus further economic pressures develop, ones indirectly
owing to suburbinization, and the competition for land.
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
201
Figure 1. The road pattern, location of barns, and the hedgehopping
subdivisions in Milwaukee County, 1958.
202 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Subdividers compete with other potential users of land for space.
Among these are federal or county agencies purchasing or condemn¬
ing airport locations, park land, school sites, and institutional sites ;
churches obtaining land for present or potential use ; factories and
research centers seeking rural or peripheral locations ; country clubs,
golf courses, cemeteries, commercial and industrial users; com¬
panies building radio or TV towers ; dumps, and many others. Each
of these users today desires a generous supply of land ; in Milwaukee
County fringe and rural areas there are 80-acre school sites —
one-eighth of a square mile ; 40 and 60-acre church sites ; 50 to 80-
acre sites for towers ; paved parking lots of 40 or more acres sur¬
rounding shopping centers; and new one-story factory buildings
surrounded by extensive parking lots. And, in present and potential
Interstate Highways and modern freeways, from one-sixteenth to
one-eighth of each square mile through which the road passes is
removed from farming or other uses.
The Landscape of the Zone of Rural Retreat
The zone of urban sprawl and hastened rural retreat contains a
combination of rural and urban cultural forms. In Milwaukee
County the most striking cultural relicts are the large basement
dairy barns, nearly 1,000 of which are still standing, inheritances
in part from the 2,000 farms of a generation ago, and more par¬
ticularly from the 1,349 of ten years past. These well-built struc¬
tures, with field stone (glacial boulders), local Niagara Limestone,
or concrete foundations, are too valuable or expensive to demolish
as long as some use can be found for them ; sheds, cribs, and other
out-buildings are removed, however. Many of the barns are 100 to
150 feet long, 40 to 80-feet wide. Some stand in or next to hedge¬
hopped subdivisions. Some remain next to factories or commercial
establishments. Some have been converted to new uses — clubhouse,
summer theater, real estate office, headquarters for a contractor.
A barn in adjacent New Berlin has been cut down in height and
remodelled into a modern ranch-style house. Other barns have been
converted into use for storage ; some are used for the selling of top¬
soil, for some of the frugal farmers of German descent gain an in¬
come from this before selling space to a subdivider. A relocated
market garden may have a large dairy barn upon it, a structure
not needed in the new enterprise. Vacant barn after vacant barn
stand abandoned on a farm temporarily devoted to the growing of
crops alone; the former barnyard is deep in vegetation, and the
barn is used, perhaps, only for the overnight storage of an auto¬
mobile.
Silos are relicts in many locations where the barn has been re¬
moved. Some silos still stand in subdivisions. Fields among subdi-
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
203
visions are in effect relicts of a former land use. An occasional aban¬
doned apple orchard is a relict, but on the whole orchards have
proved to be especial magnets for subdividers, and orchard acreage
was limited in Milwaukee County in any case. Cultivated fields
stretch to the back yards of some housing developments; it is not
uncommon in the summer to witness a ‘‘relict farmer” at work
on his tractor on one side of a line fence passing a householder and
his power lawnmower on the other side.
Large and substantial frame farm houses, and smaller but well-
built yellow-brick farmhouses, each quite usual in the county, re¬
main as relicts. In most cases they have been retained for residences.
Where a new subdivision of one story ranch-style houses or hun¬
dreds of small and similar box-like frame houses has been con¬
structed, its adjacency to a relic farmhouse of different-style archi¬
tecture provides a sharp contrast. Equally notable in the scene are
the mature trees surrounding the former farm home and the newly-
planted “shadeless” small trees of the subdivision.
Dairy cows are becoming relict features in the Milwaukee area.
Their numbers, as recorded in the Census, have dropped from more
than 7,500 in 1944 to fewer than 2,000 by 1959. Dairy farms have
declined in numbers from 603 in 1929, more than 500 in 1939, and
440 in 1944 to only 75 census-reported ones in 1959 — and to ap¬
proximately 50 (only 26 selling milk to Milwaukee) by 1961. In
the northern portion of the county only four farmers still main¬
tained a dairy herd during August 1961.
Changes in the Agricultural Zones
The agricultural zones surrounding Milwaukee have been frac¬
tured, reversed and turned “inside out,” or even eliminated com¬
pletely by the urban sprawl of the post-World War II period. (1)
Market gardens, theoretically closest to a city market are virtually
extinct; three dozen remain where there were nearly 300 in the
1930’s. In general, they have not been replaced on the present fringe,
owing to the hesitancy of making the necessary capital investment
because of the certainty of city expansion, and the competition of
fresh and frozen vetgetables now produced on truck farms hundreds
of miles distant ; modern technology and the advent of frozen vege¬
tables, coupled with the housewife’s ease of preparation of the
latter, have been background factors. There are today only two-and-
a-half times the number of vegetable farms in the entire state of
Wisconsin that there were market gardens in Milwaukee County
alone in 1930. (2) The city milkshed, theoretically in the second
zone outward, has been overrun by subdivisions, factories, and
fractured by land held for anticipated schools, parks, and other
204 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
uses. Milk is now transported to Milwaukee from distant counties
(Figs. 2 and 3). Even adjacent Waukesha County, which in the
past furnished nearly all of the market milk not produced in Mil¬
waukee County, supplied only 19.7 per cent of Milwaukee milk in
1961, and had but 448 farms remaining on the market ; during the
five years 1954-1959 Waukesha lost 10,000 dairy cows. (3) Field-
crop agriculture, the selling of cash crops (mainly small grains and
corn now in Milwaukee County) , theoretically distant from the city,
now appears an activity on the urban fringe. It engages land await¬
ing '‘development,’' on former dairy farms where animals cannot
be replaced because of zoning ordinances, by older farmers to ease
their daily work-load, by farmers who hesitate to invest in capital
equipment for the expansion of other agricultural enterprises, and
by farmers renting land which is owned by developers for future
subdivisions, by agencies for future park or school use, and other
similar land awaiting a future use. The market for the final dispo¬
sition of these crops is, in many cases, not the Milwaukee market,
but one in the reverse direction. (4) The feeding of beef cattle and
swine, theoretically not close to an immediate city market, now is
an enterprise on certain farms. Former dairymen have shifted to
Figure 2. Milwaukee milkshed of 1925. The maximum extent of 25 miles from
the city reflects the local intensity of dairying”.
. 1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
205
Figure 3. Milwaukee milkshed of 1958. The subdivision zone is virtually coin¬
cident with the milkshed of 1925 (Fig. 2). The fraction shows the changes in
number of farms on the milkshed in two years; the denominator is the number
for 1956, the numerator 1958.
beef cattle, in response to labor costs and shortages, the use of their
land for crop agriculture during the summer and use of their own
labor for feeding animals in the winter, their hesitancy to invest
in additional capital equipment for continuance on the fluid milk
market, and because the herd can be liquidated quickly if the farm
is sold.
Nurseries, greenhouses, growers of ornamental plants, shrubs,
and trees and 'dawn specialists’’ have increased in number and im-
206 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
portance in urban fringe areas. Their market is the new housing
development, an insatiable market considering population growth,
the American desire to live in a single house, the prestige factor
associated with a landscaped lawn, and the “necessity’’ factor of a
home-owner having his “bare” surroundings seeded and planted.
Other Changes
The activity, if not the function, of the Milwaukee County Agri¬
cultural Agent has changed with the times and the urban develop¬
ment. This official now finds a large part of his work (80 per cent)
and a large percentage of the questions reaching his office, with the
residents of subdivisions or the new rural nonfarm resident. They
seek advice on how to grow a lawn on subsoil, for the bulldozer of
the subdivider has left the topsoil on the bottom. The activities of
the County Weed Commissioner have increased; his problem has
been enlarged from concern about weeds on vacant lots to the weed
problem on land “awaiting development” and not used for the grow¬
ing of crops.
The terms unimproved land and raiv land have assumed new
meanings in the Milwaukee setting and elsewhere in urban counties.
Today these terms to the subdivider (and no doubt to many urban-
reared persons) is land upon which there are no dwellings, fac¬
tories, man-made parks, or other cultural elements denoting urban¬
ism. “Raw land” is advertised in the newspapers for sale as a build¬
ing site, the raw (or “undeveloped”) land being some of the finest
farm land in the nation. Yet one hundred years ago, and even more
recently, unimproved land was land that had not been brought into
the standards of cultivation of the day. The United States Census
recorded improved and unimproved acreage in Milwaukee County
through 1860, by which time the county was two-thirds included in
farms, on which there were 48,712 unimproved acres — land on
which there was relict forest or cut-over, was unbroken and unused
prairie or oak-opening, was stumpy pasture, marshland, or swamp.
By 1870, Milwaukee had 50,000 inhabitants; unimproved acreage in
the county was not recorded. In thirty years, 1900, the city of Mil¬
waukee contained 300,000 inhabitants, and its landward edges were
semi-circled by more than 2,500 highly-developed farms, whose col¬
lective area included more than four-fifths of the county. Only a few
woodlots of second-growth hardwood provided any indication of the
former dominant landscape-type and fields and pastures occupied
the gently rolling to undulating glacial-drift plain.
Thus a little more than a century and a quarter from the 1830’s
to the present has witnessed marked shifts in the landscape and the
geographical scene in the 239 square miles of the county. And the
NORTHERN MILWAUKEE COUNTY, AUGUST I96|
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
207
UJ
<
<
o
o
o
H
CO
3
□
q:
< CL
CO X
u ^ H
5 < 2
£ ca CD
Figure 4. Land use in northern tiers of sections in Milwaukee county, 1961. Area shown is from western county
line to Lake Michigan. Entire area is in the zone of urban sprawl and rural retreat.
208 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
shift in population, not only in this area but in the United States,
from predominately rural to principally urban has resulted in
marked shifts in the attitude of the majority toward land on the
urban fringes of the present. “We must clear the forest and break
the prairie to improve land'’ has now become “We must eliminate
the farm land {raw land to the subdivider) to improve the land.”
The pioneers attacked the forest with axes, to replace it in time
with fields and pastures. Their descendants now attack the terrain
with bulldozer and concrete to cover it with aspects of urbanism.
Pressures Upon Agricultural Land
The pressures exerted upon farm land in urban counties of the
United States are of several origins and types. They involve land
uses which are observable in the landscape. The ultimate final de¬
cision to sell may be indirect, through the economic pressure of in¬
creased taxation of farm land or through a highly favorable price
offered. They may be direct in the passage of urban-type zoning
ordinances that place the agricultural land in a non-conforming land
use ; direct when under the “nuisance” application of common law,
animals and barnyards may be declared nuisances by the courts
should the residents of subdivisions complain and carry a suit suc¬
cessfully through the legal process; or direct through condemna¬
tion of a farm for public use such as a park, or municipal airport.
Pressures from Hedgehopping
The presence of a hedgehopped subdivision or a line of rural non¬
farm homes creates pressure upon the surrounding farm land, or
the farm land remaining in the interstices between subdivisions.
The demands of their residents for schools, public garbage collec¬
tions, other services, and eventually for local water or sewerage
systems, local street pavements, fire and police protection, and
other services and amenities to which they were accustomed (either
in the city, or as young city-reared persons) all lead toward an
increase in taxes, of which the farm acreage bears a dispropor¬
tionate share, considering its size (even though assessed as farm
land) . The rise in school taxes for new schools is particularly large.
Should sewers be provided, the total of sewer-line assessments on
the farm property is relatively greater, for the sewer line passes
through a longer frontage on the farm property line than on a build¬
ing lot. Finally, to obtain services or to asure self-rule the resi¬
dents of the many subdivisions in a township band together and
incorporate. All of Milwaukee County now is within incorporated
villages or cities; the former towns (townships) have disappeared.
The complete incorporation of the county was accomplished dur-
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
209
ing the 1950’s, the smaller units competing with Milwaukee to an¬
nex territory. Some units moved for self-incorporation for fear that
the master city might annex them; in fact, Brown Deer and Mil¬
waukee each annexed the same territory, with a resulting lawsuit.
At some point, either before or following incorporation, the tax
load on the farm land may reach a point where the farmer is forced
to sell to a subdivider. His farm acre is a working acre, and must
carry its economic load. An acre-lot, or a fractional-acre lot in a
hedgehopped subdivision, does not yield products to help pay the
taxes assessed upon it; tax money for it is obtained from the oc¬
cupier’s pay check, whether in the form of wages or salaries. Thus
the two adjacent land areas, and the viewpoints of ’the adjacent
farmer and subdivision resident, are reversed. The farm land is de¬
voted to crops or animals, from which enough return per acre must
be obtained to pay for the costs of labor upon it, the capital invest¬
ment, repair of buildings, the charges in taxes, and still yield a
profit. The occupier of the house and lot in the subdivision is en¬
gaged, in his home at least, principally in the rearing of children.
Other pressures build up on the remaining farm land. Incorpora¬
tion of a township, or other unit of territory, means concentrated
government, — aldermen, city managers or mayors, and other offi¬
cials. Today it follows that there is planning and zoning of an urban
type (rural zoning of farm land has been common in Wisconsin
since the early 1930’s), The farmer finds his property zoned for a
future factory site, shopping center, or some other use. He finds
his farm zoned into a non-conforming land use by the planning
board, and the zoning ordinance passed eventually by the govern¬
ing board of the village or city, or by the more-numerous voters
resident in the hedgehopped subdivisions. As a non-conforming land
user he is zoned out of farming should he cease operations for any
reason for a time. In some ordinances his number of animals are
set at the time of passage, and he cannot add to them. Thus, added
to the pressure of increasing taxes, he is deterred from making
capital investments looking to a change in type of operation, mod¬
ernization of barns or equipment, or replacement of machinery.
Land values have arisen in any case. Between 1954 and 1959 the
value of Milwaukee County farm land, as reported by the Census,
rose from $684 an acre to $1,049. Even though specific figures are
affected by inflation and the purchasing power of the present dollar,
both increased value and increased tax rates are operative in pro¬
viding tax pressure. From this base, the additional school and other
taxes, added on with the advent of subdivisions, provide the total
pressure upon farm land and help hasten the rural retreat, and fill¬
ing of the interstices between and among the hedgehopped areas.
210 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
And, as subdivisions mushroom, the competition for land bids up
its price; the farmer may thus decide to sell because of a highly
favorable offer.
Pressure From Park Land
Milwaukee County has an excellent park system ; parks, whether
within the city limits or the county are administered by the Mil¬
waukee County Park Commission. In 1961 the park acreage was
10,361. Eleven and a half square miles of this, 7,414 acres, is lo¬
cated beyond the closely-built portions of the city and its immediate
and long-establishment suburbs. Virtually all of the outlying park
land was in farms twenty to thirty years ago ; some of it was cul¬
tivated as recently as two to five years ago ; within the three years
of 1958-1960 about two square miles of farm land was added to
the system.
The land in parks includes large single blocks and streamside
parkways. Plans were drawn in the 1910’s and 1920’s for the park¬
ing of every stream course in the county, and of much of the Lake
Michigan frontage. Today there are parkways along nine different
streams, and this facet of the plans is nearing consummation. Re¬
cent purchases of land for the streamside parkways, however, are
of large blocks rather than narrow strips, and remove many farms
from the tax rolls, as well as change the landscape from one of
fields and pastures to one of planned landscape-planting or of
county-owned golf courses. For example, in the southern part of
the county the Commission has obtained, in three adjacent sec¬
tions (square miles) acreages of 93, 45, 250, and 188; of this total
area the Root River flows through only three 40-acre plots. Nearby,
280 acres were added to obtain one 40-acre area through which the
river flows.
Obviously, with all considerations of the greatest good for the
largest number of people and the ivisest use of land for the many
put aside, the park developments have created pressures upon farm
land, particularly stream-side land. The acquiring of land originally
in narrow strips removed lowland pasture from some farms, made
the creeks and rivers inaccessible for watering cattle, access rights-
of-way split other landholdings on the periphery of the parkway,
and some farms were split in two. The present purchases remove
whole farms from agriculture. The farmers owning stream-side
land know they have a potential buyer if they wish to sell ; however,
in effect they have no alternative buyer to turn to. As money be¬
comes available the Park Commission negotiates for purchase in
order to obtain the land at “agricultural prices.’’ If Commission
and farmer fail to agree on a price the land may be condemned.
The Commission now attempts to obtain land before the appearance
1962]
Durand^Retreat of Agriculture
211
of competition from subdividers, who might threaten otherwise to
buy the non-streamside portion of large farms; thus the '‘new’’
buying practice affects, or may affect, the entire farm. It reflects,
economically, the fact of competition of land users for the shortage
item in the county — land.
The removal of park land from agriculture, coupled with the ad¬
vent of subdivisions in the vicinity, places increasing tax burdens
upon the remaining farm land. In one case the park land is removed
from taxation, placing the tax base upon the remaining land; in
the other the tax pressures engendered by the subdivisions appear.
Offsetting this in many districts is the attraction of parkside land
to the subdivider and builder of high quality houses. Several discon¬
tinuous hedgehopped subdivisions margin parks and parkways in
outlying areas; many streamside parks close to the city are now
paraded by houses on either side. Eventually the overall tax base is
increased.
From the standpoint of the farmer, the park land hastens rural
retreat. A farmer whose acreage contains potential park land, like
farmers in the interstices among subdivisions, thus hesitates to in¬
vest in improvements to continue in dairying ; for example, in 1956
the Milwaukee milk market shifted from the collection of milk in
cans and in bulk tanks to its collection alone from bulk tanks in¬
stalled on the farms. Most farmers along stream courses and in
interstices did not invest the $2500 to $3000 necessary for the bulk
tanks even though they could receive some aid from milk distrib¬
utors — the investment might never be returned or amortized. In¬
stead they sold their herds, some sold their farms, and others shifted
to a cash-grain crop agriculture.
Pressure From Church-owned, School, and Public Land
Long-established churches and schools occupy small sites in the
zone of rural retreat, sites inherited from rural days. Quite in con¬
trast, the sites purchased for new churches and schools are gen¬
erous.
In the subdivision zone in Milwaukee County the sites purchased
by the various Protestant denominations are generally from five to
30 acres. Sites owned by various units associated with the Roman
Catholic Church include lands of this acreage, and blocks of larger
size. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee owns separate blocks of 38
acres, 39, 75, and 244 acres. The Xaverian Fathers own 58 acres,
the Servite Brothers 153, the Sacred Heart Monastery 128, the
Sisters of St. Francis 80, and there are several others; the total
of larger church landholdings of the Roman Catholic Church in
the urban sprawl-rural retreat zone exceeds 1000 acres. Some few
are operated temporarily as farms.
212 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
School sites of 20 to 40 acres are usual. Seventy and 80-acre
‘‘campuses’’ for public schools have been obtained, such as that for
the Granville High School.
The Milwaukee airport of more than three square miles, another
airport of nearly three-quarters of a square mile, several smaller
airports and landing strips, and a partial ring of United States-
owned land for various defense installations are all on former agri¬
cultural land, some of it in crops very recently. One of the principal
former market gardening areas, comprised of intensively cultivated
vegetable farms, is now almost completely obliterated by the Mil¬
waukee airport and the urbanized districts that have grown in its
surroundings.
Pressure from Other Uses
The industrial and miscellaneous land uses are highly diverse in
character and type. Some of the sites occupied by new factories —
long and low buildings surrounded by extensive parking lots — in¬
clude 200 or more acres ; a power company owns nearly 400. Private
golf courses, several in number, occupy about a quarter-section (160
acres) apiece. Cemeteries are about the same in size. Shopping
centers in the urban sprawl-rural-retreat zone either are using or
have reserved from 80 to 100 or more acres apiece. One Drive-In
Movie Theater occupies 80 acres. Private schools, Boy Scout camps,
outlying railroad yards, dumps, yards of construction companies,
gravel pits, a polo club, archery club, curling club, and other organ¬
izations are users of land. Collectively some 7000 or more acres be¬
yond the closely-built urban areas are occupied by industrial and
miscellaneous land uses. Certain of these users come into competi¬
tion with projected public use. The Lake Michigan shore property
toward the south county line is scheduled for park-use by the Park
Commission. Two or three miles are owned presently by manufac¬
turing companies, but not entirely in industrial use ; rather they are
farmed by renters, and in crops and orchards. The eventual use of
this land is thus subject, perhaps, to litigation or condemnation.
Interstate Highways remove land from farming or other uses.
The projected continuance of an Interstate Highway from the
southern line of Milwaukee County to the city has already at sched¬
uled outlets, included nearly 80 acres of each outlet, and 120 at
clover leaf interchanges.
Composite Land Uses
The total pressure upon farm land is owing to the composite of
all non-rural uses of land. Although the hedgehopped subdivision re¬
ceives the bulk of farmer criticism, and is most obvious in the land¬
scape because of its multiplicity of generally similar houses, the
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
213
competition for land from schools, parks, churches, industries, golf
clubs, cemeteries, and a host of other users is severe. But the subdi¬
visions contain the school children, the voters and the vocal element
of the population, desiring services. Thus the subdivisions receive
the publicity.
Collectively the nonfarm users of land in a township within the
subdivision zone may occupy as much area as the remaining farm
land — and in time will exceed it. The city (former township) of
Franklin, the southwestern unit of Milwaukee County, contained
in 1961 some six square miles — out of about 34 — of park, school,
church, and other public land, including in the last a 752-acre
County Home of Correction and associated farm and a 150-acre
shrub and tree nursery operated by the City of Milwaukee. In addi¬
tion to this, the growing number of hedgehopped subdivisions con¬
sume acreage annually. When the Root River Parkway plan is com¬
pleted, three or four more square miles of present farm land (de¬
pending on the size of purchases) will be removed. Franklin is the
“most rurak’ portion of the county. In 1944 Franklin contained 327
farms, primarily of the dairy type; ten years later the number of
farms was halved. By 1961 only a few more than a hundred com¬
mercial farms remained (out of 237 in Milwaukee County), and
only 18 of these in Franklin still engaged in 1961 in milk production
for the Milwaukee market.
The Rise and Fall of Farming in Milwaukee County
Milwaukee County is perhaps unique in the state in that it has
long contained both a large urban population and has been very im¬
portant in agriculture. Its small total size has precluded it from
being a major farming county in the state except when measured
on a per unit area basis. Nevertheless, despite size, the county as a
unit has been among the top 100 agricultural counties of the nation
in the past in the production of certain items, such as cabbage. The
present urban sprawl is to top quality farming land, some of the
most productive agriculturally in the state of Wisconsin. The use of
this land for crops is well on its way to oblivion.
The southern part of Milwaukee County contained outliers of the
extensive prairies farther south. Oak openings — giant oaks grow¬
ing separately in grasslands — occupied other southern and south¬
western areas. The central and northern portions of the county
were in the dense hardwood forests. A strip of mixed northern for¬
est, hemlocks and birches mingling with hardwoods, occupied the
narrow red clay strip between the Milwaukee River and Lake Michi¬
gan. The soils developed on the glacial drift, and in this vegetation
and climate setting, were heavy soils of high quality. The environ-
214 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
ment continued westward into eastern Waukesha County until the
more stony glacial drift and the rougher surfaces of the Kettle In-
terlobate Moraine and the inland lake district was (or is now)
reached.
Three broad, smooth-sloped morainal ridges extend north-south
more or less parallel to the shore of Lake Michigan. These are
separated by shallow north-south trending valleys or broad swales
in the glacial drift. Surface-wise no portion of the county, save for
wave cut cliffs facing Lake Michigan, was (or is) too steep for
cultivation, nor for present land uses and urban housing. Drain¬
age was and is a problem locally in the swales, and in some of the
present subdivisions in rural territory certain of the heavier soils
are not particularly receptive to drainage from septic tanks.
Agriculture expanded from an almost-subsistence stage at one
time, through the wheat boom in Wisconsin during the 1850's to
1870’s, to the dairy stage. Dairying was always of some importance,
considering the local city market, and in the 1890’s and early 1900’s
even contributed enough surplus milk to support cheese factories in
the southern portion of the county.
The Rural Land Use of the Recent Past — Late 1920' s
Milwaukee County contained just under 100,000 acres of farm
land on more than 2,000 farms in the late 1920’s. The acreage of
corn and small grains combined was greater than the present total
farm acreage included in commercial farms; in the late 1910’s it
was greater than all present acreage in farms, part-time, residen¬
tial, and commercial combined. The county was an outstanding
center of market gardening, a source of sugar beets for neaby sugar
mills, a principal cabbage-producing area both for fresh cabbage
and for canners of sauerkraut, contributed peas and tomatoes to
canneries, and overall was outstanding in dairying and part of the
important region of intensive dairying in southeastern Wisconsin.
A leading celery-producing district, specializing in part in celery
for the New York market, and located on muck lands where parts
of West Milwaukee and West Allis exist at present, had succumbed
to urbanization. Although the average size of farm was only 43
acres, this average obscured the extremes of small, intensively cul¬
tivated market gardens of about 20 acres each, and dairy farms
averaging more than 80 acres in size. Hay, oats, and corn were the
leading crops in order of acreage on the dairy farms. The cabbage,
sugar beets, peas and tomatoes were cash crops on these same
farms. Corn was grown for silage almost exclusively ; only about a
quarter of the acreage was matured for grain. All home-grown
grain, principally oats, was used in the dairy feed, and for horse
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
215
feed — 7,000 horses still were maintained on farms of the county in
1928. Income from the sale of chickens and eggs was a sideline on
most farms ; swine were very few — grain was fed to cattle and there
was no skim milk for pigs, as whole milk was sold to Milwaukee
distributors.
Market gardens, nearly 300 in number, clustered near the mar¬
gins of the city, and along the principal highways leading from it.
The gardeners grew a complete array of vegetables in season. And
other farms, general and dairy in type, contributed fresh vegetables
in season as a sideline activity. Many of the market gardens were
on drained muck land at the southern edge of the urbanized areas
of the time. Others were prominent on the loamy outwash terraces
of the Milwaukee River valley immediately north of the city. A
network of radiating electric interurban lines, in operation until the
mid-1930’s, localized still others on soils of suitable warmth and
friability near their stations. The largest numbers of gardeners
were of second or third generation German ancestry, and persons of
Polish birth. These last were generally immigrants from peasant
areas in Poland (or, prior to World War I, of German Poland) who
came to Milwaukee as factory workers, and whose prior training
and inclination led them back into agriculture when finances or op¬
portunity permitted.
More than 600 dairy farms surrounded the urban and gardening
areas. In the late 1920’s the northwestern township (Granville) and
the two southern townships (Franklin, Oak Creek) were occupied
almost entirely by dairy farms ; the other townships contained sub¬
urban, market gardening, and dairy districts. Although some dairy¬
men were of eastern American ancestry, the majority were third
and fourth generation Americans of German extraction, descend-
ents of the German immigrants of pre-Civil War days. Farms were
highly developed. Barns were large, painted red, and well-kept.
Nearly all were basement barns, the foundations of the older ones
were of glacial boulders or blocks of the local Niagara Limestone;
more recently-built ones had concrete walls around the excavated
basement. Farm houses of wood, stone, or brick were substantial
and in good repair. The dairy farms of the late 1920’s maintained
more than 10,000 cows and heifers, two years of age and over, kept
as milkers, and some 14,000 dairy stock in total, counting young
stock, calves, and bulls.
The urbanized areas of Milwaukee, of Wauwatosa, West Allis,
Cudahy, South Milwaukee and other suburbs, were compact. In
fact, there was farm land along the Lake Michigan shore in the
southern part of the county, and farm land west of Wauwatosa
to the west county line. Northward the high-class residential
216 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
suburbs of Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, and Fox Point occupied nar¬
row strips along the lake bank and farms lay west of them, mainly
market gardens along the Milwaukee River terraces. The one rem¬
nant of the level of former Lake Michigan (its glacial-lake an¬
cestor), a flat terrace just above the elevation of the current lake,
and below the wave-cut bluff at Fox Point, had been under cultiva¬
tion as recently as the early 1920’s. The estate district in the upper
Milwaukee River Valley (now River Hills) was passing from farm
land to large county-estate properties. The town (township) of
Milwaukee, the northeastern town, although generally impinged be¬
tween the lake and the river still contained more than 100 farms.
Rural Land Use — Early 1960’s
The percentage of the county in farms is now only ten by recent
assessor’s reports, in contrast to 50 in the early 1930’s, and 21 in
1959 as reported by the Census. Milk cows numbered but 1,800 in
1959, fewer now. Only 215 horses remained. Of the 557 farms re¬
corded by the Census of 1960, sixty per cent were “unclassified,”
principally residential or part-time landholdings. The theoretical
(and formerly actual) zones have disappeared or been fractured;
only 35 market gardens exist, and except for two small clusters,
their pattern is one of dispersal rather than close to the city. Dairy
farms number but about 50 only 26 of which shipped milk to the
city in August 1961 ; 16 farmers in the southwestern part of the
county shifted to the Chicago milkshed; the others sell class B or
manufactural milk to condenseries in the reverse direction from
the city market. The acreage of the former cash crops has declined
enormously — sugar beets from 1,000 to 12 acres, cabbage acreage
from more than 1,000 to but 131. The 237 remaining commercial
farms of 1961 are about equally divided in number between the
two southern former townships (present cities) of Franklin and
Oak Creek at the very southern part of the county. A few remain
in the northwestern corner.
Farmers ceased dairying in numbers during the middle and late
1950’s. In part this was owing to the urban sprawl and the elimina¬
tion of farms by presures engendered by the hedgehopped subdivi¬
sions, and the resulting tax pressures. The former Town of Green¬
field contained 185 farms in 1944, and only eight in 1955. In part,
during the middle and late 1950’s, the rapid decline in dairying was
coupled with the shift of the Milwaukee milk distributors to the
collection of milk entirely from bulk tanks installed on the farms of
the milkshed. The combination of the costs of installation (even
with financial help from the dairy companies), the incurrence of a
debt for this capital equipment, and the mounting taxes on the
1962]
Durand — Retreat of Agriculture
217
remaining farm land in the county, caused the rapid decline in
dairying and the. shift to cash-crop agriculture, or the decision to
sell to a subdivider. The numbers of Milwaukee County farms on
the milkshed dropped rapidly, from 300, to 200, to 111 by 1956, 41
by 1958, and 26 by 1961. The county by 1962 contributed only one
per cent of Milwaukee’s milk supply, despite its propinquity to
market.
Cash-grain farming has appeared and has increased relatively
on the remaining farms and on land awaiting subdivision, or on
land owned by speculators. It is a response of many farmers — old
and young — to their situation with respect to an uncertain im¬
mediate future, and to the competition of the nearby city and sub¬
urban factories for the labor necessary for an animal enterprise,
and to the variety of pressures upon their farm land. Also, the op¬
erator can devote part of his time to farming and part of off-farm
work, something not too feasible in an intensive dairy economy.
Today small grains (oats, wheat, barley, rye, flax for seed) and corn
for grain are grown on over half (55 per cent) of the total culti¬
vated acreage ; the percentage of the corn acreage now harvested
for grain has risen to 80. Ninety per cent of the wheat crop, more
than half of the corn crop, and a third of the oats are sold. Half
of the remaining farms in the county sell cash grain. And on
some two dozen commercial farms the sales in 1959 were of a mag¬
nitude to have them classified by the 1960 Census as cash-grain
farms. And soybeans have been introduced as a cash crop.
Nursery and greenhouse products from 119 enterprises gross
more than three million dollars a year. In value this horticultural
activity is now close to half of the total of all ‘‘farm” production
remaining in Milwaukee County. The activity culminates the rapid
shifts in urban counties — in response to the nearby market, the
ability to use land intensively, to produce flowers and nursery stock
of a value high enough to carry the taxes and other charges, and to
persist under the economic situation of location near subdivisions,
or at the very edge of urban development, or even within it.
The Future
What of the future of agriculture in Milwaukee County and near¬
by areas? No doubt most, if not all, of Milwaukee County will be¬
come urbanized or rather completely suburbanized in the not too
distant future, judging from present trends and the rapid changes
of the last fifteen or so years. Each Census reports a larger and
larger percentage of the population of the United States resident in
a Metropolitan Area, of which the Milwaukee region is one. How
far this area will stretch cannot be forecast accurately. Certainly an
218 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
increasing acreage of some of the finest land in the state will cease
to be used for farming.
What of agriculture in the outer fringe area, as westward into
Waukesha County or even in the southwestern sections of Milwau¬
kee? Can they be saved for farming? The current usual answers to
the problem of rural retreat near major cities (not as yet attempted
in the Milwaukee region) are: (1) strictly enforced zoning for ag¬
ricultural use only; (2) tax adjustments in urban counties to pre¬
vent farmers from being forced out of agriculture; and (3) rural
incorporation. Loudoun County, Virginia, near the urban sprawl of
Washington, and some other counties have passed zoning ordinances
for the preservation of farming. Three dairy cities have been in¬
corporated southeast of Los Angeles to keep people out, cows in.
Will these efforts elsewhere — or in Wisconsin — prove perma¬
nent? The residents of a subdivision in a township can outvote the
farmers. Zoning can be changed by voters or their elected repre¬
sentatives. The present dairy cities in southern California may vote
to unincorporate if land values reach astronomical figures. And the
voters in urban counties as well as the voters in the subdivisions of
the townships of fringe counties are urban in outlook and look with
disfavor upon proposals for possible tax relief on farm land of the
present, or farm land zoned only for agricultural use. Furthermore,
they have been conditioned for most if not all of their adult years
by talk and writings about farm surpluses, crop-control programs,
soil banks, benefit payments, commodity-storage programs, increas¬
ing productivity, new fertilizers, increased yields of crops and ani¬
mals, government give-away programs, and other items. Therefore
it is natural that the milieu is one of apathy on the part of the ma¬
jority of our inhabitants.
Perhaps in the future high quality farm land may be treated dif¬
ferently, just as forest land received protective and tax dispensa¬
tions as it became a shortage item in the early years of the present
century, and water shortages now engage public attention.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WISCONSIN, 1870-1880
Thomas L. Dahle
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Wisconsin, like any state, has its contradictions, but in general it
has a reputation for being a leader in social progress and social
legislation. This reputation has been built up over a number of
years through the words and actions of its citizens and we are privi¬
leged to be the heirs of a line tradition.
A look into the past is interesting both from a historical point of
view and also because of what it reveals concerning our heritage.
The decade, 1870-1880, was a transitional period. The passions
engendered by the Civil War were beginning to abate. The isolation
of the agrarian culture was still present, but improved means of
transportation and communication were beginning to remove it.
However, the mobility of the automobile and good highways had
not yet begun to enlarge local communities into the more urban and
closely related units typical of today.
Citizens of the state in 1870-1880 were particularly conscious of
their rights and their opportunities. Many of them were new citi¬
zens who had emigrated from foreign countries where the right of
“free speech’’ had been abridged. All of them were anxious to pre¬
serve the freedoms granted them under the democratic form of
government and they were quick to voice their opinions.
“Free speech” gave them the right to criticize when social con¬
ditions were adverse ; it gave them the right to criticize when things
were going well. Some abused the privilege in speeches and writ¬
ings, which judged by today’s standards would be considered libel¬
ous or slanderous. However, it should be noted that “free speech”
of the 1870’s was not subject to the legalistic refinements of today.
In short, Wisconsin in those days afforded a favorable environ¬
ment for “free speech”, which in turn helped create the tradition
of free speech which we enjoy today.
Let us examine, by considering some examples taken from news¬
papers published in those days, some of the characteristic prob¬
lems of the day and evidences of how freedom of speech was
interpreted.
Then as now, political occasions were numerous and constituted
a prime source for the interchange of ideas and viewpoints. News¬
papers of the day carried public notices of meetings and partisan
editors took pains to invite members of the opposition parties to
219
220 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
their functions. They were always careful, however, to credit the
success of an occasion to the party of their choice, A meeting re¬
ported by the Democratic editor of the Lafayette County Democrat
stated that :
'‘The meeting was about three-fourths democratic, and consequently the
best of order prevailed — no one interrupted the speakers and the contest
was fair in every particular.’'^
An Oshkosh editor, with obviously a preference for the Republi¬
can point of view was a little more forthright in his analysis of a
somewhat similar meeting for he reported it in this fashion:
“Doolittle (ex-Sen. Doolittle — the Democratic candidate) squirmed and
writhed under this torture like an eel on a hot skillet; but Washburne
(Gen. C. C. Washburne) was relentless, and answered every charge
brought against the republican party, out of the very mouth of his adver¬
sary.”"
Both the citizens and the speakers of the day must have had con¬
siderable stamina for the occasions were numerous, the speeches
long and numerous, and the newspaper reports of the speeches
were almost equally long and numerous.
For example, in the 1871 gubernatorial campaign between Gen.
Washburne and Sen. Doolittle a series of nine debates patterned
after the Lincoln-Douglas debates was held in major cities of Wis¬
consin, and occurred within a one month period. In every one of
these meetings the candidates spoke for one and one half hours
each, plus a discussion period. The La Crosse Leader not only sum¬
marized the occasion but carried the complete text of more than
12,000 words of General Washburne’s speech and a lengthy sum¬
mary of Doolittle’s remarks.^
However, the persuasion was felt to be most effective in oral
form rather than printed, for as one editor put it:
“persons in need of sound political gospel, will listen to a good speech and
be impressed and moved by the truths it contains, but they will not bother
themselves by reading the same speech in print.”^
But freedom of speech carried with it some of the same hazards
it does today in the form of opposition which is lacking in restraint.
For example, a political orator spoke one night at Reedsburg where
the Democrats caused considerable annoyance to him by “building
a bonfire near his place of speaking, firing anvils and beating pans
so loudly ... as to almost drown the speaker’s voice.”®
1 Lafayette County Democrat, August 27, 1871 (Darlington).
2 Oshkosh Journal, August 7, 1871.
^LaCrosse Leader, October 14, 1871.
^ Fond du Lac Commonwealth, October 18, 1879.
® Baraboo Republic, October 18, 1876.
1962]
Dahle — Freedom of Speech
221
On another occasion in Watertown at a meeting called “for the
purpose of taking measure against the present rule of mismanage¬
ment and corruption in our city’' the meeting “was broken up by a
band of Union Leaguers who took this method of showing their
appreciation of free speech and the rights of American citizens to
quietly assemble and express their sentiments.” After attempting
to oust the chairman who had already been chosen by the sym¬
pathizers “the meeting soon resolved itself into a sort of pande¬
monium through the League influence, until finally the lights were
put out and the crowd dispersed.”®
In our newspapers today, we normally expect editorial comment
concerning the days events to be confined to the editorial sections.
Columns devote dto news reports are supposed to be objective, and
factual in nature. This was not so with newspapers of the 1870-1880
era and is well illustrated by the following accounts of a political
campaign speech delivered in Watertown by Gen. E. S. Bragg. One
Watertown newspaper reported that :
“The political meeting . . . was numerously attended by our citizens, to
hear the brave and eloquent General express his sentiments . . . he . . .
aroused a good deal of interest, giving his hearers a simple, dignified, and
truthful presentation of facts in matters of reform that were beyond
question and utterly unanswerable.”^
Another Watertown newspaper had this to say of the same
occasion :
“The Reform meeting addressed by Gen. E. S. Bragg . . . was a very slim
and dull affair, considering the preparations that had been made for it . . .
The orator was introduced ... to an audience of just 250 persons all told,
a large proportion of whom were republicans . . . His remarks were ram¬
bling and desultory, and he seemed to lose sight of his subject all the way
through.”®
Once elected to a state legislative position, the politician could
expect his constituents to be just as interested in what he said in
the state legislature as they were in what he said while running for
office. State affairs commanded just as much attention as did na¬
tional affairs and many local newspapers — not just those from the
larger cities — maintained a correspondent in Madison during the
legislative sessions. He would issue a general report on each week’s
legislative activities with particular emphasis on the local repre¬
sentative. Knowing they would be called to account for their stew¬
ardship, state and local legislative body representatives made it a
policy to report to their constituents at public meetings at which
the electorate gathered.
® Watertown Republican, March 17, 1874.
'^Watertown Democrat, October 28, 1875.
® Watertown Republican, October 27, 1875.
222 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
For example, a ‘'large audience (which) assembled at the Court
House’’ in Chippewa Falls in March, 1876, did so in order to “hear
Judge Wiltse” render an account of how he had discharged his oblh
gations. They listened for more than an hour to his “able and for¬
cible” remarks. Approval of his conduct was then voiced through a
unanimous vote of thanks.^
When the issue was of sufficient importance to warrant direct
action Wisconsin citizens of the 1870’s did not rely upon lobbyists
to exert persuasive pressures, but sent delegations from the local
areas to ensure desirable action by their representative. When the
proposed Graham liquor licensing bill was before the legislature in
1872,
“the lobbies and galleries of the Assembly Chamber were crowded at an
early hour and soon the floor of the house underwent a systematic packing
and presented a very pleasing spectacle of ‘fair men and brave women’
who came to give courage and sympathy to the great popular reform
measure ... It was a time well calculated to inspire the best efforts of
the friends of reform.”^^’
Public meetings were widely attended by Wisconsinites and pro¬
vided both social and educational fare for the people. In addition to
that, the tendency toward free and open discussion of topics shaped
the course of Wisconsin’s growth in some rather obvious ways. Wis¬
consin’s reputation, as a dairy state, is due in part at least, to the
widespread discussions held by farm groups concerning agricultural
developments. As an indication of this, consider the following frank
opinions expressed at a meeting of the Freedom Farmer’s club to
discuss going “into the so called breeds of cattle”.
“Mr. H. W. Armstrong thought not, believed that by giving his native
cows the same care and feed . . . they would yield as much milk and butter
and make as fine animals as pure bloods . . . Wm. Sowders thought that
native stock was good enough for anybody; thought if people would stay
at home and take care of their farms and cattle instead of running
around to farmers clubs and fairs they would be better off. Pat. Monahan
believed in introducing blooded stock. E. Nye kept two cows, natives;
thought the blooded stock too tender for common farmers to keep . . .
thought that his wife had as much to do with the quantity and quality of
the butter as the cows did . . . F. P. Wolf wanted to improve his cows . . .
and meant to improve his stock, wanted better cows than he got . . . T. R.
Alvord believed that all this talk was a humbug ... he was too old to be
fooled by such nonsense.
Apparently the remarks of the gentleman who felt farmers’
club meetings to be a waste of time were not heeded, even by him¬
self, for according to the records he was present also at the next
® Chippewa Times, March 22, 1876.
La Crosse Republican and Leader, March 2, 1872.
Appleton Crescent, February 3, 1872,
1962]
Dahle — Freedom of Speech
223
meeting of the club when farm accounts and farm labor were
equally frankly discussed.
Ordinarily topics for discussion at this type of meeting were de¬
cided upon in advance as when the Greenville Farmers’ Club an¬
nounced its question for the forthcoming meeting to be “Will clover
hay give a horse the heaves Another common practice however,
was to put discussion questions in a basket and draw forth a topic
which might be a serious one such as the value of “cooperative
labor” or a topic of a less serious nature such as “how does Miss
Ella White make her plants look so thrifty
As it does today, public opinion changed with almost frightening
rapidity during that period 90 years ago, and what was popular
one day might before long be condemned— sometimes with good
reason as in the case of the railroad expansion and exploitation.
The public road system, being as it was in those days, an alter¬
nate series of quagmires or choking dust clouds, it was not unusual
that the railroads with their promise of rapid, reliable, all weather
communication were eagerly sought. Meetings to discuss railroads
were common and well attended. Upon being organized they were
addressed by prominent local officials and citizens ; resolutions were
then proposed and discussed and committees appointed to mature
the plans.
When finally the petitioning, memorializing, imploring and
pleading were over and the railroad actually arrived, it touched off
elaborate celebrations which were as colorful as they possibly could
be made. In Green Bay, 10,000 people were on hand to greet the
arrival of the first train and hear the speeches upon the occasion.^^
The 3,000 excursionists who arrived in Wausau to inspect the town
upon the completion of its railroad connection, were met by 5,000
Wausau natives, the Mayor and the Common Council, the Fire De¬
partment, a colorbearer, two bands and the salutes of all the bells,
steam whistles and cannon in the city. The procession was then
escorted to the Music Hall and Forest Hall where they heard ad¬
dresses and a banquet was prepared for nearly 4,000 people.^®
However, with the coming of the financial depression of 1873 the
people’s joy with their newly acquired railroads sometimes turned
to deepest gloom. Scarcely a month after their big railroad jubilee,
the Wausau paper noted that the Wisconsin Central Railroad “ex¬
hibits as great capacity for ugliness as it does for bond getting and
land grabbing.”^®
Appleton Crescent, November 30, 1872.
13 Oshkosh Journal, December 3, 1870.
1^ Green Bay Advocate, June 26, 1873.
15 Wisconsin River Pilot (Wausau), November 14, 1873.
1* Wisconsin River Pilot (Wausau), December 19, 1873.
224 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The protest meetings following this experience and similar expe¬
riences, in which citizens expressed their dissatisfaction culminatd
in the passage of the regulatory “Potter Law” which formed the
basis for corporate law in Wisconsin. This law, “the elucidation of
which . . . occupied nearly four hours” on the part of Chief Justice
J. P. Ryan was “pronounced one of the most masterly and scholarly
efforts ever produced in our courts.
Another public meeting which left little doubt as to the effective¬
ness of the free expression of opinion which took place, occurred in
Aztalan where the owner of land which had been used for many
years as a picnic site decided to fence it off from the public. He dug
post holes for this purpose and the citizens filled them up. Then
they tried without apparent success to reason with him. Finally
they sent word through town about the condition of affairs and
requested a meeting that evening. According to succeeding reports :
“About 120 of the citizens assembled full of indignity for their townsman,
and after some not over conciliatory speeches, and an organization . . .
they arranged themselves along the fence and lifted it out. The next day
Mr, A. rebuilt it and the next afternoon the citizens removed it piling it
(very?) carefully on Mr. A’s premises and the third day likewise.’’^®
Freedom of speech in Wisconsin in the 1870’s meant not only
wide latitude in what a person could speak or write ; it also meant
a great amount of speaking and writing on the part of a great num¬
ber of citizens. One facet of life which provided some distinctive
occasions for speaking were the religious meetings.
Camp meetings, revivals, “bush meetings” as well as the regu¬
larly organized religious services were common, and were reported
in great detail.
Probably the most distinctive were the “camp meetings” which
were held out of doors, usually during the summer months and
most often in shady groves where good water was available and
tents could be pitched. From early morning bell to the final bene¬
diction in the evening the campers heard the word of God dis¬
pensed in English, Danish, Norwegian, German and several other
languages. In between sermons they visited or spent their time
strolling through the grove in which the meeting was held.
Revivals were commonly held too throughout the state and had
the same purpose as camp meetings, but generally the approach
was different. In addition to seeking converts of those who attended
the meetings, the revivalists sought also to secure the active par¬
ticipation of the stay-at-homes.
Superior Times, September 18, 1874.
Watertown Republican, May 26, 1875.
1962]
Dahle — Freedom of Speech
225
Religion was attractive to the female speakers of the day. One of
the most successful revivalists in the state was Mrs. Van Cott, a
lady of very large proportions, whose “pleasant, animated features,
sparkling blue eyes and a head that would show well in plaster’’ led
one reporter to proclaim her an even greater speaker than the
famous Senator Matt. Carpenter. Her prowess was so great that as
“she prayed to God to loose the purse strings of the members (of
the congregation) so that the outstanding debt of the church might
be paid”, the debt of $1,500 was twenty per cent oversubscribed.^^
Congregation members as well as their clerical leaders took part
in discussion of social issues as well as religious matters. It may
seem strange to us that topics such as attendance at circuses and
games such as croquet came under close scrutiny as possible as
sources of evil, but discussions of these topics were of serious con¬
cern.-^ Questions of individual conduct were also discussed freely
as for instance when the Mutual Council of Plymouth Church met
to consider the “sufficiency and validity of Mrs. Moulton’s reasons
for abstaining so long from the services and sacraments of the
church.”2i
Of all the causes responsible for discussion perhaps none was as
vehemently supported or on the other hand condemned as vigor¬
ously as temperance. Nearly all citizens had firmly held beliefs
regarding temperance and they were not hesitant to express them.
Temperance meetings were usually sponsored by organizations.
Some were organized along denominational lines ; others according
to nationality groups. Most were general in their membership.
Ladies took an active part in the temperance occasions and it was
at this time that a Wisconsin woman, Frances Willard, began work
in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and became nation¬
ally known from her temperance speaking.
Temperance gatherings called for the same elaborate prepara¬
tions, parades, welcoming processions, and cannon salutes, as did
political and ceremonial occasions.
Not all groups proposed the same solution. The Janesville Ladies
Temperance Union proposed to establish a free library and reading
room to keep young men out of saloons. Hon. S. D. Hastings pro¬
posed a constitutional amendment outlawing liquor,^^ and many
favored going into the saloons to hold prayer meetings and after¬
ward, to take direct action. Apparently few speeches which
espoused the cause of liquor were delivered, or at least found their
way into print.
La Crosse Republican and Leader, April 6, 1872.
^Oshkosh Journal, November 5, 1870.
^Chippewa Times, January 5, 1876.
Janesville Gazette, March 7, 1874,
28 Western Advance (Portage), September 23, 1874.
226 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
These then, are but a few of the many evidences of freedom of
speech in Wisconsin in 1870-1880. There was little mention of free¬
dom of speech as such, but there was indeed much of it.
Perhaps citizens then, as now, had become so used to being
allowed to think and speak as they wished, that they took this free¬
dom as a matter of course. Fortunately for us, they did set a good
precedent, even though at times they seemed to go so far as to abuse
the privilege.
But we should be grateful to them for their interest and for their
willingness to express themselves on matters which have as much
relevance and as much importance in 1962 as they did in 1872.
^^ALL THE RUNNING WE CAN DO !^^-^CONTINUING
EDUCATION FOR ALUMNI*
Roger W. Axford
University Extension Division, University of Wisconsin
“The man who stands still today is actually slipping backward’'
chides the abstract covered booklet offered to more than ten thous¬
and University of Wisconsin alumni in the Milwaukee area. “Learn¬
ing for Living” is the theme of the continuing education program
provided late afternoons and evenings for adults. More than one
hundred courses each semester are listed to entice the adult to con¬
tinue to use his brain power.
Most alumni recognize the validity of the admonition of
the Dean of Extension at the University of California, Dr.
Paul Sheats, who warns, “Learn or Perish” (Time, February
2, 1962), The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the
Extension Division remind the adult, “Every day brings new
advances in scientific and social theories, and each of us to keep
pace must do quite a bit of educational running.” One of our major
objectives in the adult program is to help alumni learn of the new
developments in their respective fields. Slowly there is the recogni¬
tion of the essentiality for educating adults to insure the security,
productivity, and adaptability of the individual to a society continu¬
ally changing. For example, a recent class entitled, “The Utilization
of Radio Isotopes in Medical Radiology,” was taught by a group of
distinguished scientists; and it drew physicians, radiologists, and
medical technicians, all trying to keep up with advances in the field.
Professor Richard John, Coordinator of Commerce Extension pro¬
grams, developed a course, “Accounting for Managers”; of the 21
enrolled, 20 were college graduates, but 17 had never before at¬
tended an evening adult class.
Wisconsinites are fortunate for the vision of President Charles
R. Van Hise, Louis E. Reber, William H. Eighty, and Frederick
Jackson Turner, all of whom had a realization that adult education
is an imperative for modern man. As early as 1904 Van Hise pro¬
claimed, “I shall not rest content until the beneficent influences of
the great University of Wisconsin are made available to the people
of the state.” The University Extension Division was the outgrowth
of his organizational genius, which resulted from the prodding of
* Paper read at the 92nd annual meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters.
227
228 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Dr. Charles McCarthy, that great friend of libraries and adult edu¬
cation. The once “Cow College,'’ as recently described so pictur¬
esquely by President Elvehjem has become one af the world leaders
in continuing education. The University can be justly proud of the
search, and public service — the diffusion of knowledge to the people
third leg of the milking stool of higher education — -teaching, re-
of the state.
Study of Alumni Education
There has been far too little study of alumni education. In a
small volume “New Directions for Alumni: Continuing Education
for the College Graduate” Ernest E. McMahon, Dean of University
College of Rutgers describes the history of alumni education and
many of the programs now being carried on by institutions of higher
learning. His concern is with the extent to which American colleges
and universities provide educational resources to aid the alumnus to
continue his personal, political, philosophical, and social growth.^
As early as 1917 President Alexander Meiklejohn of Amherst
College made a plea for a closer relationship between the college
and its graduates. Meiklejohn stated that the real test of a gradu¬
ate's loyalty is that of membership in a college community. “If the
college has given itself up to the pursuit of knowledge and appre¬
ciation, jhilosophic, literary, scientific, humanistic, no man who has
ceased from that pursuit is in any genuine sense a member of the
college community. I sometimes think that the only real test of our
teaching is that of the extent to which pupils continue to study our
subjects after they leave us ... I am dreaming of the college com¬
munity as a body of thousands of men — teachers, graduates, under¬
graduates — all of whom are engaged in the same intellectual opera¬
tion, in the same great enterprise of the mind.''^
In 1956 a survey was made among seven hundred members of
the American Alumni Council by Robert J. Ahrens, Only 267 insti¬
tutions replied. Seventy-two institutions reported current or past
programs of continuing education among alumni, and 195 replied
that they did not have nor had they ever had such a program. Six¬
teen reported the programs as unsuccessful, while forty-four rated
their efforts as successful. Ahrens found that the highest percentage
of continuing education programs was carried on by private
women's colleges.®
1 Ernest E. McMahon, New Directions for Alumni, Published by the Center for the
Study of Liberal Education for Adults, 1960, 52 pp.
“ Rutgers College, The Celebration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of
Its Founding as Queen’s College (New Brunswick: Rutgers College, 1917) pp. 118-21.
Quoted by McMahon, p. 6.
3 Robert J. Ahrens, ‘Working Papers”, for the Shoreham Conference on Continuing
Alumni Education, (Washington: American Alumni Council).
1962]
Axford — Continuing Education
229
University of Wisconsin Leader in Alumni Education
Alumni education is not new to the University of Wisconsin. Al¬
though President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth is gener¬
ally credited with the first call for alumni education in 1916, the
records of the Wisconsin Alumnus show that William H. Eighty, or¬
ganizer of the Correspondence Study Department of the University
of Wisconsin Extension Division, was urging alumni to continue
their education as far back as December, 1907. Eighty wrote enthu¬
siastically of the ‘^NEW UNIVERSITY EXTENSION” which he
had helped organize with the help of Frank A. Hutchins and Dr.
Charles McCarthy. Eighty reminded alumni that at that time there
had been organized one hundred and seventy-five courses offered by
correspondence instruction, taught by fifty-eight professors of the
University representing twenty-five departments. As early as 1907
non-degree programs were offered alumni. Eighty wrote: “Some
special post-graduate work is also offered not for university credit
purposes, but as a practical means of keeping abreast of the times
in a most effective way through contact with the scholar and spe¬
cialist.” A special course was then being organized for physicians
on “Immunity and Infection” , , , “Thus,” he says, “the practitioner
may be effectively in touch with the newer and established results of
research that apply to medical practice.”^ So far as I can find.
Eighty was the first in the United States to promote alumni educa¬
tion, and his urging of continuing education was perpetual; his
motto until his dying day at 93 was, “Keep abreast of the times.”
Today, however, at the University of Wisconsin new programs
are being developed especially for alumni. A program organized re¬
cently is the Summer Alumni Seminar now to be offered both on the
Madison and Milwaukee campuses. Under the able leadership of
Dr. Robert Schacht, a specialist on residential adult education, a
program of liberal adult education has gained national recognition
for the University of Wisconsin. This summer the themes for the
six one-week seminars in Madison are “Scientists at Work at Wis¬
consin,” “The Future of Cities and Metropolitan Areas,” “The Na¬
ture of Marxism,” “The Exploration of the Universe,” “Africa: A
Continent in Transition” and “Political Power in America”.
In Milwaukee, a new residential seminar will be held at spacious
Marietta House on the Kenwood Campus near Lake Michigan. Lead¬
ing scholars will discuss their concern over the immersion of the
individual in a stream of conformity under the title, “The Role of
the Individual in Today's Mass Society.” A week will be spent in the
residential seminar, not too different from the format of the Danish
Folk School, where persons gather for consideration of problems
^ Wisconsin Alumnus, December, 1907, p. 101.
230 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
confronting their contemporary society. Living in, there will be
lectures and discussion in history, economics, and sociology, dealing
with the conditions which produced the kind of society with which
alumni come face to face today. Through selected readings and
group participation, alumni will examine certain basic concepts of
individualism, such as self-reliance and self-assertion, and try to
determine whether the loss of these values is an inevitable conse¬
quence of our societal and economic systems. Guest lecturers include
Dr. Earl S. Johnson, Visiting Professor of Secondary Education,
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ; Dr. Warren L. Susman,
Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University and Dr. Herbert
F. Klingman, Director of the Division of Commerce and Professor
of Commerce UW-M. Visitations will be made to interesting places
in Milwaukee during the evening hours.
Opportunities Unlimited for Continuing Education
Unlike yesteryears, alumni today have numerous rich programs
from which to choose. Study-travel, institutes, conferences, eve¬
ning classes and correspondence study, all are available through Ex¬
tension Centers and a statewide service of University Extension.
Radio and television add numerous opportunities for continuous
learning. The Milwaukee program, like the other adult programs
throughout the state, is designed to aid citizens in their pursuit of
intellectual interests and in the acquiring of skills necessary for per¬
sonal achievement and progress. Through the ‘'Learning for Liv¬
ing” program, new theories in the physical sciences, new methods
in the arts, and new thought in the social sciences are brought to
the greater Metropolitan Milwaukee community. Through Univer¬
sity Extension the total resources of the University are made avail¬
able to the citizens of the state.
It is never too late to learn ! Longfellow reminds us :
“Ah! Nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years.”
And today, fellow holders of sheepskins, we must admit, it takes
all the running we can do to stay in the same place !
THE CROSS-MEDIA APPROACH TO TEACHING AND ITS
EFFECT ON THE ACQUISITION AND RETENTION OF
SCIENCE AND SOCIAL STUDIES VOCABULARY
LEARNINGS AT SELECTED GRADE LEVELS^
Louis G. Romano
Shoretvood Public Schools, Shorewood
and
Nicholas P. Georgiady
Department of Public Instruction, State of Michigan
Previous investigations in the field of audio-visual education have
been largely concerned with the gaining and retention of factual
information and of gains in vocabulary directly employed by the
media used. The studies described in this paper constitute an at¬
tempt to investigate the interactions which appear when, not one
but many, carefully chosen, wisely used audio-visual materials are
selected and used in combination. This interrelated use of audio¬
visual materials is known as the cross-media approach.
Definition of the Problem
The two studies described in this paper were designed to identify
the effects of the use of several selected audio-visual materials in
a cross-media approach on vocabulary learnings in science and so¬
cial studies. The classes used in the science vocabulary experiment
were selected from grades 5, 6, and 7 while the classes used in the
social studies vocabulary experiment were selected from grades
6, 7, and 8. All of the students were from the Shorewood Public
Schools and the Whitefish Bay Public Schools.
These studies specifically attempt to find possible answers to the
questions: (1) Do children learn more of the vocabulary of science
and social studies units when motion picture films and projected
still pictures are added to the use of other audio-visual materials?
And (2) Do children retain more of the vocabulary of science and
social studies units when motion picture films and projected still
pictures are added to the use of other audio-visual materials?
The participating classes were rotated so that each served in
turn as an experimental and a control group. Blackboards, bulletin
1 This paper presents the findings of two separate, but closely related studies in the
cross-media approach to the teaching-learning situation. The reader will note the
similarity of conclusions for both studies.
231
232 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
boards, charts, models, flat pictures, and field trips were used both
in the control and experimental situations, but motion pictures and
projected still pictures (filmstrips, 2x2 and x 4 slides, and
pictures used with the opaque projector) were used only in the
experimental situations and served as the experimental factors.
Vocabulary test results, supplemented by the reactions of teachers,
and students, provided the means of judging the contributions of
the experimental factors.
Significance of the Problem
Vocabulary development has been a source of greatly increased
concern recently and much attention has been centered upon the im¬
portance of vocabulary usage as a basic skill or learning tool. A high
value has been set upon a student’s vocabulary as a means of im¬
proving his effectiveness in speech and writing as well as in read¬
ing. This emphasis on a larger and more useful vocabulary for the
student has been in marked contrast to previous practice of severly
curtailing the size of the vocabulary to be acquired at each grade
level in the theory that such severe restriction would facilitate more
effective learning. Witty- points out the following:
As a result of word counts and recommendations by educators, some pub¬
lishers assumed that vocabularies in reading textbooks should be rigidly
controlled and limited. During this period 1925 to 1940, the makers of these
textbooks not only tended to restrict vocabulary narrowly, but also to re¬
peat words again and again in order that “basic” vocabularies might be
thoroughly mastered . . . Moreover, the repetition of words was so great
that monotony resulted and children lost interest in the stories.
Recent investigations have discredited the extreme practice of
severe limitations of vocabulary estimates for each grade level.
Seashore^ and others have presented studies which lead one to con¬
clude that most vocabulary estimates have been too low. Stone" also
voiced his concern as follows :
In methods and materials in reading, we have tried to go to extremes, of
which the presently unjustifiable restriction of vocabulary is an example.
We have the problem of providing for adequate vocabulary expansion
along with the problem of providing sufficiently easy material at each level.
The provision for maximum pupil growth calls for the use of all
effective means for its accomplishment. It is an objective of these
studies to determine the effectiveness of selected audio-visual aids
in the facilitation of the accomplishment of this task.
3 Paul Witty, Reading in Modern Education (Boston; D, C. Heath Co., J949).
3 Robert H. Seashore, “How Many Words Do Children Know?’’ The Packet, Vol. II,
No. 2 (Boston: D. C. Heath Co., November, 1947).
^Clarence R. Stone, “A Vocabulary Based on 107 Primary-Grade Books,’’ The Ele¬
mentary School Journal, XLII, 1942.
1962] Romano & Georgiady — Cross Media Teaching
233
It is felt that an increase in as basic a skill as vocabulary com¬
prehension is worthy of every consideration for the beneficial effect
this increase may have in generally improving learning. A purpose
of these studies is to provide information which may be of value in
helping to satisfy the need for the improvement of this skill.
It is also hoped that these studies will stimulate thinking in terms
of the effectiveness of teaching and will increase an awareness on
the part of the teacher of the value of the growing numbers of
mechanical aids available for use in improving the effectiveness of
teaching-learning situations.
Another important point is that these studies do not attempt to
determine the effectiveness of a single audio-visual material over
other visual materials such as slides, demonstrations, maps, and
the like, or the more traditional classroom procedures using verbal
instruction by means of textbooks or supplementary reading. In¬
stead, these studies attempt to determine the effectiveness of an
audio-visual utilization in which several audio-visual materials are
employed over an audio-visual utilization in which a limited num¬
ber of audo-visual material are used. Dale^ states that experimen-
tors often neglect to establish normal schoolroom procedures in
their investigation which may result in lessening the value of their
data. The procedures in these studies seem to follow a realistic
classroom situation. Many schools use some audio-visual materials,
but according to various surveys many schools do not have an audio¬
visual program which includes the use of several audio-visual mate¬
rials in the cross-media approach. If the findings of these studies
should point out that better learning is achieved when certain audio¬
visual materials are employed throughout a unit of study, it might
suggest that these materials be included as an integral part of the
instructional program.
Limitations of the Studies
These studies attempt to determine the effects of the use of
selected audio-visual materials including carefully selected and ap¬
propriately used 16 mm. motion picture films, 35 mm. filmstrips,
and other projected pictures on vocabulary growth in the science
and social studies in specific situations. There were certain inherent
limitations in the studies as they were planned. The first limitation
concerns the size of the population. The studies were carried on in
two villages having a total population of thirty-eight thousand. The
total elementary school population in the public schools of these
communities is approximately four thousand six hundred students,
of whom two thousand four hundred were enrolled in grades five,
5 Edgar Dale, Fannie W, Dunn, Charles F. Hoban Jr., and Etta Schneider, Motion
Pictures in Education, The H. W. Wilson Company, New York, New York. 1938.
234 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
six, seven, and eight. Of these students fewer than three hundred
eighty have participated in the studies. The size of the number of
subjects was limited,
A second limitation concerns the nature of the communities in¬
volved in the studies. Both Whitehsh Bay and Shorewood are resi¬
dential suburbs of the City of Milwaukee, Both communities are
desirable places in which to live with the socio-economic status of
the residents a high one. These communities are composed of a large
percentage of professional and business people possessing homes
with many advantages for their children, often including a wealth
of books, magazines, newspapers, and other reading materials. In
addition, many of the parents of the children in the communities
have backgrounds of college training. All of these are important
environmental factors which would tend to affect the achievement
of the children in school and their performance in these studies. In
short, the population tested was not a cross section of over-all
population but rather a limited segment of it.
Another limiting factor was the availability of suitable materials
used in the experimental situation, namely 16 mm motion picture
films and 35 mm filmstrips. For the purposes of these studies, a
careful survey was made of all these materials which were avail¬
able and which were pertinent to the studies and selection was made
of those which were most suitable for the units involved and ap¬
propriate to the grade levels being tested. This survey pointed out
the need for more materials of this type for use in our schools today.
An additional limiting factor was the nature of the instruments
used to evaluate pupil growth in terms of vocabulary. A multiple
choice objective test was carefully constructed for use with each
unit of study, but the very nature of the instrument made inevitable
inherent limitations. The judgements of the teachers in subjectively
gauging progress in vocabulary growth were of value in supple¬
menting the information gained from use of the objective tests.
These points are brought out to emphasize that the results of
these studies need to be interpreted in the light of the nature of
the studies and that the results of the studies are applicable to this
situation.
Design of the Studies®
Rotation Technique. The rotation-group technique of experimen¬
tation was used in order to minimize the effect of several uncon¬
trollable factors such as initiative, industry, or study habits. The ro¬
tation method ‘b , . involves an exchange for the groups at intervals,
in terms of the procedures followed,''^ This technique was used
8 A description of the Science Vocabulary Experiment procedures is included in this
paper. The procedures used in the Social Studies Vocabulary Experiment were similar.
Carter V. Good and Douglas E. Scates, Methods of Research, Appleton-Centruy-
Crofts, Inc., New York, New York, 1954.
1962] Romano & Georgiady— Cross Media Teaching
235
with both the classes and the teachers. During each unit of study for
each grade level, one class was designated as the “controF’ group
while the other class was designated as the ‘‘experimental” group.
The “control” group was the group which used only the following
audio-visual materials : bulletin boards, blackboards, charts, models,
flat pictures, and field trips. The “experimental” group not only
used the materials listed for the control group, but also used sixteen
millimeter motion picture films and projected still pictures.
Selection of Groups Participating. Equal numbers of children in
the fifth and sixth grades from the Lake Bluff School of Shorewood,
Wisconsin, and from the seventh grade from Cumberland School of
Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin were included. These groups were equated
within feasible limits on the basis of I.Q. scores and standardized
reading vocabulary test scores.
The Selection of the Vocabulary Words and the Construction of
Tests. Prior to the experiment, the investigator reviewed all of the
science textbooks from the third grade level through the ninth
grade level to assemble the vocabulary essential to the understand¬
ing of the core ideas to be developed within a unit of study. In addi¬
tion to looking through the available textbooks, the investigator
reviewed each article in the World Book Encyclopedia^ that per¬
tained to a particular unit of study, A review by the investigator of
all the available textbooks in each of the participating schools from
the third grade level through the ninth grade level, was designed
to provide a range of science words from the third through the
ninth grade level.
These lists of words were then carefully reviewed by a committee
made up of teachers participating in this study. Also, teachers who
were especially interested in the teaching of science and had had
several years of experience in this field, were asked to check this
list of words carefully. After the vocabulary lists were approved by
this committee, test items were developed which included all of the
words in the list. In each unit approximately 250 words were re¬
corded. This made possible the construction of a 50-item vocabulary
test. Wherever possible a word meaning nearly the same as the key
word was obtained from the list of 250 words. For example, part of
the vocabulary from the sixth grade unit of study, Sound, includes
the following:
reception
range
transmit
amplitude
supersonic
loudness
spread
mute
intensity
audio
decrease
velocity
speed
amplify
^ The World Booh Encyclopedia, Field Enterprises, Inc., 1952.
236 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
From the above list, the committee of teachers selected and desig¬
nated the word “velocity’’ as a key word. The test item then in¬
cluded five different words, one being the correct answer. When¬
ever possible a word which had the same, or nearly the same mean¬
ing was obtained from the list of 250 words. This word was con¬
sidered the correct response.
The tests used as instruments of measure in this study were of
the multiple-choice objective type.
Validity and Reliability of the Test Items, A high degree of cur¬
ricular validity could be assumed since the vocabulary was closely
correlated with the curricular content of each unit of study.
Reliability was estimated by administering the vocabulary tests
to groups not participating in this study. The split-half method was
used. This necessitated obtaining separate scores on odd and even-
numbered items, A coefficient of correlation was obtained between
these two scores by the product-moment method. By means of the
Spearman-Brown formula, an estimate of the reliability of a test as
long as the two halves combined was obtained.
Administration of the Vocabulary Tests. Prior to teaching the
units of study, tests for each grade level were given to the control
and experimental groups. These tests were administered two hours
apart so as to reduce practice effect. The scores are designated as
the “pre-test scores”. At the termination of each unit of study which
took five weeks, “final tests” were given. Six months after the “final
tests”, the participants were given the same test. These scores are
designated as “retention test scores”.
The Selection of the Units of Study. A committee of teachers se¬
lected two units of study for each grade level based on the follow¬
ing criteria: (1) availability of audio-visual materials related to
the various units of study, and (2) extent of previous experiences
in the particular unit of study. Specific problems to be covered in
each unit of study were defined by the teachers so as to insure some
degree of uniformity in both experimental and control groups.
The Selection of Audio-Visual Materials for the Experimental
Group. The criteria determined by the participating teachers in¬
cluded: (1) Does the audio-visual material contribute to the objec¬
tives of the unit of study? (2) Does the audio-visual material suit
the experiences, intellectual maturity, and grade level of the stu¬
dents? (3) Is the audio-visual material accurate and authentic?
(4) Is the audio-visual material significant? Any audio-visual mate¬
rials previewed that did not meet the above criteria were not used
in this study.
The procedure for showing audio-visual materials was carefully
planned by the group. Such procedures were demonstrated in an
in-service meeting.
1962] Romano & Georgiady — Cross Media Teaching 237
Procedure in the Selection of Pupil and Teacher Responses, Sub¬
jective evidence was gathered on the reactions of pupils and teach¬
ers to the utilization of audio-visual materials in the classroom. Spe¬
cifically, teachers were asked to respond in writing to the following
question ; “What reactions do you have concerning teaching a unit
of study in which a limited number of audio-visual materials are
used as contrasted with a situation in which several audio-visual
materials are used/' The reports were then submitted at the term¬
ination of a ten-week experimental period.
The boys and girls were asked to react to the following question :
“What reactions do you have concerning the first unit of study in
science and the second unit of study?" Responses to this question
were recorded immediately by the participating teachers, or, when
possible, a stenographer was employed.
Presentation of Findings and Interpretation
Science Vocabulary Test Results, The findings for the fifth, sixth,
and seventh grade groups using the rotation-group technique are
summarized in Table 1.
Table 1 points out that the fifth grade classes in the unit on Elec¬
tricity had a mean score of 7.24 words on the pre-test for the experi-
piental group, and a mean score of 11.45 for the control group. In
the final test scores given five weeks after the pre-test, the experi¬
mental group scored a mean of 23.62 words while the control group
scored a mean of 21.93 words. In this particular unit the experi¬
mental group had a mean gain of 16.38 while the control group had
a mean gain of 10.48. The experimental group in the unit on Elec¬
tricity had a mean gain of 5.90 words over the control group.
Table 1. Summary of Mean Scores Achieved in Pre-Tests, Final Tests and
Gains for Both Experimental and Control Groups in All Units of Study
*Final Test Score Minus Pre-Test^§Qore.
238 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
In the remaining units of study the experimental groups had
the following mean gains over the control group :
Astronomy: Mean gain of 11.44 words
Sound: Mean gain of 10.39 words
Air: Mean gain of 8.64 words
Soil: Mean gain of 7.72 words
Rocks: Mean gain of 10.55 words
Table 2 summarizes the percentage of gain achieved by the ex¬
perimental group over the control group in the amount of vocabu¬
lary acquired by the boys and girls in these groups.
All experimental groups using the motion picture films and pro¬
jected still pictures had a range of mean scores from 6.90 to 11.44
words gained over the control groups. This indicated a large in¬
crease in words gained over the control groups. Thus it may be
concluded that the children of this particular population acquired
to a greater extent the vocabulary in a unit of study when motion
picture films and projected still pictures were introduced.
Six months following the completion of the unit of study the
boys and girls were given vocabulary tests on the particular unit so
as to determine the amount of vocabulary retained over this period
of time. Table 3 summarizes the results achieved in the re-test vo¬
cabulary tests.
A close examination of the retention test and final test scores
shows that retention test scores of the experimental group were
lower in the Rock and Astronomy units of study. Retention test
scores were higher in the control groups for all units of study.
Table 2. Percentage of Gain Achieved By Control Group Compared to the
Experimental Group in All Units of Study in Grades
Five, Six, and Seven
1962] Romano & Georgiady — Cross Media Teaching 239
Table 3, Summary of Mean Retention Scores and Mean Gains for Both
Experimental and Control Groups in All Units of Study
The following may indicate reasons for this increase in scores: (1)
the science program did not terminate following the experimental
period. All classes continued with the science instructional program,
and throughout the instructional program classes utilized many
audio-visual materials including films and projected still pictures.
An examination of the units of study and the audio-visual materials
used following the experimental period show that some of the vo¬
cabulary words included in the vocabulary tests were used. This
may account for the gains in the retention test vocabulary scores
for both the control and the experimental groups. (2) During the
period between the pre-test and the final test both science and social
studies were taught as part of the daily instructional program. An
attempt was made not to include social studies units which were
closely allied or related to the science units of study. This procedure
eliminated to a certain extent the duplication of terms or vocabulary
which might have been included in the vocabulary tests. Following
the final tests the social studies and science programs might have
been correlated, but in any case both classes received the same or
similar activities.
An analysis was done so as to check on the possibilities that the
experimental group gains could be accounted for by the presence of
key words in the media to which the control group may not have
had access. Table 4 summarizes the vocabulary included in the
audio-visual materials used in the experimental group for the unit
on Astronomy. Many duplications of words were found, but only
138 different words were included in the audio-visual materials as
compared to 250 words in the vocabulary tests. This is 55 percent of
the total number of words included in the Astronomy vocabulary
tests. Of the 138 words only 14 were key words or only 28 percent
of the 50 key words included in the test.
240 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
Table 4. Tabulation of Vocabulary Included in The Audio-Visual
Materials Used in The Experimental Group for The Sixth
Grade Unit on Astronomy
Is There a Relationship Betioeen the LQ. and the Child’s Gains in
the Vocabulary Tests in the Experimental Group?
The Pearson-Product-Moment Test for correlation was found be¬
tween the child’s LQ. score and the gains he achieved in the vocabu¬
lary tests. The vocabulary test gains were derived by subtracting
the pre-test score from the final test score. In each of the units of
study, the correlations obtained are shown in Table 5.
In the units of study on Astronomy, Rocks, and Air, there is no
relationship while in the remaining units of study, Electricity,
Sound, and Soil, there is a slight relationship between LQ. scores
and gains achieved in the vocabulary tests. In conclusion, no definite
relationship exists as to LQ. scores and gains achieved in the vocab¬
ulary tests in any of the units of study. The foregoing conclusion
also means that the bright, average and slow child profited some¬
what the same in this study, or stated another way, the gains
achieved in the vocabulary tests do not necessarily depend upon the
intellectual level of the individual.
Is There a Relationship Between the Standardized Reading Vo¬
cabulary Scores and the Gains Achieved in the Vocabulary Tests by
the Experimental Groups ?
1962] Romano & Georgiady — Cross Media Teaching
241
Table 6 shows that in only two units of study, Rocks and Air,
there is a definite correlation which exists between standardized
reading vocabulary scores and the vocabulary test scores in this
study. In the remaining four units of study there is only a slight
relationship.
Table 5. Correlations Between I.Q. Scores and Gains Achieved in The
Vocabulary Tests By The Experimental Groups in The Science
Units, Grades 5, 6, and 7
Table 6. Pearson Product-Moment Test for Correlation Between Reading
Vocabulary Scores on Standardized Tests, and Gains Achieved
IN The Vocabulary Tests for all Units of Study
Pupil and Teacher Reactions to Audio-Visual Materials. The re¬
actions of pupils and teachers represent the subjective evaluation
of the use of various audio-visual materials in the classroom. All
of the teachers in the study point out the intrinsic value of the use
of audio-visual materials in making for a more effective teaching¬
learning situation. The reports from both teachers and pupils in a
situation in which a limited number of audio-visual materials were
employed is a negative one. A more enthusiastic learning situation
seemed to develop in the classroom situation in which several audio¬
visual materials were used in a cross-media approach.
242 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Summary of the Findings for Science Vocabulary Experiment
1. In each unit of study, the experimental classes using the ex¬
perimental factors showed larger unit learning gains than the con¬
trol groups in the vocabulary acquired. The unit learning gains by
experimental groups were doubled as compared to those achieved
by the control groups, in all units of study except the fifth grade
Electricity unit.
2. Retention test scores of the experimental group in the Rock
and Astronomy units were lower than the final test scores while in
all the other units of study for the experimental group and for all
the units of the control groups, the retention test scores were higher
than the final test scores. There was a slight loss in retention for
the experimental group in only two of the units of study.
3. No definite relationship exists between I.Q. scores and unit
learning gains achieved in the science vocabulary tests in any of the
units of study in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades.
4. There was a definite relationship between standardized read¬
ing vocabulary scores and unit learning gains achieved in the sci¬
ence vocabulary tests in one-third of the units. A slight relationship
exists in the remaining units of study.
5. Vocabulary unit learning gains achieved by the experimental
group were acquired from the vocabulary of the total instructional
program rather than solely from the vocabulary of the 16 mm mo¬
tion picture films and projected still pictures used in this study.
Summary of Findings in the Social Studies Vocabulary
Experiment
1. Unit learning gains in the experimental groups using the ex¬
perimental audio-visual materials were greater than the unit learn¬
ing gains made by control groups which did not use these materials.
2. Residual learning gains [retention scores over pre-test scores],
made by the experimental groups were greater than the residual
learning gains made by the control groups.
3. Gains made by the experimental group were not made because
of the test vocabulary contained in the films and filmstrips. Gains
made by the experimental group were acquired from the total in¬
structional program including the use of films and filmstrips.
4. A definite relationship between standardized reading vocabu¬
lary test scores and vocabulary unit learning gains made in this
study was found to exist in two units. In the remaining four units
there was a slight relationship or none between these factors.
1962] Romano & Georgiady— Cross Media Teaching 243
5. As determined by instruments used in this study, there is no
relationship between I.Q. scores and vocabulary unit learning gains
made by students in five of the six units. In one unit, there was a
definite relationship between these factors.
Implications
The implications of the findings of these studies are presented in
relation to the role of projected audio-visual materials used in the
cross-media approach in science and social studies learnings.
Vocabulary gains achieved by experimental groups which used
motion pictures, filmstrips, and other projected pictures in combina¬
tion with other audio-visual materials in a cross-media approach ex¬
ceeded those of groups which limited themselves to audio* visual
media other than the above named items. An increase in as basic
a skill as vocabulary comprehension is worthy of every considera¬
tion for the beneficial effect this may have in generally improving
learning. This is further emphasized by the fact that the control
groups in these studies were not in situations which were barren of
of audio-visual materials but were free to make use of any of these
except the experimental items. In view of the marked superiority
of the gains in vocabulary growth achieved by the experimental
groups over those of the control groups, it appears that serious con¬
sideration needs to be given by teachers to the carefully planned
effective use of films, filmstrips, and other projected pictures in
combination with other audio-visual materials for the benefits
that may result in vocabulary growth and subsequently in general
learning.
One of the major objectives in science and social studies is the
development of important understandings or concepts. These con¬
cepts are expressed through word symbols, that is, vocabulary. The
ability to interpret word symbols may play an essential part in aid¬
ing comprehension and understanding of these concepts. These
studies may have important implications for the enrichment of the
child’s basic science and social studies concepts.
There is a need for closer cooperation between the producers of
audio-visual materials and the educator so that the needs of our
instructional programs are better met in terms of films and film¬
strips.
The acquisition of vocabulary, one of the important skills in read¬
ing, is a prerequisite to adequate comprehension and interpretation
in reading. The utilization of audio-visual materials enhances the
acquisition and tention of vocabulary, and these should therefore
be included in the instructional program.
244 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
A further implication has to do with the training of prospective
teachers. Every effort should be made to have these students enroll
in audio-visual courses. Too often, beginning teachers limit their
instructional program to the use of one or two audio-visual mate¬
rials rather than a combination of these materials. Learning the
simple operation of these tools of instruction is important, but of
greater consequence is the knowledge of how to use these materials
fully and effectively in the teaching-learning situation.
ALLIS-CHALMERS : TECHNOLOGY AND THE FARM
1925-1940
Walter F. Peterson
Milwaukee~D owner College, Milwaukee
Under the direction of General Otto H. Falk, Allis-Chalmers
entered the farm equipment field to further diversify the company’s
products and to make the company name known beyond the area
of heavy machinery. This venture was to change the technology of
the American farm, particularly during the decade of the 1930’s.
Broadly speaking, technology is the way people do things. This
being the case, patterns of agricultural life and production had
changed but little over the centuries until very recent times. It is
true that steam power had come to many farms in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, but steam merely supplemented the tradi¬
tional horsepower — it did not replace it. From 1914 to 1920 about
20,000,000 horses and 5,000,000 mules were used on American
farms. ^ However, the horse had been brought to its highest effi¬
ciency while the tractor was being markedly improved with each
passing year.
The first Allis-Chalmers tractor went into production late in
1914. By modern standards it was a most cumbersome piece of
equipment. An unwieldy tricycle type with one speed forward and
one reverse, it weighed 4,000 pounds and sold for $1,950. Largely
an experimental tractor, it never achieved a wide sale to the Ameri¬
can farmer.2 During World War I and the early 1920’s, tractor
manufacturers constantly improved their products as engineers
simplified design, reduced the weight, and provided greater ease in
operation. As farmers became increasingly aware of the advantages
of the tractor, the number of horses began to decrease. By 1928 the
number of horses had fallen to 15,000,000; one quarter less than
eight years before.^
One of the most important events in the history of the Tractor
Division of the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company was the
appointment of Harry G. Merritt as manager on January 1, 1926.^
His job, as he saw it, was to produce a quality tractor at a price
1 Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After, 191-^-1928, (New York, 1931),
p. 194.
^ A-C Views, July 24, 1952, p. 5; Pioneer Power, (Milwaukee, 1942), p. 81,
® Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After, p. 194.
* President’s Circular Letter, No. 173, December 29, 1925; W. F. Strehlow to author,
June 13, 1961 ; Malcolm C. Maloney to author, June 19, 1961.
245
246 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
that the depression=ridden farmers of the 20's were willing to pay.
As he and Allis-Chalmers engineers set about redesigning the stand¬
ard 20-35 tractor, non-essential apparatus was stripped from the
old model and essential parts were replaced by lighter ones. Con¬
centrating on the tractor's general appearance, they gave it what
Merritt called tractor “sex appeal,” The finished product was a
trim, snappy looking tractor that was more efficient, half a ton
lighter, and priced at $700 less than its predecessors.®
Under Merritt's direction, change and improvement were con¬
stant in the Tractor Division. Engineers were sometimes reluctant
to suggest ideas for improvement as Merritt would invariably ask
them to proceed immediately. This policy produced greater sales
and, consequently, more money for research and development.® The
willingness of Allis-Chalmers to take a smaller profit had a good
deal to do with its success in producing a cheaper tractor and its
rapid emergence as the third largest manufacturer of farm equip¬
ment.'^
Administrative change was equally rapid. The appointment of
W. A. Roberts as General Sales Manager made it possible for Mer¬
ritt to concentrate on his primary interest, that of tractor engineer¬
ing.® Allis-Chalmers purchased the well-known La Crosse Plow
Company so that it could join the ranks of the “full line” companies
and compete on more even terms with other major producers.^
When it was found that its distribution system was inadequate,
Allis-Chalmers purchased the Advance-Rumley Corporation of La
Porte, Indiana, which had 24 branch houses and about 2,500 deal¬
ers, along with Advance-Rumley's well-known harvesters and
threshing equipment.^® Through expansion Allis-Chalmers put itself
in a position to engage in imaginative engineering which would
revolutionize American agriculture.
Allis-Chalmers^ in common with all other tractor producers, faced
the cold fact that the tractor had not been universally adopted for
farm use and was not in a position to really replace the horse on
® “Allis-Chalmers : ‘America’s Krupp’ Fortune, May, 1939, p. 150; W. J. Klein to
author, April 10, 1962.
® A. W. Van Hercke, W. F, Strehlow, and John Ernst to author, June 13, 1961,
'^Fortune, May 1939, p. 150. Accordingto this article, a report of the Federal Trade
Commission indicated that in the period of the 1930’s, the average Allis-Chalmers
profit on new farm machines and implements in some years was less than 4 per cent,
compared to an average of 6.7 per cent for International Harvester, and a whopping
18.1 per cent for Deere and Company.
^ Power Review, September, 1941, pp, 27 f. W. A. Roberts succeeded Harry Merritt
as Manager of the Tractor Division in 1941, and in 1951 became president of the
company.
^ Sales Bulletin, September, 1929, p. 815; The La Crosse Tribune, October 7, 1929;
A, W. Van Hercke and W, F. Strehlow to author, June 13, 1961 ; The Ace Reporter,
“Silver Anniversary, Allis-Chalmers La Crosse Works, 1929-1954,” passim.
Sales Bulletin, April to July, 1931, p ,1049 ; Chicago Journal of Commerce, May 13,
1931 ; A-^G Line, “Allis-Chalmers La Porte Works, Silver Anniversary,” December,
1956, passim.
1962]
Peterson— -Technology and Farm
247
the farm as the automobile and the truck had replaced him on the
highway. This was due to the limitations and inefficiency of the
type of wheel equipment used. The lugs on the steel wheels damaged
meadows, orchards, and barnyards; and signs stating “Tractors
with Lugs Prohibited” were appearing on most welLsurfaced
roadsd^
The sheer inefficiency of the lug-type wheel is indicated in the
old tractor ratings of 10™18 and 20-35, The first figure represented
the useful power delivered at the drawbar and the latter the rated
power of the motor. Tests proved that the tractive efficiency, the
ratio between the power delivered at the drawbar and the power
produced by the motor under field conditions, varied from a low
of 40 per cent to a high of about 65 per cent. Very simply, it took
power to push the lugs in and power to pull them out. The end re¬
sult was that even on level ground the tractor was compelled to
constantly climb a rather steep grade. As the speed of the tractor
was increased, more of the total horsepower was required merely
to move the tractor. At higher speeds it tended to approach the total
output of the engine, leaving little power for useful work. The con¬
sequence of this was that conventional tractor work had to be done
slowly, inefficiently and with a high rate of fuel consumption/^
Engineers had flirted with the idea of putting rubber tires on
tractors. Experiments were conducted with both hard rubber tires
and high pressure pneumatic tires, similar to those used on trucks.
But when attempts were made to plow with this equipment it was
found that the tractor could perform only under the most favorable
ground conditions, and it was absolutely useless on wet ground.
However, the tractor engineering staff finally arrived at the solution
to the problem. They conceived of the idea of a low pressure tire
with a flexible casing that would allow the tread to spread out and
distribute the load, thus giving the needed traction,^^ The develop¬
ment of the “air-tire” was a significant break-through for the entire
industry. As the Farm Implement News put it on October 13, 1932,
“Just about the time this industry seems to have dropped into a
rut and reached a static point with no outstanding developments in
sight, something arises to change its course. Rubber may be the
pivot of the next turn,”^^
Sales Bulletin, October-November-December, 1931, p. 67; J. W. Shields, Pneu-
niatie Tires for Agricultural Tractors, undated mss. Shields was a field eng-ineer for
the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.
J. Brownlee Davidson, “Riding- on Rubber,” Successful Farming, January, 1935,
pp. 8, 34 ; J, W. Shields, Pneumatic Tires for Agricultural Tractors ; R. A. Crosby to
author, June 15, 1961.
^^WE, July, 1947, p. 4 ; R. A. Crosby to author, June 15, 1961; According to For¬
tune, May, 1939, p .150, Deere and Company offered solid rubber tires for tractors in
1926 and high pressure pneumatic tires beginning in 1928. However, it is generally
accepted that Allis-Chalmers introduced the first lov/ pressure, or air-tire.
i^Farm Implement News, October 13, 1932, p. 24.
248 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
A program of testing was set up ; Allis-Chalmers tractors
equipped with air-tires were put on selected farms so that the tests
could be conducted under a wide variety of work and conditions.
The reports were uniformly enthusiastic. Rubber actually seemed
tougher than steel ; the tractors rode more comfortably and the air-
tires were easier on the tools used. They provided greater fuel econ¬
omy, presented greater tractive surface, and most important, per¬
mitted greater speed of travel in the fields. The farm tractor
equipped with air-tires was no longer limited to a narrow field of
operation but had become a general utility machine to be used
wherever power was required. Harry G. Merritt in 1933 sum¬
marized the agricultural advance made possible by the air-tire in
these words:
We regard this new development as marking the dawn of a new era in
American agriculture and the most important advancement in Tractor
engineering in years. It eases a bit more of the farmer’s yoke, making
his work easier, shortening his hours and reducing his costs of production.^®
While one group of Allis-Chalmers engineers was developing the
air-tire and thus solving one problem — how to make the tractor an
all-purpose machine, another group of engineers was tackling an¬
other knotty problem — how to design and produce a practical com¬
bine of small size for use particularly on the small Mid-Western
farm. A combine is basically a threshing machine with a harvesting
attachment which heads, threshes, and cleans the grain as it moves
over the field. Crude combines had been devised as early as the mid-
ninteenth century and with later refinements they came to be used
effectively on the great wheat farms of the Far West and North¬
west. These huge machines were drawn by 40 to 50 horses and cut a
swath 30 to 40 feet wide. As the conventional combine crept east¬
ward to the Kansas wheat fields its size was reduced to 20 to 30
feet. But it was successful primarily with wheat which could simply
be headed and the heads rammed through a small throat into the
threshing cylinder. It proved totally unable to harvest such crops
as sweet clover, alfalfa and bush beans which inevitably clogged
the small threshing cylinder. Eventually, the size was cut to 10 to
12 feet for the Mississippi Valley. Although these 10 and 12 foot
combines were a vast improvement over the binder-thresher method
of putting up grain, they still cost $1,250 to $1,500 and required a
three-plow tractor and the services of two or three men to operate
them.
Farm Implement News, June 23, 1932, quoted in A Decade of Allis-Chalmers Pio¬
neering, undated mss., pp. 22 f: Also see William A. McGarry, “The Farm Tractor
Takes Wings,” The Magazine of Wall Street, December 7, 1935, p. 198. The original
Model “U” tractor equipped with the original Firestone airplane tires used in the
first experiments is now on permanent exhibit at the Museum of the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin.
13 Unmarked tractor mss., p. 2.
1962]
Peterson- — Technology and Farm
249
AlliS“Chalmers set out to develop a totally new harvester that
could, as one man put it, harvest everything from bird seed to
beans. Other specifications were that it had to be light enough to be
pulled by a two^plow tractor and operate from its power take-off,
and it must sell at a price low enough that a farmer could afford
to buy it. To provide a basis for development of such a machine the
company in 1930 purchased the rights to a small five-foot combine
manufactured in California. While they found it cumbersome and
inefficient, it was a basis for experimentation and development.
When Advance-Rumley was purchased in 1930, their long experi¬
ence in threshers was utilized in the continued designing and test¬
ing of the proposed combine.^^
The basic idea that was to make this machine different from and
better than its predecessors was having a threshing cylinder the
same width as the cutter bar. This permitted the grain to be fed
into the cylinder in a thin stream rather than trying to ram a large
quantity of grain into the narrow cylinder throat. Behind the
threshing cylinder there was a wide rack which allowed the stream
of straw to move toward the back of the machine making it easier
to shake the grain out of the straw. It was no longer necessary to
hammer the straw to pieces. The farmer who was feeding livestock
could now save the entire yield of istraw as well as the grain. This
new concept of threshing also kept the weeds and green stuff out
of the grain thus revolutionizing the harvesting of crops on the
smaller farms of the United States.^®
The first demonstration of the ''Corn Belt Combine,’^ as this ma¬
chine was originally named, was described in the Indiana Farmer's
Guide :
A new development in high-speed grain harvesting was demonstrated a
few weeks ago on a farm in La Porte County, Indiana, when a baby com¬
bine, travelling 5 miles an hour cut and threshed wheat and oats at one
operation with such ease and speed as to amaze the more than 200 specta¬
tors gathered from all parts of the country. This new type machine, the
product of the factory of the Allis-Chalmers Company, marks a distinctive
milestone in the advancement of American agriculture, quite as much as
did the advent of the reaper, more than a hundred years ago,^®
When the "Corn Belt Combine'’ was put to the test in 1935, it
was found that it exceeded all expectations. By 1936 it had success¬
fully harvested 84 different small seed and bean crops, including
even rice and sunflower seed. Eventually it was to harvest over 100
different crops, and the name was logically changed to the All-Crop
A Decade of Allis-'Chalmers Pioneering^ pp. 41 f ; R. A. Crosby to author, June 15,
1961. Mr. Crosby came to Allis-halmers from Advance-Rumley where he worked from
1912 to 1931. Sales Bulletin^ November— December, 1930, p. 114.
A Decade of Allis—Ghalmers Pioneering, pp. 42 f ; R. A. Crosby to author.
^^Allis-Chalmers Milestones in Farm Mechanization, (Milwaukee, 1953), p. 17, quot¬
ing The Indians Farmer’s Guide, Huntington, Indiana.
250 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Harvester. In 1935, 550 machines were sold. Adverse harvesting
conditions throughout the country stimulated sales because it was
found that the All-Crop could harvest grain when no other con¬
ventional combine could. In 1936 the sales of All-Crop Harvesters
jumped ten times, to 5,500. In 1937 the number was 10,500 and in
1938, 16,500 more replaced the binders and threshing machines. In
fact, the All-Crop Harvester came to be known as the “successor to
the binder,'' for as Allis-Chalmers production increased to meet
demand, total binder production in the United States declined from
66,000 in 1936 to 15,000 in 1939.20
But the real merit of the new machine and its revolutionary na¬
ture received outstanding recognition when the Allis-Chalmers All-
Crop Harvester was awarded the Royal Silver Medal at the Royal
British Agricultural Exposition held at Bristol, England. It was
held that this machine represented the most notable advancement
of the year in agricultural machinery. This was the first time in
twelve years that this coveted award had been won by an American
manufacturer.2^
The All-Crop Harvester made the small Mid- Western farmer
competitive with the large Western grain grower. By combining his
grain the large farmer could put his grain in the bin for about 9^
a bushel. By comparison, the small farmer found that the cost of
binding, shocking and threshing cost him at least 20^ a bushel. By
combining the operations with an All-Crop Harvester he found that
he could put his grain in the bin for 10^ less a bushel than before
and could pay for his machine with his new profits in less than two
years.^^
Allis-Chalmers research in a third area met a long-standing need.
As early as 1871, Horace Greeley envisioned a small, inexpensive
form of power on the farm in these words:
What our farmers need is not a steam plow as a specialty, but a loco¬
motive that can travel with facility, not only on common wagon roads, but
across even freshly plowed fields, without embarrassment, and prove as
docile to its manager’s touch as an average span of horses.
Such a locomotive should not cost more than five hundred dollars, nor
weigh more than a ton.
20 A Decade of Allis-‘Chalmers Pioneering, pp, 47 £f ; Sales Bulletin, October, 1935,
p. 33, and July, 1936, p, 64 ; Allis-Chalmers Milestones in Farm Mechanization, p. 18,
^ Sales Bulletin, October, 1936, p. 9.
23 A Decade of Allis-Chalmers Pioneering, p. 47; R, A. Crosby to author. By 1936
the Tractor Division was the largest single division of the company, selling more than
300 different products from four large plants. The West Allis Works manufactured
wheel-type tractors, and the engines for the tractors and equipment built in other
plants. The La Porte, Indiana, factory built the All-Crop Harvester together with an
impressive line of threshers, big combines, clover and alfalfa hullers. The La Crosse
Works at La Crosse, Wisconsin, manufactured the extensive line of Allis-Chalmers
farm implements, including cultivators, plows, bedders, harrows, mowers, and other
power machinery tools.
1962]
Peterson — Technology and Farm
251
It should be so contrived that it can be hitched in a minute to a plow,
a harrow, a wagon or cart, a saw or grist mill, a mower or reaper, a
thresher or a stalk cutter, a stump or rock puller, and made useful in
pumping or draining operations, digging a cellar or laying up a wall, also
in ditching and trenching.
We may have to wait several years yet for a servant so dextrous and
docile, yet I feel confident that our children will enjoy and appreciate its
handiwork.^
Allis-Chalmers provided the fulfillment of this dream.^^
Merritt studied the farm census figures and discovered that of
the 6,800,000 American farms, some 4,000,000 were under 100
acres. But most of the 1,200,000 tractors in the country were work¬
ing farms of more than 100 acres. In order to bring tractors into
use on smaller farms, the Model “B” tractor was designed and
placed in production in 1938. It was revolutionary in regard to
price, weight and adaptability. This 2,100 pound tractor cost only
$495. It weighed and cost only one-third as much as tractors of ten
years before, but it would do 20 per cent more work with 25 per
cent less fuel. It could pull a sixteen-inch moldboard plow at 3 to 4
miles per hour. To haul a load of hay a farmer could hitch a trailer
and roll it along (on rubber tires) at about 7 miles per hour. To
saw logs, he could attach a belt to the pulley wheel which would be
geared to the tractor transmission. The belt could operate a circular
saw. Also ,shaft-driven machinery such as a mower could be pow¬
ered by a take-off on the rear axle. Designated as the “successor to
the horse,’' the Model “B” was all that Horace Greeley had called
for, and much more.^®
For the first time in agricultural history it was possible to oper¬
ate a completely mechanized farm of 100 acres for an investment of
only $10 an acre. The Model “B” cost $495. The next most expen¬
sive investment might be the 40-inch All-Crop Harvester with
power take-off which cost $345. With these machines the small
farmer could thresh all his small grains, beans, and seeds without
outside help. For plowing, a farmer could buy an Allis-Chalmers
no. 116 Moldboard Plow for $85; it plowed the soil deeper and
23 Quoted in Rubber Invades the Farm, undated tractor mss., pp, 5 f.
In 1915 Allis-Chalmers engineers developed the radically different 6-12 tractor
as a direct substitute for the horse. This unique tractor had two steel driving wheels
in front, pivoted by a turning mechanism at the center. The driving wheels were obvi¬
ously the direct substitute for the horse and the operator sat at the end of a long pole
on lighter wheels at the rear. By removing the sulky, the tractor could be attached to
any two-row, horse drawn implement, thus saving the farmer a great deal of expense.
Although the 6-12 was an ingenious machine it never captured the imagination of the
conservative American farmer who was just becoming accustomed to the conventional
tractor.
^Annual Review, 1937, p. 64; Arthur Van Vlissingen, “50,000,000 New Dollars a
Year,” Forbes, June 1, 1938, pp. 34 f; A Decade of AlUs-^Chalmers Pioneering p. 30,
also, p. 50 f ; Allis-Chalmers Milestones in Farm Mechanization, p. 10 ; Fortune, May,
1939, p. 150. The Fortune article points out that by 1938 the protests of the Horse and
Mule Association had been reduced to the rather obvious fact that tractors were infe¬
rior to animals because they produced no manure.
252 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
pulverised it better at twice the speed of horses. Finally, he could
buy a one-row cultivator for $50.25, which was adaptable to all row
crops.^® If, as some have maintained, the small farmer has tradi¬
tionally been the backbone of American society, Allis-Chalmers did
much in the 1930’s to maintain his independence by making him
economically competitive.
Allis-Chalmers’ engineering and innovation had a profound effect
on the agricultural equipment industry as a whole. From a position
of relative insignificance as a producer of tractors and agricultural
equipment, the company shot rapidly upward to third place in this
field during the middle and late 30’s. It is estimated that during that
decade, Allis-Chalmers had no more than one-twelfth of the sales¬
men in the field, but by 1937 it was selling 13 percent of the prod¬
ucts of the industry as a whole. This percentage increased during
the two succeeding years so that by 1939 the company was selling
more than one-fifth of the national product.^^
The Tractor Division had gained a significant, in fact, a pre¬
dominant position within the company. It had also, through the
revolutionary nature and excellence of its products, produced a
revitalization of the industry as a whole. But perhaps more import¬
antly it had contributed in a significant fashion to American agri¬
culture and the economy of the nation as a whole. Calvin Coolidge
once remarked philosophically, “Farmers have never made money,
I don’t believe we can do much about it.”^^ Allis-Chalmers’ tractors
and implements in the decade of the 30’s helped the farmer in gen¬
eral and the small farmer in particular perform his work more
effectively, more efficiently, and more profitably than ever before.
In the early days of the American Republic, something like 85 per
cent of the nation’s workers were actually needed to produce food
for themselves and the other 15 per cent of the population. By
1940, 15 per cent of the population could feed themselves and all
other Americans as well as export enormous amounts of food stuffs
to our allies during World War II. Allis-Chalmers had played a
leading role in the agricultural revolution of the 1930’s.
AlUs-^Chalmers Milestones in Farm Mechanization, p, 11.
27 A. W. Van Hercke to author, June 19, 1961.
28 Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, (New York,
1957), p. 67.
2» Stewart H. Holbrook, Machines of Plenty, (New York, 1955), p. 224; Bert S. Git-
ting', Land of Plenty, (Chicago, 1959), p. 50.
ARTS AND LETTERS
A HISTORY OF THE WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES,
ARTS AND LETTERS
A. W. SCHORGER
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The organization meeting of the Academy was held in the State
Agricultural Rooms in Madison on February 16, 1870/ A call for
a meeting to form an Academy was issued in December, 1869, under
the signature of 105 prominent citizens of the state. About two
years previously there was an attempt made to organize “The Wis¬
consin Academy of Science.” Apparently there were too few scien¬
tists to support an organization of this nature so the base was
broadened to a “comprehensive State Academy of Sciences, Arts,
and Letters.”
A constitution was adopted at 7 :30 P.M. on February 16, and
the first formal meeting was held at 9 :00 P.M. The by-laws were
adopted the following morning. John W. Hoyt,^ who came to Madi¬
son in 1857, was elected President. Prior to his arrival in Madison
he taught chemistry at several institutions in Ohio. When the bur¬
den of organizing the Academy was on his shoulders, he was Sec¬
retary of the State Agricultural Society. On February 12, 1911, he
wrote of this task to Arthur Beatty : “I can never forget the diffi¬
culty I had in making a beginning — how nearly everybody I ap¬
proached, while admitting that such an institution, in itself, would
be immeasurably useful, thought it yet too early in the history of a
new Western State.” Thirty-six letters approving the organization
of an Academy were printed in the first Bulletin.
At the preliminary meeting from one-fourth to one-third of the
audience consisted of women “as listeners.” Hoyt added: “The rea¬
son, I suppose, for this absolute silence on their part was that, in
Wisconsin, the antagonism to woman suffrage as a political and
social measure was at its height. Women sometimes have extraordi¬
nary common sense, expressed in extraordinary ways, and this was
one such occasion.” In spite of this encomium, women were barred
from membership. There was even reluctance to admit Catholics.
Ardent support for the formation of the Academy came from Dr.
P. R. Hoy of Racine and Increase A. Lapham of Milwaukee. Hoy
was the foremost ornithologist, mammalogist, entomologist, and
icthyologist in the state. Lapham, who was elected General Secre¬
tary, was active in botany, geology, archeology, zoology, aiid me¬
teorology. His efforts in inducing the United States Weather Bureau
255
256 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
to install a system of storm warnings for the Great Lakes resulted
in impressive savings of life and property.^ J. G. Knapp was elected
to the important position of Librarian while William Dudley be¬
came Director of the Museum. It was ruled that no books were to
be taken from the Library or specimens from the Museum without
the authority of the General Council. This was not an age of
impatience.
The Department of the Sciences only was organized at the first
meeting, those of Arts and Letters in 1871. A Department of the
Social and Political Sciences came into existence in 1872 and there
was a proposal for one on Speculative Philosophy. Each depart¬
ment had its own officers. Lyman C. Draper, “the accomplished and
indefatigable” Corresponding Secretary of the State Historical So¬
ciety, signed the special call for the organization meeting and in
1872 became one of the Counselors of the Department of Letters.
Strangely, his name is not to be found in the list of members until
1878.
The charter was approved by the Legislature on March 16, 1870.
It provided that the Academy be furnished space in the Capitol for
an office, library, and collections, the latter comprising the Museum
of Natural History and the Useful Arts. The President reported in
1874 that a large, adequate museum was highly desirable but prog¬
ress was slow as additions to the collections depended upon the
spare time of the officers.^ On December 29, 1891, a resolution was
passed to deposit the collection of fossils in the University, the
Academy to retain title.® Its library was moved in September, 1900
to the “magnificent fire-proof building” of the State Historical So¬
ciety, housing the library of the Society and that of the University.®
At this time the chief geologist was required by law to collect and
present to the Academy, State University, incorporated colleges,
and normal schools, if they so requested, specimens of rocks, ores,
fossils, and minerals.
The ambitions of the Academy were beyond its resources, both
human and pecuniary. The Charter states: “The general objects of
the Academy shall be to encourage investigation and disseminate
correct views in the various departments of science, literature and
the arts.” The arts were to comprise the useful and the fine. Presi¬
dent Hoyt reported in 1874 that there had been no success with the
fine arts, a condition that has existed up to the present. Two years
later he reported that only the Department of the Natural Sciences
was in a flourishing condition. In 1881 an amendment was intro¬
duced to abolish the Department of the Arts but it failed to pass
at the next annual meeting.'^ Departments, as entities, have ceased
to exist. Of the five that existed at one time only those of Sciences
and Letters remain active.
1962]
Schorger — History of Wisconsin Academy
257
258 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
For the year ending February 13, 1872, the Academy had 28 cor¬
responding, 12 life, and 56 annual members. Its growth was so slow
that thirty years later the Academy had but 12 life and 196 annual
members. With this small membership it was impossible to marshal
a sufficiently large group to maintain a live interest in philosophy,
or the fine arts. The founding of the Academy was due largely to
the efforts of scientists and they have constituted the majority of
the members. In an address on the founding of the Academy at the
50th annual meeting T. C. Chamberlain stated : “Of the papers pre¬
sented during the first two years, 35 per cent related to geological
subjects, 23 per cent to biological, 17 per cent to physical and mathe¬
matical science, 15 per cent to political and sociological subjects,
and the remaining 10 per cent to historical and philological sub¬
jects or to topics not readily classified.”® The preponderance of geo¬
logical papers was due particularly to the charter members, L A.
Lapham, J. H. Eaton, and T. C. Chamberlain. The very useful index
compiled by L. E. Noland shows that of the papers published by the
Academy, 1870-1932, approximately 80 per cent are on scientific
and related subjects. Botany led the field followed by zoology. The
Transactions form an ideal medium for papers on the natural
resources of the state so that many of the articles are of this type.
Exchanges of the Transactions for the publications of other
learned societies has led to the formation of a superb library hav¬
ing approximately 36,000 volumes. President Hoyt reported in
1874: “It is not the policy of the Academy to build up a separate
library, but rather to cooperate with the State Historical Society
in sustaining and strengthening the Scientific, Art and Literary
Departments of its already extensive Library. This it will be able
to do in a large degree by securing an exchange of the Academy's
Transactions with those of kindred institutions throughout the
world, provided its own publications are regularly issued at short
intervals — annually, if possible.” W. A, Germain,^ Acting Libra¬
rian, in 1878, recommended that a certain sum be made available
for binding as the accessions consisted largely of pamphlets and
unbound publications, not usable in their present state. A list of
the publications owned by the Academy covered eight pages. In
1881 $100 was appropriated for binding. E. A. Birge,^® then libra¬
rian, stated that the library now ''crowds about 100 feet of shelv¬
ing.” He was able to report that all complete volumes were bound
or in process of binding. The cost of binding in 1893 ran from 50
cents to as high as 90 cents for one-half Morocco. The average cost
per volume was 68 cents!
The initial caution in loaning books did not last long. A resolu¬
tion was passed in 1878 that any member of the Academy could
borrow books for a period of one year. The librarian's report for
1962]
Schorger— History of Wisconsin Academy
259
1893 reads in part : “The room should not be left open without an
attendant, as we have already suffered too much from depreda¬
tions/’^^ And : “Should the librarian have reason to think the books
were no longer in use and retained because of neglect, he might at
his discretion call them in/’ The Academy accepted an offer from
R. G, Thwaites, Secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Society to
aid in the loan of books by furnishing a member of his staff when
the librarian or his assistant could not be in attendance. The Acad¬
emy would be expected to pay for this service if it proved to be a
“considerable burden.”
The library was maintained in the Capitol under difficult condi¬
tions. W. H. Hobbs, in 1891, had great difficulty in arranging and
cataloging the books owing to the use of the quarters for law and
history classes. Access to the rooms could be had only on Saturdays
and during vacations. This was not the sole trouble. Two years
later the librarian complained: “As the cases have no backs, but
rest against the rough plaster, it is impossible to keep from the
books finely disintegrated plaster which shakes down from the
walls. The books become covered with a considerable layer of this
material, which is so gritty as to abrade the skin when the books
are handled. On opening a book this material gets between the
leaves and plates. New tenants, committees of the Legislature
and compilers of the state census, occupied the library for most of
1895. The last straw was added in 1897 when the Academy’s room
was divided by a partition, one part being used as a committee
room, the other as a cloak room.^-^ The library was now virtually
inaccessible. In December, 1898 it was agreed that the library be
placed in the custody of the State Historical Society, the arrange¬
ments to be left to the discretion of the Council of the Academy.
As early as 1892 a resolution was passed to memorialize the Leg¬
islature on the construction of a building for the libraries of the
Historical Society, University, and Academy.^^ The building was
obtained but was not ready for occupancy until 1900. A year later
it could be announced that the Regents of the University had been
of great service to the Academy “by placing at the disposal of the
Librarian of the Academy the library staff of the University under
the direction of Librarian Smith.” It was not only logical but
almost inevitable that the library of the Academy be combined with
that of the University and initial action to this end began in 1909.
The University Librarian in 1954 began to reclassify the periodicals
and journals of the Academy in changing from the Cutter system
to that of the Library of Congress. The integration is now so com¬
plete that the library of the Academy has lost its identity ; however
the Academy retains title.
260 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The Academy has published the Bulletin, Transactions, and Re¬
view, Five Bulletins were printed during the years 1870-1871. The
pages are numbered consecutively and total 81. Bulletins 2 and 3,
and 4 and 5 are bound together. These Bulletins give information
on the founding of the Academy, Proceedings, and abstracts of
papers. The Transactions consist of original papers, and the Pro¬
ceedings. The Review is published quarterly, the first volume ap¬
pearing in 1954. It contains information on the activities of the
members, obituaries, brief articles by members of the Academy and
those of the Junior Academy, reports on the annual meetings, and
book reviews. This publication sustains interest in the Academy
between the annual intervals of the appearance of the Transactions.
In 1920 the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy was commemo¬
rated by the publication of a volume of 776 pages for which the
Legislature made a special appropriation of $2000. T. C, Chamber¬
lin, one of the incorporators and presidents of the Academy, and
formerly President of the University of Wisconsin was given the
honorary degree of Doctor of Science. There was a special exhibit
of photographs of former officers and members, correspondence
and scrapbooks of the early secretaries, programs of past meetings,
and copies of early and recent publications.
A handsome medallion by the artist Leonard Crunelle of Chicago
was struck. The obverse carries the figure of Minerva with the
motto. Naturae species ratioque. On the reverse were the portraits
of six eminent members: William Francis Allen, historian; Thomas
Crowder Chamberlin, geologist ; Philo Romayne Hoy, physician and
naturalist; Roland Duer Irving, geologist; Increase Allen Lapham,
naturalist and geologist; and George Williams Peckham, zoologist.
The number of meetings held by the Academy varied. Three meet¬
ings were held in 1870. The following year there were special and
semi-annual meetings. In 1896 only one meeting, the annual, was
held, a practice that has been continued. There was the perennial
problem of how to make the meetings of greater interest. At that
of December 27, 1893, the President asked E. A. Birge to open the
discussion of the subject.^® Most of the members present ventured
suggestions. Joint meetings were held at intervals with other socie¬
ties such as the Wisconsin Archeological Society, the Wisconsin
Mycological Society, the Wisconsin Natural History Society, the
Wisconsin Section of the American Chemical Society, and others,
without apparent benefit. At the present time the Academy does
meet with the Junior Academy which it fosters.
Every effort was made to keep the expense of attendance at meet¬
ings low. On July 4, 1871, President Hoyt wrote to Lapham that
the railroads would carry members to the meeting on the 18th at
1962]
Schorger — History of Wisconsin Academy
261
60 per cent of the regular rate.^ Meals and lodging by modern
standards were fantastically low. When the meeting was held at
Ripon College in 1892, supper, lodging, and breakfast could be had
at Wood’s Hotel for $1.25. The fare for the excursion to Green Lake
was 18 cents. On December 18, 1902, Secretary Ernest B, Skinner
sent the Madison members a card reading : “It has been customary
whenever the Academy has met in Madison for the resident mem¬
bers to give a complimentary banquet to the visiting members. The
banquet will be held this year in the Unitarian Church, Friday
evening, December 26, at 6 o’clock sharp. The cost to Madison mem¬
bers will not exceed $1.25 each. Members may bring guests by pay¬
ing for each guest an amount equal to the actual cost per plate.”
When the Academy met in Milwaukee the following year the Plank-
inton House offered to serve a dinner in a private dining room at
$1.00 per plate “provided as many as thirty people wish to avail
themselves of the privilege.”
The original constitution provided for an initiation fee of $5.00
and annual dues of $2.00. The Treasurer reported in 1877 that only
62 of about 200 members had paid dues of any kind.^® Nevertheless
the annual dues were increased to $3.00. In 1880 remedial steps were
taken to strengthen the membership. The initiation fee was reduced
to $2.00 and the annual dues to $1.00.^^ In addition the old members
were given credit for future annual dues to the amount paid in the
past in excess of these dues. In spite of these heroic measures 31
members were suspended for non-payment of dues. The initiation
fee was subsequently dropped. In 1952 a family membership was
inaugurated for the sum of $4.00, the co-member paying $1.00.
Only one copy of the Transactions went to the family.
The Academy has had financial problems during most of the years
of its existence. It is vital that the Transactions appear annually
for the purpose of exchange. This can not be done by dues alone.
President HoyU wrote to Lapham on February 28, 1870, that he
considered it inadvisable to ask the Legislature for pecuniary aid
until the Academy had shown that it could do useful work for the
state. He soon reached the conclusion that the organization was
worthy for on March 22, 1872, he wrote to Lapham that he had
succeeded in getting through the Legislature a joint resolution pro¬
viding for the printing of 2000 copies of the first volume of the
Transactions to consist of 200 pages. For years afterward the Leg¬
islature authorized printing by the state printer of one volume
biennially. In 1913, for the first time, a sum of money for printing
was placed directly at the disposal of the Academy. Since that date
appropriations have varied from zero to $5,000 biennially. The re¬
sult has been that during the 91 years of the existence of the Acad-
262 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
emy only 50 volumes of the Transactions have been printed. This
is far short of the desirable one volume annually.
The constitution provided that life members contribute $100, pa¬
trons $500, and founders $1000. At the second meeting of the Acad¬
emy, July 19, 1870, a resolution was passed to place all monies from
life memberships in a permanent endowment, the income from
which was to be available for the general purposes of the Acad¬
emy.^® The Treasurer reported $807.25 in this fund on February 14,
1872. C. S. Slichter wrote to Secretary Arthur Beatty in 1920: ‘T
think that the Academy is making a great mistake by not soliciting
more vigorously the interest of prominent families in the state as
patrons of our work. When the Academy was originally started this
particular function of its work was ‘emphatically emphasized.’
In spite of the long existence of the Academy the endowment fund
does not exceed $7500. This is far from the $100,000 contemplated
by the founders.
The Academy from the beginning was interested in determining
the natural resources of the state including geological and topo¬
graphical surveys. A resolution was introduced by T. C. Chamber¬
lin^® at the third meeting that the secretary present an outline of
the scientific investigations that have been made in the state and
indicate those investigations that were most worthy of pursuit. He
was authorized to assign the projects to various members of the
Academy, Little or nothing was accomplished in this direction. The
President reported in 1872 that “no single county has been thor¬
oughly examined in its relation to all departments of natural his¬
tory, and much the larger portion of the State . . . has not been
favored with so much as a general reconnaissance.”^®
Geological investigations were intermittent. The first State Geol¬
ogist, Edward Daniels, was appointed in 1853. The following year
he was succeeded by James C. Percival who served until his death
on May 2, 1856. The Legislature ordered a general geologic survey
in 1873. It was commenced under Lapham who served two years,
then 0. W. Wright took over for two years, T. C. Chamberlin be¬
came State Geologist in February, 1876. The field work was pub¬
lished in four volumes between 1879 and 1883. In the latter year
the organization passed out of existence. It was not until 1879 that
geologic work under state auspices was again resumed.
The Academy was in no position to conduct geological and natural
history surveys, but it could influence the Legislature to establish a
department for this purpose. At the December 28, 1894, meeting a
proposal for establishing a survey of this nature was discussed, and
a committee was appointed to draft a bill and secure support for its
passage. In Volume X (1895) of the Transactions there appeared
1962] Schorger — History of Wisconsin Academy 263
the ''Report of the Committee on the Proposed Geological and Nat¬
ural History Survey of Wisconsin.” The report was printed as a
separate of twelve pages under a somewhat different title. Specific
objectives for the survey were outlined. The iron bearing forma¬
tions were to be mapped, materials for building roads located, and
samples of soils collected for examination. Attention was called to
the diminishing forest resources and the desirability of knowing
what trees to plant on particular soils. Nutritive forage plants
should be sought for the large areas of sandy soil unsuitable for ag¬
riculture. The zoological investigations would be devoted mainly to
the food and enemies of fish. Supporting arguments were : "As an
example, we may refer to the whitefish. No one knows anything of
the fate of the millions of fry planted in this and adjoining states.
No one knows anything of the food, enemies, or habits of the young
whitefish.” An unsuspected resource were the pearls taken from the
Sugar River. This stream during the past six years had produced
pearls valued at $500,000 to $600,000. The pearls were removed by
killing the clams but they could and should be removed without
injury.
The chief supporters of the bill were Charles Van Hise, geologist,
and E. A. Birge, zoologist. On January 1, 1895, the following letter,
on Academy stationery, was sent to potential supporters:^
Dear Sir:
There are enclosed herewith two copies of the following: the perfected
bill for the establishment of a Geological and Natural History Survey in
the State of Wisconsin, and a statement of the reasons for the establish¬
ment of such a survey, with a map showing the progress of surveys in
Wisconsin.
Signed: C. R. Van Hise, President.
C. R. Barnes, Secretary,
In giving their reasons for the survey the pearls were cast aside.
A law was passed in the spring of 1897 creating the Survey.
The Natural History Division of the Survey was under E. A.
Birge from the beginning. He served without compensation and was
paid only for travel and field expenses. His assistant, Chauncey
Juday, was employed full time. These gentlemen published in the
Transactions a long series of papers on the limnology of Wiscon¬
sin lakes. Their work is classic.
A few of the minor activities of the Academy may be mentioned.
In February, 1874, a committee was appointed to "wait on the
proper legislative committee to urge such changes relating to mar¬
riage certificates as are recommended in Mr, Holland’s paper.”-^
Some months later another committee was appointed to investigate
264 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
an Indian mound near Madison at a cost to the Academy not ex¬
ceeding $25.00. Resolutions were passed on February 11, 1909, for
the conservation of natural resources and copies were sent to the
Governor, members of State Board of Forestry, members of the
Legislature, and the Public Press.^^ Resolutions were also passed
against a proposed extension of the open season for the shooting of
ducks in April. Shortly thereafter Congress was urged to pass the
proposed bill for the protection of migratory birds.
The latest important achievement has been the establishment of
a Junior Academy of Science comprising the Science Clubs organ¬
ized in the High Schools of the state. For a long time there had been
discussion of the desirability of forming a Junior Academy but no
concrete plan had emerged. Early in 1944 I discussed with President
C. A. Dykstra the potential benefits to be derived from a Junior
Academy. The project was placed in the competent hands of E. B.
Fred who took the steps necessary to support a junior organization
as a University activity. The budget of May 23, 1944, carried an
appropriation of $2800 for an unselected person to organize and
direct on part time a Junior Academy. The budget was approved on
June 15 and John W. Thomson, Jr., was appointed to the position
on August 18, 1944. He served until February 1, 1961. Too much
credit cannot be given to Dr. Thomson for the organization and
supervision of the Junior Academy, and for his long and faithful
service. The head of the Junior Academy carries the title Chairman
of the Junior Academy Committee. This title expresses inadequately
the dignity and responsibility of the position.
The state is divided into seven districts. Each district holds a
meeting at which three of the best papers are selected so that there
are twenty-one papers presented by pupils at the annual meeting.
The meetings of the Junior and Senior Academies are held sepa¬
rately, but at the same time and place. The purpose behind the
founding of the Junior Academy was to encourage high school stu¬
dents showing ability and interest in science to follow it as a life
profession. This aim has been well realized since 90 per cent of
the pupils that attend the district and annual meetings have pur¬
sued science in one form or another.
The major accomplishments of the Academy have been the pub¬
lication of the Transactions ,the building of a science library, and
promotion of the Geological and Natural History Survey and the
Junior Academy of Sciences. It is doubtful if any other Wisconsin
organization has accomplished so much at so little cost to its citizens.
1962] Schorger — History of Wisconsin Academy 265
References
The Proceedings of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters,
cited below, were published in the Transactions. The dates are for the Pro¬
ceedings, while the volume numbers are for the Transactions,
1. J. W. Hoyt. 1870, Wis. Acad. ScL Bull. 1:24 pp.
2. Wis, Hist. Soc. files.
3. Joseph Henry. 1876. Proc. 3:234; A. W. Schorger. 1944. Science 99:514.
4. J. W. Hoyt. 1874. Proc. 2:18-20.
5. W. H. Hobbs. 1891. Proc. 8:422.
6. L. Kahlenberg. 1900. Proc. 13:657.
7. J. E. Davies. 1881. Proc. 6:345, 348.
8. T. C. Chamberlain. 1920. The founding of the Wisconsin Academy of Sci¬
ences, Arts and Letters. Proc. 20:693-701.
9. W. A. Germain. 1878. Proc. 4:281.
10. E. A. Birge. 1881. Proc. 5:336.
11. W. H. Hobbs. 1893. Proc. 9: lx; Ixi.
12. W. H. Hobbs. 1891. Proc. 8:420.
13. W. S. Marshall. 1897. Proc. 12:633.
14. W, H. Hobbs. 1892. Proc. 9:xv.
15. W. H. Hobbs. 1893. Proc. 10:583.
16. G. P. Delaplaine. 1877. Proc. 4:276.
17. J. E, Davies. 1880. Proc. 5:331.
18. J. W. Hoyt. 1870. Wis. Acad. Sci. Bull. 2:27,
19. T. C. Chamberlin. 1870. Wis. Acad. Bull. 3:40.
20. J. W. Hoyt. 1870. Trans. 1:40.
21. J. E. Davies. 1874. Proc. 2:248-49.
22. B. M. Allen. 1909. Proc. 16(2) : 1353-54.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THOREAU’S TRIP TO THE
UPPER MISSISSIPPI IN 1861*
Harriet M. Sweetland
University of Wisconsin-Milwauhee
Exactly one hundred years to the day of the time of the last
Wisconsin Academy meeting- — that is, on May 6, 1862 — there died
in Concord, Massachusetts, that provocative individualist, Henry
David Thoreau. Now the centennial of a man’s birth or death —
especially of a man of such international stature as Thoreau —
often elicits a spate of magazine commentary and academic re¬
search. Such seems to be the case in the present instance. However,
since the longest trip this stalwart individualist ever made was that
taken during the last year of his life to our Upper Mississippi
region, and since the general topic of the ninety-second Academy
session was the Upper Mississippi, it seemed appropriate that one
paper of the conference should deal with this last journey of
Thoreau’s,
Because contemporary research of that journey had concerned
itself largely with summarizing surveys of the records of the trip
made both by Thoreau^ and by his travelling companion, Horace
Mann, Jr.,^ this writer will not attempt a replowing of that terrain
but instead will analyze the Thoreau-Mann records from a topical
approach, purposing to discuss the significance of the journey from
a three-fold aspect : its interest to today’s readers for what Thor-
eau’s account reveals of Upper Mississippi cultural and natural
history ; the probable importance of that trip to seventeen year old
Horace Mann, Jr., Thoreau’s travelling companion on the two-
month Western jaunt; and the significance of that journey to
Thoreau himself.
Although Thoreau had originally intended a f/iree-month trip for
his health,^ in actuality he was away from home only two months —
* Paper read at the 92nd annual meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters.
1 The first contemporary research in the field was John Flanagan’s “Thoreau in
Minnesota,’’ Minnesota History, XVI (1935), 35-46. This study is based on the San¬
born edition of Thoreau’s record, however.
2 Robert L. Straker, “Thoreau’s Journey to Minnesota,” New England Quarterly , XIV
(September 1941), 549-55. This article, based on Mann’s letters to his mother, presents
the trip as viewed by Thoreau’s companion. Walter Harding-, ed., “Thoreau and Mann
on the Minnesota River, June 1861,” Minnesota History 37:225-8, supplements the
Straker study by g-iving one more, although uncompleted, letter of Horace Mann’s.
3 See Thoreau’s letter to H.G.O. Blake of May 3, 1861, in Walter Harding and Carl
Bode, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York, 1958), p. 615.
267
268 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
leaving his native Concord on May 11, 1861 and returning on
July 10 — just in time to spend his forty-fourth (and last) birthday
with his family. But since part of this two months was used in
botanizing in the East (at Niagara Falls on the way out and at
Mackinac Island on the return trip), only about five weeks were
actually devoted to the Mississippi region — from May 23 — when
the pair boarded the Itasca at Dunleith (now East Dubuque) for
the up-river trip to the St. Paul area, to June 27 (when they left
the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien to entrain for Milwaukee and
thence to sail to Mackinac). Of these five weeks, most of their
time — about three weeks — was spent in the then-frontier St. An-
thony-Minneapolis-St. Paul section, with the most interesting part
of their sojourn (from June 5-June 14) at the private boarding
home of a Mrs. Hamilton on Lake Calhoun,^ exploring what was at
that time comparatively wild terrain about Lake Calhoun and Lake
Harriet. Since boats were the major means of early public trans¬
port in Minnesota before the first ten miles of railroad were laid
in 1862, about one week of Thoreau’s Minnesota visit was spent
aboard the excursion boat. The Franklin Steele, with some hundred
other passengers, making a winding trip up the Minnesota River
to Redwood — there to observe the Sioux Indians receiving their
annual payment from the government at the Indian agency;^ and
three days and four nights were similarly spent on the Mississippi
boats en route to and from St. Paul. A three-day sojourn in Red
Wing, exploring the river bluffs of that region, accounted for the
travellers’ last time-allotment in Minnesota.
Unfortunately Thoreau had neither the health nor the energy
after his return to Concord to organize the jottings of his observa¬
tions made on this last journey into his usual readable Journal
form ; so his record remains only in fragmentary jottings. The orig¬
inal copy of these jottings is now on deposit in the Huntington
Library, California.® The only published record of these notes was
^ After research through old records and journals in the Minnesota State Historical
Society Library, this writer believes evidence points to the location of widow Hamil¬
ton’s home at the southern tip of Lake Calhoun: Emma Grimes, compiler of Biograxthi-
cal and Genealogical Data of Some Pioneer Families of School District No. 18, Hen¬
nepin County, Minnesota, (1938 typed memoir now in the Minnesota State Historical
Society Library) states on p. 3 of the section titled “Mr. and Mrs. Grimes in Minne¬
sota” : “One summer Mr. Henry D. Thoreau came to Minnesota to try and regain
his health. He boarded with a Mrs. Hamilton who had an exclusive boarding house
on the shore of Lake Calhoun, where the residence of the late Judge Ueland now
stands.” This site is now right near Berry and Lyndale parks, on the strip of land
lying between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet.
5 One year later this area along the Minnesota was the site of the bloody Sioux
massacres of 1862.
« I am deeply indebted to the Museum of Natural History at the University of Minne¬
sota for graciously allowing me access to their photostatic copy of this manuscript for
careful study. Throughout this paper, allusion to this document will be symbolized by
TM (Thoreau Manuscript), followed by the paging.
1962]
Sweetland — Thoreau's Mississippi Journey
269
made by Franklin Sanborn, Thoreau’s editor, in 1905;^ but this
publication was in a limited, private edition, not readily available
today; and, even if available, it is likely to be more puzzling than
helpful to the modern reader because of Sanborn's usual free edit¬
ing, haphazard arrangement, and misinterpretation of Thoreau's
notations.® Since the published Mann letters and the Flanagan
study, previously cited, constitute the only accessible printed mate¬
rial on Thoreau's trip but tend toward chronological summary in
their treatment, it would seem that a topical presentation, high¬
lighting some of the significant aspects of the trip, is justifiable.
To the contemporary reader interested in the cultural history of
the Upper Mississippi area, that aspect of Thoreau’s account which
undoubtedly would prove most fascinating is the glimpse he gives
of life along the Great River in the early 1860’s. It was, according
to one authority, the heyday of Upper Mississippi boat trade.® Im¬
migrants were pouring westward by train as far as the River and
then journeying up it to settle in western Wisconsin and Minne¬
sota. The region was also becoming noted for its therapeutic, health¬
giving qualities — Thoreau's reason for going there.^® Magazine arti¬
cles of the 1850’s^^ and that popular art creation — the travelling
panorama^^ — had done much to acquaint Easterners with the
region.
But even before his actual start up the Mississippi, Thoreau had
been impressed by the prairie wheat country in Western Illinois —
farm land so very different from that of New England! As he
described it —
Distances on prairie deceptive — A stack of wheat straw looks like a hill
in the horizon, % or Vz mile off — it stands out so bold & high . . . Small
houses — without barns surrounded & overshadowed by great stacks of
wheat straw — it being threshed on the ground . . . The inhabitants remind
you of mice nesting in a wheat stack midst their wealth. Women working
in fields quite commonly. Fences of narrow boards. Towns are as it were
stations on a
'^Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, ed., First mid Last Journeys of Thoreau, II (Boston,
Bibliophile Society, 1905). This volume will hereafter be cited in this paper as Journ-
neys. I am grateful to the Newberry Library for allowing me access to their copy,
one of the 492 copies that were printed.
8 Evadene B. Swanson, “Manuscript Journal of Thoreau’s Last Journey,” Minnesota
History 20 (June 1939), 169-73, indicates some of the more obvious errors made by
Sanborn.
9 Mildred Hartshough, From Canoe to Steel Barge on the Hyper Mississippi (Univer¬
sity of Minnesota press, 1934), pp. 41—108. This author includes, too, interesting his¬
torical detail about the three boats on which Thoreau journeyed: The Itasca, pp. 132-4 ;
The War Eagle, pp. 132 and 140—1 ; and The Franklin Steele, p. 168.
See Theodore Blegen. “The ‘Fashionable Tour’ on the Upper Mississippi,” Minne¬
sota History, 20 (Dec., 1939), 377—96, and William J. Petersen, Steamboating on the
Upper Mississippi, (Iowa City, 1937), pp, 298-352.
Catherine Sedgwick’s “Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony,” Putnam’s 4
(September 1854), 320—5, describing the famed trip of excursionists to celebrate the
completion of the railroads to the Mississippi, had doubtless been read by Thoreau,
since he published in the same periodical.
1^ Thoreau's essay, “Walking,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston,
1906), V: 224, gives his impressions pj one of the Mississippi panoramas.
13 TM, 4.
270 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Later, when actually aboard The Itasca headed up the Mississippi
for St. Paul, Thoreau gives an impression of the isolation along the
great waterway — with the little river towns lining its banks appear¬
ing as rather lonely outposts of civilization, tucked in wherever a
level resting spot could be found between tall river bluffs. Occa¬
sionally, he notes
a little lonely house on a flat or slope — often deserted — banks in a primi¬
tive condition bet, the towns which is almost everywhere —
However, when the daily boats arrived in one of these isolated
towns, then the little lonely outpost woke up. Thoreau’s descrip¬
tion of this awakening is somewhat reminiscent of that famed pas¬
sage in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, describing the steam¬
boat’s arrival in the more southerly Hannibal,^® yet Thoreau’s nota¬
tion was written over twenty years before. It does, however, record
the same sudden revival to life of a town when the steamboat
approaches :
Every town a wharf with a storage building or several & as many
hotels as anything — & commission merchants. “Storage, Forwarding, &
Commission’^ one or all these words on the most prominent new building
close to the waterside — Perhaps a heap of sacks filled with wheat on the
natural quay or levee close by — or about Dubuque and Dunleith a blue
stacks of pig lead — which is in no danger of being washed away .... The
steamer whistles — Then strikes its bell about 6 times funereally, with a
pause after the 3^' — You see the whole village making haste to the land¬
ing — commonly the raw stony or sandy shore — the postmaster with his
bag — the passenger — & almost every dog and pig in the town — of com¬
monly one narrow street under the bluff — & back yards at angles of about
45° with the horizon.^
If the river towns were sleepy and somewhat isolated, the river
itself presented much life : Besides the passenger boats which made
connections with the railroads on the eastern banks of the Missis¬
sippi at Prairie du Chien, Dunleith, La Crosse, etc., there were vari¬
ous lumber rafts floating southward, which Thoreau described in a
later letter to Sanborn :
The lumber, as you know, is sawed chiefly at the Falls of St, Anthony
(what is not rafted in the log to ports far below) having given rise to
the towns of St. Anthony, Minneapolis &c &c In coming up the river
from Dunleith you meet with great rafts of sawed timber and of logs —
20 rods or more in length, by 5 or 6 wide, floating down, all from the pine
region above the Falls.^^
The ‘Vooding up process” — so important in those days before
coal, oil, or atomic energy were being utilized for boat power — is
alluded to in several places. At Fountain City, for instance, they
5.
See second paragraph of Chapter IV, of Life on the Mississippi.
16 tm, 7-8. Cf. Journeys, 26—27,
Letter of June 25, 1861, in Harding and Bode, op. cit., p. 619.
1962] Sweetland—Thoreau's Mississippi J ourney 271
took a wood boat along with them and they ‘Vooded up again be¬
fore reaching L Pepin taking the boat along with us-^now on this
side then on that.”^® The actual wood-loading was speeded up by
labor co-operation, it seems, for he speaks of twenty men loading
‘‘some 9-10 cords of wood in 10 minutes’’ at one landing/®
In regard to the river towns which they passed, Thoreau has a
personal notation about almost every one: At Prairie du Chien
“the smartest town on the river,” exporting the “most wheat of
any town bet. St. Pauls and St. Louis”, he noted great sacks of this
wheat piled up, “covered at night— & all over the ground & the
only bread wheat.”^® At Cassville he observed “holes in the side of
the hills” where lead had been dug, as he had similarly seen the
bluffs mutilated for the same purpose near Galena.^^ Winona, “a
pretty place” was the spot to which they “towed a flat boat load of
stoneware pots from Dubuque.”^^ His only comment about La Crosse
was that the white pines started half a dozen miles above it; but,
knowing Thoreau’s love of the white pine, perhaps La Crosse resi¬
dents can be proud of this memorable association.^^ Below Wabasha
he noted an Indian encampment “with Dacotah-shaped wigwams”.
Here too he saw a loon on the lake and fish leaping.^^
After leaving the steamer at St. Paul, Thoreau next recorded
brief hints of what other frontier communities of the region were
like in 1861. Of St, Paul itself he commented that the residents
“dig their building stone out of the cellar — but of poor stuff.”-®
Although Minneapolis boasted five drug stores, its main streets
were “the unaltered prairie with burr and other oaks left;” while
of its road over the prairie to Ft. Snelling, he commented that it
was “a mere trail more or less broad and distinct.”^® The now-
fashionable residential sector of the Lake Harriet-Lake Calhoun
area was, in the days that Thoreau and Mann lived at Mrs, Hamil¬
ton’s, wild enough to reveal pasenger pigeons. The fledgling Uni¬
versity of Minnesota, for which ground had recently been set aside
in St. Anthony, Thoreau felt looked quite “artificial” in its burr
oak setting.2^ Ft. Snelling apparently proved more interesting to
Thoreau for the wealth of nature offerings in its vicinity than for
its history; but he was fascinated by the mechanical technique by
18 TM, 8.
5.
5-6.
^^lUd., 5 and 7.
^lUd., 9.
^lUd., 6.
7.
^^lUd., 8.
^Ihid., 16 and 17.
^Tlbid., 11.
272 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
which its ferry utilized the river current to make its crossing and
even drew a picture of the ferry’s working principle. Yet he de¬
voted a mere two lines to the item that there were 600 volunteers
in training at the Fort at the time, with 300 leaving for duty the
morning of his visit.^®
As for the Minnesota river towns which they passed on their
three-hundred mile jaunt upstream to Redwood on the Franklin
Steele, he gives similar brief glimpses: New Ulm consisted “wholly
of Germans. We left them 100 barrels of salt, which will be worth
something more when the water is lowest, than at present,”^^ Near
Mankato, the boat “pushed over a tree and disturbed the bats”, a
fog delayed them for several hours, and the captain ran the boat
on a rock Redwood itself, their destination, was apparently more
significant to Thoreau because it gave him a glimpse of the open
prairie than it was for its Sioux natives on annual display for
tourist benefit:
We were now fairly on the great plains, and looking south, and after
walking that way 3 miles, could see no tree in that horizon. The buffalo
was said to be feeding within 25 or 30 miles.®^
But they did not hike toward the buffalo. Nor did they explore Red¬
wood itself — “a mere locality, scarcely an Indian village — where
there is a store & some houses . . . built for them.” Instead, the
travellers made good use of their one-day sojourn at Redwood to
investigate prairie botanical offerings.
Red Wing, the pair’s last stopping-point in Minnesota, seems to
have entranced the two naturalists most. Thoreau had noticed jut¬
ting Barn Bluff as an outstanding feature of the community on his
way up-river to St. Paul ; now on their stay in Red Wing on their re¬
turn trip they delighted in exploring that bluff for its botanical
offerings and Indian artifacts,^^ and in swimming in the Missis-
sippi.^3 In fact, though the community now claims renown for its
ceramic offerings, it might also lure travellers by advertising “Thor¬
eau slept here the last three nights he was in Minnesota!”
Modern boat owners of small pleasure craft might find interest¬
ing reading in two portions of Thoreau’s record for experiencing
vicariously, or actually, water journeyings of their own: In one
part of his Journal, he gives a detailed listing of the tables of dis¬
tances between every hamlet along the Mississippi from La Crosse
to St. Paul — probably a copy of some steamboat table, such as that
16.
^Letter to Sanborn, June 25, 1861, in Harding- and Bode, 621,
^ Joui-neys, 58; TM, 66-7.
Letter to Sanborn, June 25, 1861, in Harding- and Bode, 621.
32 TM 69-74. Cf. Journeys, 54-64.
33 Straker, 554.
1962] Sweetland—Thoreau's Mississippi J ourney 273
of The Itasca or The Franklin Steele, The second is the graphic
description he gives of the 160 foot Franklin Steele being maneu¬
vered up the winding Minnesota — sometimes running squarely into
the bank, sometimes breaking down trees, sometimes getting
“grounded'' so that a windlass and cable were necessary to free the
boat. Some river bends were so pronounced that passengers even
got off the boat and walked across the isthmus to rejoin the slower-
moving boat-crowd later.^®
Although those portions dealing with local river history are per¬
haps the most readable parts of Thoreau's record, Thoreau himself
seems to have been mainly concerned with botanical observations;
certainly from the time of his arrival in the St. Anthony area on,
he devoted more and more space to these observations — making the
account a treasure-trove for botanists but offering, it must be ad¬
mitted, certain hazards for the lay reader. In fact, one of the diffi¬
culties the average reader encounters in examining either the
Thoreau manuscript or the Sanborn edition of that manuscript is
the constant interruption of Thoreau’s daily account by his de¬
tailed annotations of flowers observed in different areas, as well as
by several summarizing lists he includes, which occupy several
pages. One of these lists records plants which Thoreau had known
in Concord but which he had also observed in the St. Anthony-
Minneapolis area:^® Another list, consisting of some 113 flower an¬
notations, notes the dates of bloom of various species from the time
he began his observations at Niagara up through his sojourn at
Mackinac Island.®'^ This latter list, which he has labeled “Notes on
the Journey West”, he may have intended to use later for purposes
of comparison with his Concord Calendar, which he had kept for a
period of years in recording similar data.
Perhaps someday when the record of Thoreau's last trip becomes
more accessible to the general public, naturalists in the Twin Cities'
area, the Redwood area and the Red Wing locale will give them¬
selves a “botanists' holiday” by making parallel trips and compar¬
ing their present-day findings with those made by Thoreau in
1861 Space limitations, however, will necessitate touching on only
a few high points of his findings here :
Thoreau's first botanical observations, on the trip up the Missis¬
sippi, had been generalized ones, concerned with comments about
the trees that lined the river banks as compared to those that grew
3’ TM, 61. Cf. Journeys, 59.
35 TM, 67, and Letter to Sanborn of June 25, 1861, Harding- and Bode, 620.
33 TM. 94-7. Note also another list, TM, 40-45.
sWbid., 2 9-3 6 A.
38 The Eloise Butler Wild Flower Garden in Minneapolis, devoted mainly to plants
native to Minnesota, has a list of its plantings compiled by Martha E. Crone, curator
of the garden in 1951, The author of thjs paper, as a hobby, has been checking
Thoreau’s listings with the Crone list and finds a high parallelism.
274 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
on the tops of bluffs and on the bluff slopes but afterwards, in
the Twin Cities’ area, he became more and more committed to de¬
tailed observations about flowering plants, although he was still
making tree and shrub observations (noting among his findings:
the butternut and hickory; American, cork-barked and slippery
elm; scarlet, red, white and burr oak; the hop horn beam; white
and sugar maple and box elder; various species of poplar, willow
and birch; hazel bushes as well as two species of elder; sand-, pin-
and choke-cherry; hawthorne; “tree cranberry”, hackberry and
waahoo)
On the first day of the Mississippi river trip, he had noted at
Prairie du Chien particularly the pasque flower (which he termed
“Pulsatilla Nutalliana”) , the bird-foot violet (Viola pedata) , and
the hoary puccoon ( Lithospermum canescens) — commenting on the
root-use of the latter for dye by the Indians. Later, apparently
using Gray, Parry, and Wood for sources of reference and compari¬
son in his botanical researchings, he proceeded (with the same zeal
he had exhibited in his New England study) to acquaint himself
intimately with every living plant he found in each patch of ground
he traversed in the St. Anthony-Minneapolis region. While here he
recorded many of the flowers that he had known in Concord previ¬
ously before sighting them in their Minnesota locale, perhaps now
recorded as “friends from home” to the nostalgic Thoreau : the
marsh marigold (Caltha palustrisj, blood-root (Sanguinaria cana¬
densis), dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), columbine
(Aquilegia canadensis) , baneberry (Actaea), four species of violet,
meadow parsnip (Thaspium aureum), Jack-in-the-pulpit, painted
cup (Castilleja coccinea), wood betony (Pedicularis canadensis) ,
blue flag (Iris versicolor), star-grass (Hypoxis hirsuta), bunch-
berry (Cornus canadensis), wild ginger (Asarum canadense)— to
mention but a few of those he had located.^^
Although today congested Nicollet Island in downtown Minne¬
apolis might appear more fruitful for sociological study, as an ex¬
tension of certain “Skid Row elements” from the nearby depot area
across the river, in Thoreau’s time it offered more for the naturalist
than the sociologist. In fact, it was wilderness enough so that
Thoreau sighted a deer there— whether a wild one or one tamed,
he does not say. And as for flowers, he spent the first day of his
botanical investigations in the St. Anthony area here. On it, and
later on nearby Hennepin Island, we find him recording such spe¬
cies as blue phlox (Phlox divaricata) , prickly ash (Xanthoxylum
5, 6.
^Ibid., 10, 12-17, 49-50 and 95-7.
6, 94-7.
1962] Sweetland—Thoreau's Mississippi Journey 275
americanum) , spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) , wild balsam
apple (Echinocystis lobata) and the frost grape (Vitis riparia)J^
On his second day of botanical investigation in the St Anthony
area, made on a ride to the Lake Calhoun-Lake Harriet region with
his new, naturalist-friend Dr, Anderson, Thoreau seems to have
been particularly impressed with the shrubbery; for he mentions
noticing the June berry ( Amelanchier) , the snowberry (Symphori-
carpos occidentalis) , the wild plum (Prunus americana), and the
honey-suckle (Lonicera parviflora) ; but on closer woodland investi¬
gation, they also found such flowering plants as the bell wort (Uvu-
laria grandiflora), the wild crane's bill (Geranium maculatum),
and the showy orchis (Orchis spectabilis)
Thoreau's journey to Minnehaha and explorations there and
about Fort Snelling the following day revealed to him, among other
species : the horse gentian (Triosteum perfoliatum) , the blue cohosh
(Caulophyllum thalictroidesj , the common trillium, waahoo, the
prickly gooseberry (Ribes Cynosbati) , the skunk cabbage (Symplo-
carpus), and the giant reed (“Arundo Phragmites ten feet high"
he records
Thoreau's ten-day sojourn at Mrs. Hamilton's on the shore of
Lake Calhoun, gave him opportunity to observe plants of the lake-
shore, woodland, and open prairie — depending on which direction
he went for his daily botanical investigations. For the dates from
June 5-14, therefore, there are to be found noted among his various
plant observations: wild artichokes, the yellow and showy lady
slipper (Cypripedium puhescens and C, spectahile), the ground
cherry (Physalis viscosa), the prairie phlox (Phlox pilosa), the
prairie rose (Rosa blanda), the wild hyssop (Lophanthus anisatus)
—which led him on a tantalizing nose-tingling hunt until he had
identified it, the ground plum (Astragalus caryocarpus) , and — most
note-worthy- — the wild apple.^®
This last discovery, that of the wild apple, was to him the most
exciting of Thoreau’s botanical findings in the Lake Calhoun re¬
gion-— a discovery which he alludes to later in one of his last,
before-death essays: “Wild Apples" Thoreau's botanical “sleuth¬
ing" in regard to its discovery reminds one of his parallel excite¬
ment in 1853, in tracking down the only pink azalea which grew
in the Concord areaJ^
82, 9, 19, 36, 37, 85.
12-13, 36, 36A.
15, 17, 18, 36A.
^Ibid., 92, 49, 51, 52, 53-4, 54-5, 57, 58, 31-2,
^8 Henry David Thoreau, “Wild Apples”, in Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, (Boston,
1906), V: 302.
See his entry for May 31, 1853 in Writings, Journal, V: 203-8,
276 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The first clue that there might be wild apples in the region had
come to him on the train through Illinois, where he had noted
“flowered, apple-like trees . . . which may be the Pyrus Coronaria.”^®
Later, at Lake Calhoun, his landlady — Mrs. Hamilton — informed
him that there had been wild apples on her premises, transplanted
from the wood by her husband but that they had all died. Thoreau
went in search of them in the locale where she affirmed that they
had grown natively but found only the June berry and wild thorn.
Then a neighbor directed him to the home of a Mr. Grimes^® — -then
absent, but whose boy
showed me some of the trees he had set out this spring but they had all
died — having a long tap root and being taken up too late, but then I was
convinced by the sight of a just expanding though withered leaf — and
plucked a solitary withered flower best to analyze. Finally stayed and
went in search of it with the father in his pasture — when I found it first
myself — quite a cluster of them.“
On the road between St. Anthony and St. Paul, just previous to
taking the boat-trip up the Minnesota River, Thoreau had been
impressed by the profusion of large-flowered beard-tongue (Pen-
stemon grandiflorus) and blue harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) ;
while on the trip on the river he noted “acres of roses in the inter¬
vales’’ between the trees, “grape in bloom on a cottonwood,” the
prairie larkspur (Delphinium azureum), and the great ragweed
(Ambrosia trifida), in particular.®^ At Redwood, prairie plants
proved an exciting discovery.®^ In fact, he devotes more space to his
listings of them than he does his notations about the Indian ritual,
although observation of the Indian seems to have been the original
intent of the Minnesota River trip.
The traveller’s last sojourn in Minnesota — their three-day stay
at Red Wing, offered them interesting contrast in plant study be¬
tween those growing on the river bluff tops and sides and those in
swampy areas near the river. Listed among the plants which they
observed here were the pale spiked lobelia (Lobelia spicata), an¬
other painted cup (Castilleja sessiliflora) , the hornless and green
milkweed (Acerates viridiflora and Acerates monocephala) , hairy
pucoon (Lithospermum hirtum), black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia
hirta), bladder fern (Cystopteris) , the ox-eye (Heliopsis laevisj,
^8 TM, 3-4.
Mr. Grimes owned the Edina Mills in the region and later ran a nursery on the
Calhoun road, winning fame both in Minnesota and nationally as a horticulturist.
(Eight pages of memoirs of J. T. Grimes in Biographical and Geneological Data of
Some Pioneer Families of School District No. 18, Hennepin County, Minnesota, previ¬
ously cited. )
50 TM, 54-5.
^^Ihid., 58, 62, 63, 33.
^ Ibid., 65, 66, 34, 71. Among plants at Redwood he notes Geum onosmodium, a sani-
cle, Heliopsis laevis, a Zygadene, and Coreopsis palmata.
1962]
Sweetland — Thoreau’s Mississippi Journey
277
porcupine grass, bishop’s cap (Mitella diphylla), dragon-head mint
(Dracocephalum parviflorum) , and LepidiumJ^
Thoreau’s only comments on Wisconsin plants — which he sighted
merely from the train en route from Prairie du Chien to Milwau¬
kee— -are a generalized view that a train-observer would necessarily
have:
1st 60 miles up the Valley of the Wisconsin — which looked broad and
shallow — bluffs 2 or 3 miles apart — Great abundance of tall spiderwort —
also red lilly [sic] — rudbeckia, blue flag — white and yel. lilly [sic] &
white water ranunculus — Abundance of mullein in Wisconsin.®^
Thoreau’s cataloging of birds in the Mississippi region is not as
extensive nor as scientific as his botanical listings. However, he
takes time out at Minneapolis to enumerate all the birds he had
noticed along the way since leaving Chicago; and throughout his
botanical observations there are comments, too, of the birds he
noted in the same areas. But the two species which seemed most
to excite his observation in Minnesota were the wild pigeon and
the rose-breasted grosbeak — the first of which is now extinct and
the other comparatively rare. Yet at the time of Thoreau’s expedi¬
tion he noted that the grosbeak was “very abundant in the woods
of the Minnehaha — and about the fort — singing robin-like all the
while while at Mrs. Hamilton’s he found it “common as any bird
in the woods.” He even describes the nest of one he had found in a
bass wood with its “4 eggs green spotted with brown.”^®
Just as minutely he described the wild pigeon’s nest — having
located four such nests, all told, in the region near Mrs. Hamilton’s :
“2 in bass — 1 in oak and 1 in hop horn beam.”®^ Although the hop
horn beam may still be found in the woodland park between Lake
Calhoun and Lake Harriet, one will search in vain for the pas¬
senger pigeon’s nest! Instead, the contemporary naturalist will
have to content himself with experiencing vicariously, with Thor-
eau, his discovery of one loosely woven nest in a bass tree (a nest
which he describes minutely and even illustrates) ; or watch with
69-72.
74.
^ Among’ birds in Thoreau’s lists were the red-wing' black bird (“the prevailing’’
bird), whip-poor-will, kingfisher, white-bellied swallow, red-headed woodpecker, kill-
deer, smaller plover, brown thrasher, kingbird, phoebe, “peet-weet,” redstart, humming
bird, catbird, wood thrush, Wilson’s thrush, goldfinch, yellow-throated and warbling
vireos, “cherry bird’’, cowbird, chewink, snipe (“boom on prairie at St. Anthony’’),
loon, “fiocks of cranes, bittern or heron flying up Mississippi’’, marsh hawk, night hawk,
Maryland yellow throat, myrtle warbler, horned lark (“very tame”), bluebird, bay¬
wing, white-throated sparrow, tanager, flicker, chestnut-sided warbler, black-and-white
creeper, “young eagle eating blue jay in Minnetonaka lake”, shrike, cuckoo, passenger
pigeon, rose-breasted grosbeak, and meadow lark (TM, 5, 6, 10-16, 50 52-3, 56, 58 62
80, 83, 91-2).
58 TM, 16 and 50.
80.
278 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
him as he peers into another nest and finds therein its young bird
‘‘dirty yellowish and leaden with pin feathers”; and, observe, in
imagination the distracting antics of the guardian bird as she
“slipped to the ground fluttering as if wounded 2 or 3 times as she
went off amid the shrubs.”®® But the contemporary naturalist may
have twinges of nostalgic regret when he reads that in that long-
ago summer of 1861, on the Minnesota River near Shakopee, the
“Big Woods” were “alive with pigeons flying across our track.”®®
Besides the wild pigeon and the rose-breasted grosbeak, other
birds which engaged Thoreau’s special scrutiny were the horned
lark, whose song he describes as “a low jingling . . . note — sparrow-
like;”®® the turkey buzzard, which he noted both at Lake Calhoun
and along the Minnesota ; blue herons and loons. Also, commenting
on the difference in song between the Western lark and the com¬
mon meadow lark, he indicates that the Western lark’s note was
“very handsome heard at the same time as the common meadow
lark — much louder on toodle-em note.”®^
Besides birds, other kinds of wild life that Thoreau included in
his annotated comments were bats seen along both the Mississippi
and the Minnesota rivers ;®2 hyla “cr-a-a-ck” ing in the sloughs of
the prairie near St. Anthony ;®® “shad froggs hopping and dripping
their water all over;”®^ turtles of various kinds, some of which en¬
gaged his attention for that same detailed description that he had
recorded in his Concord writing;®® varieties of snakes, observed on
the prairie, at Mrs. Hamilton’s and at Red Wing, and which he de¬
scribes in such generalized terms as — “ribbon snakes,” “chicken
snakes,” “striped snakes,” and rattle snakes ;®® “great flight of large
ephermae this AM on L Harriet shore & this eve on L. Calhoun ;”®'^
and, lest Minnesota seem too paradisical in its wild life, tormenting
him the first day at Mrs. Hamilton’s were “myriads of mosquitoes —
wood ticks.”®®
The animal which most intrigued Thoreau, however, was the
gopher — presenting a sight novel to his New England eyes. He ap¬
parently believed he had noted three different species: the striped
gopher, the Missouri gopher, and the Franklin ground squirrel.®®
-^Ihid., 48, 52, 53, 80.
62.
Ibid., 17.
^^Ibid., 56.
*^^Ibid., 5 and 67.
'^Ibid., 10.
52.
^■5 Ibid., 51, 62, 63, 82.
<^''Ibid., 13, 17, 57, 73-4, 83.
Ibid., 55-6.
‘^^Ibid., 92.
TM : 13, 14—15, 57, 82 and 92 for Spermophilus ti’idecemlineatus ; TM : 13, 15, 19
and 83 for Geomys bursardus ; and TM : 91 for S. Franklini.
1962]
Sweetland — Thoreau’s Mississippi Journey
279
Of these, the striped specimen, “Spermophile Tridecemlineatus
erect'’, most fascinated him. He depicts it as ‘‘making a queer note,
like a plover over his hole," and graphically describes its stripings
as —
6 dirty tawny — clay-colored or very light brown lines — alternating with
broad (3 times as broad) dark brown lines striped — the last having an
interrupted line of square spots of the same color with the first men¬
tioned — running down their middle — reminding me of the rude pattern of
some indian work — porcupine quills — gopher baskets & pottery — ™
Before termination of this discussion of the natural and cultural
history reflected in Thoreau's jottings, some comment should be
made about his notations on the Red Man. When one considers that
Thoreau had spent his life studying the Indians, so that at his death
he had accumulated eleven volumes of observations for a projected
history of this first American,^^ it is disappointing that in his
Upper Mississippi record there is a dearth of comment on this
native inhabitant. Although when at Mrs. Hamilton's, Thoreau
lived in the locale of a former Sioux village on Lake Calhoun, he
makes no comment of that fact ; however, he does describe the site
of the old Pond mission nearby as being then “overgrown with
sumac and covered with gopher heaps.""- True, he had noted the
Indian encampment at Wabasha on the way up, and he had discov¬
ered some Indian graves — both at Minneapolis and, later, on the
top of Red Wing bluff (the chief's grave), But the Redwood trip,
probably taken for study of the Sioux first-hand, offers little infor¬
mation except a description of an Indian pipe-lighting ceremony
(obtained from the “Illinois Man" on the boat) and some jottings
on the Indian dance he had witnessed at the Agency, put on for
tourist benefit.'^^ In a later commentary to his friends, Sanborn and
Ricketson, however, made after the trip was over, Thoreau gave
more explicit details about the Sioux gathering in Redwood :
A regular council was held with the Indians, who had come on their
ponies, and speeches were made on both sides thro’ an interpreter, quite
in the described mode; the Indians, as usual having the advantage in
point of truth and earnestness and therefore of eloquence. The most
prominent chief was named Little Crow. They were quite dissatisfied with
the white man’s treatment of them and probably have reason to be so.
This council was to be continued for 2 or 3 days — the payment to be
made the 2d day .... In the afternoon the half-naked Indians performed
a dance at the request of the governor for our amusement and their own
benefit .... In the dance were thirty men dancing and twelve musicians
■OTM, 13, 14-15.
See Sanborn’s comment in Journeys, I, xxxvi, and Albert Keiser, “Thoreau — Friend
of the Native,” in The Indian in American Litei'ature (New York, 1933), pp. 209-32.
‘2 TM, 91.
^^Ihid., 7, 82, and 71.
^‘^Ihid., 65-66, 66, 68, and 73.
280 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
with drums, while others struck their arrows against their bows. The
dancers blew some flutes and kept good time, moving their feet or their
shoulders — sometimes one, sometimes both. They wore no shirts. Five
bands of Indians came in and were feasted on an ox cut into five parts,
one for each band.'^®
It is probable that Thoreau, sincere in his own respect for the
Red Man, may have been disgusted with the political tinge of the
trip to Redwood. In fact, he also comments in his letter to San¬
born — after first listing the government notables aboard The
Franklin Steele:
also a German band from St. Paul, a small cannon for salutes, & money
for the Indians (aye and the gamblers, it was said, who were to bring it
back in another boat).'^®
Although the space devoted to discussion of the social and natural
history of the Upper Mississippi, as reflected in Thoreau’s record,
may seem extensively treated in this paper, the writer feels that
such space-emphasis is justifiable: For, sick though he was, this
New England individualist recorded for future citizenry brief but
revealing glimpses of life along the Mississippi in 1861 ; and, even
more significant, he included detailed observations of its botany.
There remain, however, the two even more important aspects of
this journey to discuss — the significance of the experience to Hor¬
ace Mann, Jr., and its significance to Thoreau himself.
In regard to the trip’s importance to the seventeen year old
Horace Mann, it seems to this writer that this is one aspect of the
journey which has not yet been sufficiently emphasized and ex¬
plored. What an experience it must have been for the shy, grave
adolescent that Sanborn describes to have been with Thoreau —
even an ill Thoreau — for two months of botanizing and woodland
exploration ! In fact, it is the theory of the present writer that this
experience may possibly have determined Mann’s future vocational
career — -that of botanist. To prove this statement, let us briefly
examine certain facts.
Mann, son of thef amous educator and Mary Peabody Mann and
nephew of Elizabeth Peabody of kindergarten fame, was the educa¬
tor’s first child, born in his father’s forty-eighth year. In fact, so
proudly excited was the father at the birth of this first child that he
put aside those famed journals in which he was wont to record edu-
Journeys, II: 55-6. Compare this account to portion from Thoreau’s letter to San¬
born, in Harding and Bode, pp. 621-2, noting that Sanborn has added to the original
Thoreau letter his own description of the native dance — probably based on Thoreau’s
manuscript jottings (TM:66) and his own recollection of Thoreau’s oral account to
Ricketson and Sanborn.
™ Harding and Bode, 621,
1962] Sweetland — Thoreau's Mississippi Journey 281
cational philosophizing and recordings and started a new, leather-
bound volume whose first page entry bore the news :
February 28, 1844
Yesterday at 1/2 past 10 o'clock P. M. a male child was born to me. An¬
other Spirit was ushered into being. . . . Whether it shall soar or sink,
whether it shall rejoice or mourn — or how much of this depends upon the
guidance he will receive. . . . What a responsibility.'^'^
That Mann, his wife, and Aunt Elizabeth took that responsibility
seriously there is ample evidence. True, at the age of three the child
was disappointing his father because he had not yet learned to
write; but then he had ‘‘made some progress in reading . . . taught
by the phonetic method/’^® Fortunately at five the precocious lad
was doing better; for he had begun the study of Latin and soon
could tell one of Aesop’s fables — that of the wolf and the lamb — in
either English or Latin/*^ No wonder that in later years he could
handle Latin botanical names with facility!
After the elder Mann’s death at Antioch College in 1859, Mrs.
Mann had returned to Massachusetts, bought a home in Concord,
and enrolled the three Mann boys in Franklin Sanborn’s school.®® It
was at this time that the friendship between Thoreau and the young
adolescent had begun.
Now if one examines Thoreau’s Journal entries for 1860 and
1861— the years of their growing acquaintance — a curious fact is
revealed : Although Thoreau makes several entries concerning
young Horace and the natural history specimens he was bringing
in at the time to show the ailing Thoreau, not one entry exhibits
any botanical interest on Mann’s part! Instead, the youth was
either describing or bringing samples to Thoreau of — “a painted
turtle,” mussels, “ a skeleton of a blue heron,” “a stake-driver . . .
freshly killed,” a crow, a screech owl, the eggs of Sternothoerus
odoratus, a bull frog, hermit thrush, buffle-headed duck, etc.®^ And
if one examines the contents of Horace Mann’s letters written home
to his mother while on the Minnesota trip, the reader will note that
many of his early comments concern the collecting of animals:
shells, fossils, a prairie gopher and some bird specimens — including
a rose-breasted grosbeak. But when the two travellers were at Red¬
wood, it was Mann, not Thoreau, who was bringing in specimens
Louise Hall Tharp, TJntil Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody (Boston, 1953),
p. 199.
^^Ibid., 212.
^^Ibid., 238.
^Ibid., 317-8 and Straker, 549-50.
See Thoreau’s Journal entries for October 6 and 10, 1860 ; and January 11 and 14,
February 5, April 16, 20, 22, 25 and May 4, 1861 in Henry David Thoreau, Writings
(Boston, 1906), XIV: 102, 110, 309, 313, 314, 337 and 338.
282 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. ’51
of prairie plants; and by the time they had arrived at Red Wing,
he exhibits a definite interest in plants.^- [An ironic sidelight of this
botanical interest at Red Wing deserves notice: According to Mrs.
Tharp, biographer of the Mann family, there is now in the posses¬
sion of the Houghton Library at Harvard the leather-bound volume
that Horace Mann Senior had used for recording the birth of his
son and which later that son apparently used for a flower-press on
the Western trip with Thoreau. One of the pressed flowers therein
still bears the label ‘Tulsatilla Nutatalliana, Redwing Bluff, Red¬
wing, Minn., June 24, 1861 (Journey with Mr. Thoreau)’']®^
Whether the Minnesota trip marked the turning point in young
Mann’s life from emphasis on animal-study to botany, one can only
theorize; but upon his return from the West, he entered Harvard
that fall — there later to take botany from Gray, under whom he
afterwards served as an assistant in the department. Mann was
graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Science degree — his
Bachelor’s thesis being a study of Hawaiian plants, based on a re¬
search expedition to Hawaii one summer even before getting his
degree. At the time of his death at twenty-four (from tuberculosis
contracted on a botanical trip to Brazil), he had not only served as
curator of the Harvard Herbarium for two years and was being
groomed for the head of the botany department subsequent to the
retirement of Gray, but he also had some noteworthy publications
to his credit : two studies of Hawaiian plants, and a botanical cata¬
log describing the ferns, ground pine, and horsetail east of the
Mississippi.®^ Somewhere along the line, perhaps in Minnesota with
Thoreau, Mann’s interest had shifted from a study of bird and ani¬
mal life to that of botany.
In regard to the third point under consideration in this paper —
the significance of the Upper Mississippi journey to Thoreau— it
might be pertinent to our analysis to examine the content of his
Western record to see what it reveals of the writer as compared to
that earlier Thoreau who had penned Walden and revealed him¬
self therein as a composite Man — one who was Poet, Naturalist,
Humorist, Philosopher, and Practical Economist. In making such
a comparison, we discover that the Poet-Naturalist of the Walden
era has almost disappeared; in his stead the itemizing Naturalist
has taken over — one pre-occupied with plant and animal listings.
s^Straker, 552-4, and TM, 66.
Tharp, 336.
Straker, 555 and Tharp, 317, Mrs. Tharp names Revision of the genus Schiedea,
and of Hawaiian Rutaceae and Enumeration of Hawaiian Plants as the product of
Mann’s Hawaiian research ; and Catalogue of the phaenoganious plants of the United
States east of the Mississippi and of vascular cryptogavious plants of North America,
north of Mexico as the other study.
1962] Sw eet land— Thor eau's Mississippi J ourney 283
True, the imagery used in describing some of the animal and river
life has, at times, some of the poetic tinge of his earlier period ; but,
particularly toward the last of his Minnesota jottings, Thoreau
seems to be resolving himself from some inner turmoil by a very
objective preoccupation with these natural history listings^ And the
Humorist that is so delightfully reflected from the Walden pages,
seems to have vanished almost completely, except for a wry com^
ment or two in regard to the white Man's treatment of the Indian.
As for Thoreau, the Philosopher, he too seems to be definitely
absent from the pages of the Western Journal. Perhaps had time
and energy permitted, however, these jottings, too, might have been
reworked into the philosophical vein of his earlier writing.
One will find evidences, however, of that Thoreau the Economist,
who delighted many readers in his first chapter of Walden; for sev-
eral pages of the Minnesota manuscript are devoted to an exact
itemization of just how he spent the nearly $180 he had with him
on the trip— with listings of each expenditure down to the very last
cent used in each locale, whether it be the to $1.00 for a night's
lodging to the 5^ he spent for apples on the train:®® In one place,
the ever-honest Thoreau, apparently noting that his accountings
for the day didn't total up correctly, even tabulated “cheated 5f^!"
Besides this list of expenditures there is an inclusion of just how
he was dividing up his travelling money for safe carriage while on
the trip: “Left pocket, $78.10; right, $60; bosom, $40"— totalling
$178.10.®®
Now if one considers the purpose for which Thoreau took the
Western trip— to recover his health— the manuscript of his upper
Mississippi journey becomes highly illuminating: For, although he
never mentions his health in it, there is in his itemized list of ex¬
penditures and equipment the revealing fact that he spent 50'^ for
“trochees" and $1.00 for “pectoral"— both medications for relief
of chest congestion.®^ So, indifferent though his Journal appears to
make him about health matters, here is a clue that he was willing
to spend as much for medicine as for a night's lodging, in the vain
hope of relieving his chest congestion.
The manuscript of the journey is also revealing of some definite
change in Thoreau 's physical and mental state after arriving in the
St. Anthony area, for the penmanship becomes more and more
irregular— particularly from the recordings of the Minnesota River
trip on ; and the content of the manuscript also changes, as we have
noted, from graphic observations to mere listings of plants, animals
and artifacts found in various localities. It is apparent that some-
TM, pages B and C.
^ Ibid.^ page A.
B, C.
284 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
thing had happened to Thoreau during the course of the trip —
whether it was a worsening of his physical condition because of
primitive boat-travel conditions, homesickness (for he was never
happy long from his native Concord), or a traumatic experience.
Whatever the causative factor, Thoreau decided to curtail his trip
at the end of two months instead of the three he had originally
planned.
Although we cannot discount completely the several disappoint¬
ments at the beginning of the trip which together may have had a
traumatic effect on Thoreau — the fact that his plans for both Chan-
ning and Blake as his travelling companions fell through so that the
seventeen year old Mann became their substitute,®^ and the fact that
on his arrival in St. Anthony, he found Thatcher, a Maine friend
and distant relative, seriously ill from the after-effects of a car¬
riage-accident so that social recourse in that direction was trun¬
cated®^ — yet it is more probable that homesickness and physical ill¬
ness were the prompting factors in his decision to shorten his trip.
For, although Horace Mann’s letters to his mother indicate his be¬
lief that Thoreau’s health was improving or at least remaining
about the same,^® these are the observations of a seventeen year old ;
Thoreau himself, in his June 25 letter to Sanborn, admitted that he
had “performed this journey in a very dead and alive manner.”^^
Also, there is the evidence that when his friend, Daniel Ricketson,
saw Thoreau in late August — a little over a month after the latter’s
return from the West, Ricketson was alarmed at his friend’s
physical condition.®^
Now if a summation is made of the internal and external evi¬
dence revealed in Thoreau’s manuscript — the change in penman¬
ship, the shift to a pre-occupation with objective listings, the nota-
^ Sanborn’s comment in Journeys, II : 8-10.
Thoreau’s letter of May 27 to his sister, Sophia, on Thatcher’s illness (TM:1;
Harding- and Bode, 617) is more revealing- for what it does not say than what it does.
He asks that letters be continued to be directed to Thatcher’s, “for I cannot see
where I may be a fortnight hence.’’ But Thatcher’s serious illness (“He is much worse
in consequence of having been recently thrown from a carriag-e — so as to have had
watchers within a few nig-hts past’’) precluded any friendly visiting. Fortunately
Thatcher gave Thoreau a letter of introduction to Dr. Anderson, the physician and
naturalist, so that Thoreau had other social recourse, Thatcher, a merchant in St.
Anthony, died that August. He was the brother of the George Thatcher of Bangor,
Maine, at whose home Sophia Thoreau died in 1876. (Ricketson, cited below, pp,
181—2). Both George and Samuel of St. Anthony were sons of the Hon. Samuel
Thatcher, who had married Sarah Brown, originally of Concord. (One of their children,
Elizabeth, had been born in Concord.) George Thatcher’s wife, Rebecca Jane Billings,
was the daughter of Nancy (Thoreau) Billings. (George Thomas Little, GeneoJogical
mid Family History of the State of Maine, New York: 1909, HI: p. 1493, is the source
of this information on the Thatcher family. )
Since Thoreau’s several letters to George Thatcher of Bangor were addressed “Dear
Cousin’’ (Harding and Bode, 229-30, 240-1, 321-2, 485-86, 495, 502-3, 555-56, 630),
we can assume he also regarded George’s brother, Samuel Thatcher, as his kinsman.
soStraker, 551, 552, 553.
®iJune 25, 1861 letter to Sanborn, in Harding and Bode, 618.
Anna and Walter Ricketson, Daniel Ricketson and his Friends, (Boston, 1902), pp.
317-22, 16-17, 115-7.
1962] Sweetland—Thoreau's Mississippi J ourney 285
tions of medical purchases for chest trouble, the several allusions
to New England people, both in the manuscript and the Sanborn
letter (possibly indicating homesickness) “—and we add to this evi¬
dence Thoreau's own statement of his “dead and alive” condition
on his journeying, together with Ricketson's impressions of Thor-
eau after his return, certain conclusions may probably be drawn :
Although Thoreau had taken the Western trip for his health, some¬
time during the Minnesota' sojourn he doubtless realized that pur¬
pose was in vain; his health was not improving but worsening.
Therefore the significance of the Upper Mississippi trip to Thoreau
was that it taught him its uselessness as a health-restorative I In
fact, he had learned the meaning of the Emersonian statement on
travel preached in “Self-Reliance”— that your Giant goes with you
on your journeyings. Ill Health was Thoreau's Giant; and evidently
there was to be no release for him from this companion— in Minne¬
sota or on this earth. Instead, Thoreau may even have felt that his
time was running out and that Death stood around a near corner.
One can understand, therefore, why the Western trip was trun¬
cated at the end of two months. Knowing Thoreau’s philosophy of
economy— which meant saving one's time, money and energies for
the great significant experiences— one can guess why he made an
earlier return to Concord. What to him were the flowers and fauna
of Minnesota when his own time was so limited? He undoubtedly
preferred spending what little remained of life in his beloved Con¬
cord. And there were so many things to do in that remaining time :
The only man left in the family as provider for his mother and
sister, Thoreau may have decided that publication comprised the
“nest egg” on which they could depend. Certainly it is significant
that an examination of the extant letters of the last year of his life
reveals how few of these letters were friendly epistles and, instead,
how many were devoted to business matters.®^ Perhaps those critics
who have made Thoreau out as lacking in family responsibility may
have wronged him!®^ The evidence seems to point otherwise. For,
in the limited time and energy that remained to him, we find a man
using that time and energy for the future welfare of his family:
There were arrangements to be made with Ticknor and Fields con¬
cerning the publication of a second edition of Walden and a re¬
binding, for sale, of some 596 copies of A Week on the Concord and
See Harding and Bode, pp, 618-45.
9^ Note Edward Emerson’s comments in his Henry Thoreau As Remembered by a
Young Friend (Boston, 1917), pp, 32-8, that it was Thoreau’s research on black-lead
manufacture that made the family’s pencil and graphite manufacture more successful.
Evidence seems to indicate, too, that after his father’s death in 1859, Thoreau took
charge of the family industry. (Note numerous letters for payments on graphite by
business firms to Thoreau, in Harding and Bode, 553-5, 570, 576, 586, 595, 602, 605-6
629, 630, etc.)
286 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
Mer7dmack.^'^ There was the feverish readying for publication in The
Atlantic of several essays enlarged from previous lectures — essays
which one critic (Sherman Paul)^® regards as significant for their
revelation of Thoreau's ripening philosophy: “Autumnal Tints/’
“Walking,” “Life Without Principle,” “Wild Apples,” and “Night
and Moonlight.”^^ Toward the last, working against time and too
ill to hold a pencil, Thoreau was forced to dictate his ideas to his
sister, Sophia, who prepared them for Atlantic publication.
One other final preparation remained™-the readying of that red-
dish-stained pine chest, built as a repository for his thirty-nine
journals and into which they exactly fit—- so that the “record of his
days and thoughts . . . which cover a quarter of a century”*^^ could
be preserved for future readers.
From an earlier river trip with his brother John, Thoreau had
gathered material for his first book — A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, From his last trip — that to the Upper Mississippi
region — there remains no book, only fragmentary jottings. A longer
journey lay too close at hand — that universal one which all men
must take. Yet, according to all reports from family and friends,
his attitude toward this final journey was one of serenity.®® He had
accepted its inevitability earlier, when he wrote in the second
chapter of Walden:
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink
I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides
away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars.
Letters to Ticknor and Fields, in Harding and Bode, 637-38 and 638-9.
Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration, (Urbana,
1958), pp. 400-17, Note especially p. 403.
Letters to Ticknor and Fields, in Harding and Bode, pp. 636-7, 638, 639, 640,
645-6.
98 Perry Miller, Consciousness in Concord (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 3-7 and Edwin Way
Teale, ed. of Walden (New York, 1946), p. 1.
Sophia’s letters to Ricketson of Dec. 19, 1861; April 7, 1862; May 20, 1862 in
Ricketson, 137-42. See also Edward Emerson, op. cit., 117-8 ; and Annie R. Marble,
Thoreau: His Home and Friends (New York, 1902), p. 177.
HENRY JAMES ON THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION
IN CRITICISM*
Donald Emerson
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Henry James’s critical writing extended over a full fifty years
from 1864 to 1914, and reached its high point in the Prefaces to
the New York edition,^ a unique body of self-analysis. The Pre¬
faces, however, stand apart from the more conventional reviews
and essays which reveal the evolution of James as a critic. Two
factors are important: Jame’s changing conception of the nature of
criticism and the duty of the critic, and his gradually evolving con¬
ception of the role of imagination in all creative work.
James was at first more the reviewer and critic than the writer of
fiction, but the balance shifted and reviews gave place to extended
critical essays. In his early reviewing, James announced positive
principles. The critic, he held, was “opposed” to his author, bound
to consider the work within the limitations of subject imposed on
him, without reference to extraneous theory or critical dogma.^
James distinguished between “great” criticism, which touched on
philosophy in the fashion of Goethe, and “small” criticism, such
as Sainte-Beuve’s. The critic’s duty falls somewhere between the
philosopher’s and the historian’s; he is to “compare a work with
itself, with its own concrete standard of truth,”^ and to rely on his
reason rather than his feelings. Matthew Arnold, James felt, pos¬
sessed “the science and the logic” of the good critic.^
This intellectual, judicial view did not mean that James was en¬
tirely content to “compare a work with itself.” From the first he
considered imagination a universal standard. His earliest critical
essay discussed George Eliot, and on principle James felt himself
bound to seek in her work “some key to . . . method, some utterance
of . . . literary convictions, some indication of . . . ruling theory.” He
found it in George Eliot’s comprehensive concern for life and her
realistic portrayal of average humanity; but he considered her
* Paper read at the 91st Annual Meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,,
Arts and I.etters.
1 Collected and edited as The Art of the Novel by R. P. Blackmur (New York,,
1934).
^ Notes and Reviews by Henry James, ed. Pierre de Chaignon la Rose (Cambridge,.
1921), p. 102.
^ Ibid., p. 103.
^ Views and Reviews, ed. Le Roy Phillips (Boston, 1908), p. 87.
287
288 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
deficient in imagination, though in comparison with a writer like
Trollope who was totally destitute of it she might be considered
richly endowed. As compared with decidedly imaginative writers,
George Eliot was “exclusively an observer.”"’
Since James somewhat later spoke admiringly of George Eliot’s
“rich imagination” and commended Anthony Trollope’s “purity of
imagination,” some account must be taken of these striking re¬
versals. In the early 1860’s, James made a Coleridgean distinction
between imagination and fancy. Imagination would enable the
writer to present recognizably living figures, to whom the imagina¬
tive reader would respond. The merely fanciful writer could pro¬
duce cheap and easy effects because he recognized no standard of
truth or accuracy. “ As in the writing of fiction there is no grander
instrument than a potent imagination,” James declared, “so there
is no more pernicious dependence than an unbridled fancy.”® In de¬
fault of acute observation, he noted, a gifted writer might find a
standard of truth and accuracy in his moral consciousness. Fancy
alone might convey the impression of physical surroundings; the
reconstruction of feelings and ideas required imagination.
Within a very few years, James had notably modified his stand.
He began by taking a sterner view of the function of imagination,
which he now held should “hold itself responsible to certain uncom¬
promising realities.”" After examining the practice of a number of
writers, he concluded that the imagination must conform to facts,
but must also provide a degree of sympathetic penetration into its
subject to convey the very color of reality. He reassessed his esti¬
mate of Sainte-Beuve, whom he found to be a little of the poet, the
moralist, the historian and the philosopher, with the littleness of
each detectable in his “flagrant default of imagination, depth and
sagacity.” At the same time, Sainte-Beuve’s passion for literature
seemed to James “immeasurable, original and delightful.”®
By 1868 the dogmatic tone has disappeared, to be replaced by an
earnest search for justness of characterization of the authors James
discussed. His first remarks on George Sand, for example, discuss
her “vast imaginative and descriptive powers.” Her imagination
seemed to him “an immortal imagination, indefatigable, inexhausti¬
ble ; but restless, nervous, and capricious ... in short, the imagina-
^ Ibid., p. 35 f. “The Novels of George Eliot” appeared in the Atlantic, Oct, 1866.
In reviewing Felix Holt for the Nation in August of 1866, James had commented that
a myriad of George Eliot’s “microscopic observations” failed to equal a single one of
“those great sympathetic guesses with which a real master attacks the truth.” Notes
and Reviews, p. 207.
^ Notes and Reviews, p. 32.
'^“Novels by the author of Mary Powell,” Nation, V (Aug. 15, 1867), 126.
® Review of C. A. Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits of Celebrated Women, Nation, VI (June
4, 1868), 455.
1962]
Emerson — James on Criticism
289
tion of a woman/’^ Justness of characterization, it is clear, depended
for James upon proper appreciation of George Sand’s powers of
imagination. When he shortly afterward discussed the role of the
critic once more, he ignored his more youthful distinctions and de¬
clared that the day of critical dogmatism was over, and with it “the
ancient infallibility and tyranny of the critic.” It now seemed to him
his duty to detach from a work under discussion “ideas and princi¬
ples appreciable and available to the cultivated public judgment.”^®
He proceeded to attack didacticism and sentimentalism in the
novel on the grounds that life is too serious for spurious and repul¬
sive solemnity. On the other hand, levity in the novelist is deplor¬
able, for the reader’s imagination is likely to be more in earnest
than the author’sJ^ The imagination James speaks of by 1870, how¬
ever, includes the notion of artistic arrangement of material, and
its working is connected with questions of both realism and moral¬
ity; “analytic imagination,” presenting a scene with “hard mate¬
rial integrity,” can leave behind “a certain moral deposit.”^^
In the early 1870’s James began the criticism of painting, with
interesting results. The use of terms from painting in his general
criticism is less important than the extended discussion of imagina¬
tion which accompanied his observations. His premises for the arts
of painting and of writing were so similar that he at times spoke of
books as though they were pictures and of pictures as though they
were books. He kept his old distinctions between imagination and
fancy, but more and more spoke in terms of the artist’s purpose.
For he now declared that the fanciful artist who recognizes no
standard of truth or accuracy does so in pursuit of effect; the man
of imagination, on the other hand, deals in the recognizably real and
true, bathed in the light of his own great faculty. On the one hand
there is “skill . . . invention . . . force . . , [and] insincerity,'’ on the
other, “something closely akin to deep-welling spiritual emotion.
Imagination is the common name for it.”^^ He discovered at about
the same time that the composition of a work of art could in itself
be a work of imagination, as when, examining a canvas of Tin¬
toretto’s, he found that the scene had “defined itself to his imagina¬
tion with an intensity, an amplitude, and individuality of expres¬
sion, which makes one’s observation of his picture seem less an op¬
eration of the mind than a kind of supplementary experience of
life.” To contrast this artist with Titian was for James to measure
the distance between imagination and observation. Tintoretto
® Review of George Sand’s Melle. Merquem, Nation, VII (July 16, 1868), 53.
Review of Rebecca H. Davis’s Dallas Galbraith, Nation, VII (Oct. 22, 1868), 330.
Review of Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair, Atlantic, XXVI (Aug., 1870), 250.
13 Review of Gustave Droz’ Around a Spring, Atlantic, XXVIII (Aug., 1871), 251,
1® “The Bethnal Green Museum.’’ Atlantic. XXXI (Jan., 1873), 72,
290 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 51
seemed to James to have ''felt, pictorially, the great beautiful, terri¬
ble spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poeti-
cally/’i^
The imagination, then, had come to be for James at once the
power to conceive greatly and to feel greatly, to organize irre¬
proachably the work of art of whatever kind, and to make it “a kind
of supplementary experience of life.’' Without the quality of life
there could be nothing, as he felt the paintings of Domenichino
showed.
James’s notion of the serious function of criticism was under¬
going a gradual change, one indication of which was his increased
preference for the method of Sainte-Beuve over the supposed sci¬
entific method of Hippolyte Taine. Taine might attempt to knock
loose chunks of truth with the blow of his critical hammer, Sainte-
Beuve rather disengaged its diffused and imponderable essence by
patient chemistry, by dissolving his attention in the sea of circum¬
stances surrounding the object of his study. James found Sainte-
Beuve’s “frankly provisional empiricism more truly scientific than
M. Taine’s premature philosophy.”^^
He began to remake his own critical practice, and a sympathetic
essay on Turgenev in 1874 reveals something of the critical em¬
piricism he had praised in Sainte-Beuve. He found Turgenev a
searching observer, but even more a man of imagination, uni¬
versally sensitive ; he could surpass the French realists in apprecia¬
tion of sensuous impressions and at the same time appreciate im¬
pulses outside the realists’ scope. Turgenev’s view of human life
seemed to James “more general, more impartial, more unreservedly
intelligent” than those of other novelists.^® To express his sense of
Turgenev’s philosophy, James discussed Turgenev’s imagination,
which he found it impossible to praise too highly for its “intensity
and fecundity.” No novelist seemed to James to have created a
greater number of living figures, to have had so masterly a touch in
portraiture, or to have mingled “so much ideal beauty with so much
unsparing reality.”^^
This essay coincides with James’s revulsion from criticism as he
had practised it. His examination of paintings in Italy had con¬
vinced him that the whole history of art was the “conscious ex¬
perience of a single mysterious spirit.” He felt he had worked off
his juvenile impulse to partisanship, and he now perceived a cer¬
tain human solidarity in all cultivated effort. “There comes a time,”
Transatlantic Sketches (Boston, 1875), p. 92.
^Review of Taine’s English LiteraUire, Atlantic, XXIX (April, 1872), 469 f.
ni French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878), p. 275.
Ihid., p. 318.
1962]
Emerson — James on Criticism
291
he wrote, ‘‘when points of difference with friends and foes and au¬
thors dwindle, and points of contact expand. We have a vision of
the vanity of remonstrance and of the idleness of criticism.”^*
Within a year he was referring to criticism as “deep appreciation.”^^
At the same time he was enlarging his conception of the imagina¬
tion. Flaubert in Madame Bovary revealed what the imagination
could accomplish under “the powerful impulse to mirror the unmiti¬
gated realities of life.”^® Another writer's “cultivated imagination”
gave out in his work “a kind of constant murmur of appreciation —
a tremor of perception and reflection. The “true imaginative
force” enabled Howells to give his readers not only the mechanical
structure of a dramatic situation, but also “its atmosphere, its
meaning, its poetry.”^^
There were negative examples as well : Charles Kingsley's imag¬
ination died a natural death when the author turned didactic his¬
torian.-^ Bayard Taylor's lacked warmth and could not kindle the
reader's. Swinburne's was so completely for style that his criticism
was worthless.-^ After the Swinburne essay, James apparently real¬
ized that he had at times used “imagination” as a term for the
making of poetic imagery. Thereafter he sometimes spoke of “the
larger sort of imagination” or “the higher imagination,” to mark
his distinction.
When James discussed Balzac in detail for the first time in 1875,
his chief concern was the quality of Balzac's imagination, and in
later essays he returned to it again and again. It was for James the
great explanatory fact behind Balzac's reality, his vividness, and
his systematizing of the Comedie Humaine. Its deficiencies explained
Balzac's failures of portrayal whenever he attempted to touch the
moral life. He lacked moral depth, which James conceived as no
commitment to a specific moral code but simply respect for moral
questions and a moral ideal.
This sense of morality was henceforth inseparable from James's
thinking on the general role of the imagination. The absence of it
led to strictures on Charles de Bernard, Flaubert, and Baudelaire,
and to criticism of the French realists at large for being deficient
in simple understanding of human nature and human experience.
With all their gifts they left too much out of account, and actually
seemed inexpert whenever they attempted to touch the inner life.
18 Review of Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-trieze, Nation, XVIII (April 9, 1874), 238.
18 Views and Revieivs, p. 55.
20 A'ation, XVIII (June 4, 1874), 365.
^Nation, XIX (July 23, 1874), 62. He was discussing Emile Montegut’s Souvenirs de
Burgogne.
23 Review of A Foregone ^Conclusion, Nation, XX (Jan. 7, 1875), 12.
^ Nation, XK (Jan. 28, 1875), 61.
North American Review, CXX (Jan., 1875), 193.
25 Views and Reviews, p. 59.
^French Poets and Novelists, p. 114.
292 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
The Hawthorne of 1879 is James’s most considerable critical pro¬
duction, and in it he was guided by the practice of Sainte-Beuve : he
established the background for his portrait of the man and inter¬
preted the background through his central figure. Reviewing Sainte-
Beuve’s correspondence this same year, he cited the Frenchman’s
views with approval. 'The critic, in his conception, was not the
narrow lawgiver or the rigid censor that he is often assumed to be ;
he was the student, the inquirer, the observer, the interpreter, the
active, indefatigable commentator, whose constant aim was to
arrive at justness of characterization.”^^ He now termed Sainte-
Beuve "a man of imagination.”
What he meant at this point appears in the discussion of Haw¬
thorne, who was in most respects a man of fancy, but who could
give glimpses into "the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and con¬
science” and deal with "something more than mere accidents and
conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in
Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and . . . tried
to become familiar with it.”^® The House of The Seven Gables seemed
to James to be "pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable
echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man” which is the sign of
a great work of fiction.-^ This same extensiveness James now attrib¬
uted to the interests of Sainte-Beuve. By 1884 he declared, "the
measure of my enjoyment of a critic is the degree to which he
resembles Sainte-Beuve.”^®
James’s extensive experience as a writer inevitably altered his
criticism; he spoke more and more from his own authority and
experience. "The Art of Fiction” (1884) was a thoughtful declara¬
tion of principles which in part points out that the novel is a direct
impression of life and that its value depends upon the intensity of
the impression. The writer must work from reality and experience,
but reality has myriad forms, and experience is never complete;
". . . it is an immense sensibility ... it is the very atmosphere of the
mind; and when the mind is imaginative ... it converts the very
pulses of the air into revelations.”®^ "Imagination assisting,” the
artist can deal with anything. Experience is practically constituted
of the gifts which are designated as imagination, "... the power to
guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things,
to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life
^ North American Review^ CXXX (Jan., 1880), 56.
Hawtho'tme (New York, 1887), p. 65.
^Ihid., p .130.
»> “Matthew Arnold,” English Illustrated Magazine, I (Jan., 1884), 242. He held that
Arnold resembled Sainte-Beuve, with a larger horizon on the side of religion. But he
was on the whole “less complete, less inevitable.”
^Partial Portraits (London, 1888), p. 387.
1982]
Emerson — James on Criticism
293
in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing
any particular corner of it/’®^
This declaration of principles explains why in James's criticism
the imagination is so emphasized, why it is the ground of so many
of his discriminations, and why he insists upon a description of the
artist’s imagination as part of the discussion of his work. And with
his enlarging view of criticism as practised by Sainte-Beuve, James
was shortly to remark that works of art grow more interesting as
one studies their connections; indeed, the study of connections is a
function of intelligent criticism;®^
When he again defined the purpose of criticism (1891), he made
everything depend upon the qualifications of the critic. “Curiosity
and sympathy” form his equipment. “To lend himself, to project
himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands and
to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the
pitch and passion and expression as embracing as the air, to be in¬
finitely curious and incorrigibly patient, and yet plastic and inflam¬
mable and determinable . . . these are fine chances for an active
mind.”®^ This is complete reversal of the early stand, and James
characterized himself when he spoke of “the critic . . . who has, a
priori, no rule for a literary production but that it shall have
genuine life.”^®
The later critical essays frequently reconsider figures James had
discussed. All of them emphasize the importance of the artist’s
imaginative penetration of his subject in ways which parallel
James’s view of the importance of a sympathetic, flexible approach
in the critic. But the essays are now the technical criticism of “a
man of the craft,” as James termed himself. Flaubert seemed to him
now the artist “not only disinterested but absolutely dishuman-
ised” ; his failure was not that he went too far, but that he stopped
short and refused to listen at the chamber of the soul.®® Yet James
praised Madame Bovary as a triumph of the artist’s imagination;
Flaubert had made the form of the novel interesting, without mak¬
ing the form obtrusive.®' James’s criticism of the erotic novels of
Serao and d’Annunzio was not a quarrel with subject matter, but
with artistic disproportion and incompleteness; they ignored too
much of life. Zola was deficient when it came to private subjects;
he could deal only with “the promiscuous and the collective.” The
great lesson of Zola was that without taste, the imagination could it-
p. 389.
^Essays in London (London, 1893), p. 160.
^ilbid., p. 276.
35 Views and Reviews, p. 227.
Essays in London, pp .132, 156.
Notes on Novelists (New York, 1914), p. 80f.
294 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 51
self break down, as in Zola's later novels. Appeal to “science” seemed
to James no mitigation of Zola’s folly; for the artist, “science” is
his consciousness of life.®* In the best of his novels, Zola was saved
by his immersion in his subject, not by his theory. But beyond a
certain point, like Balzac, he failed; neither could deal effectively
with the life of the mind, or with the “cultivated consciousness.
All the last critical essays bear a family resemblance ; the artistic
problem is always the general subject, as it was of the great series
of Prefaces written between 1907 and 1909 for the New York edi¬
tion of James’s own work. Nothing essentially new was added to the
definitions of criticism or of the imagination until a final statement
of the effect of criticism showed an entirely different concern. It
was a plea for appreciation of method from the reader and an
implied demand that the writer satisfy a cultivated interest in it,
the final development of James’s concern for composition and dis¬
like of everything loose and formless.
The elfect, if not the prime office, of criticism, is to make our absorption
and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as
'possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in
turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of
the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its
interest, as only by its so ascertaining them can the interest grow more
various. This is the very education of our imaginative life ... we cease to
be instinctive and at the mercy of chance.^*’
James’s criticism reveals the growth of an artistic mind of high
quality, and the evolution of his standards explains the changed
estimates of writers he repeatedly considered. This itself is suffi¬
cient ground of interest. But there is further enrichment in seeing
the advocate of “science and logic” turning from judgment to “just¬
ness of characterization” and at last to “deep appreciation,” with
a final word that the very education of the reader’s imaginative
life must be a prime office of criticism.
^ Ibid., p. 54. James put the matter succinctly in his Prefaces. “With a relation not
imaginative to his material the story-teller has nothing whatever to do.” The Art of
the Novel, p. 106.
^ Notes on Novelists, p. 156f.
^^Ihid., p. 315.
\
TRAJISACTIOJIS OF THE
WISCONSIN ACADEMY
OF SCIENCES, ARTS
AID LETTERS
LII — 1963
GOODWIN F. BERQUIST, JR.
Editor
NEW EDITORIAL POLICY FOR THE ACADEMY TRANSACTIONS
(Effective Vol. LIII, to be issued in 1964)
The Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters
is an annual publication devoted to the original, scholarly investigations of
Academy members. Sound manuscripts dealing with the state of Wisconsin
or its people are especially welcome, although papers by Academy members on
topics of general interest are occasionally published. Subject matter experts
will review each manuscript submitted. j
Contributors are asked to forward two copies of their manuscript to the
Editor. The manuscript should be typed and double spaced on 8V2 x 11" bond
paper. The title of the paper should be centered at the top of the first page
of the manuscript and should be typed in capital letters throughout. The
author’s name should appear in capital and lower case letters, and should
be underlined and centered directly below the title. A note identifying the
author by institution or background should be placed at the top of a fresh
page, immediately after the text of the article. Upper right hand page nota¬
tions from the second page on should read 2 — Brown, 3 — Brown, 4 — Brown, etc.
The cost of publishing the Transactions is great. Therefore, articles in excess
of twenty-five printed pages will not normally be accepted. In the rare instance
in which a longer paper is approved, the contributor will be asked to help
subsidize publication.
Documentary footnotes should appear at the end of the paper under the
heading “References Cited.” Supplementary or explanatory notes of material
too specialized to appear in the text itself should be typed on a separate sheet
entitled “Footnotes” and appended to the section entitled “References Cited.”
Contributors should avoid unnecessary documentation wherever possible. Other
matters of style should be in harmony with current practice in the subject
matter area.
Galley proofs and manuscript copy will be forwarded to the author for
proofreading prior to publication; both should be returned to the Editor within
two weeks. Papers received on or before July 15th will be considered for pub¬
lication in the current year. Papers received after that will be considered for
publication the following year.
Contributors will be given five offprints of their article free of charge.
Additional offprints in sets of 50, 100, etc. may be ordered at the time galleys
and copy are returned to the Editor. Prices will vary according to quantity
desired and the length of the article involved.
Manuscripts should be sent to :
Professor Goodwin F. Berquist, Jr.
Editor, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211
Editorial Advisory Board
Robert J. Dicke (Biological Sciences)
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephen F. Darling (Physical
Sciences)
Department of Chemistry
Lawrence College
Frank L. Element (Social Sciences)
Department of History
Marquette University
Gareth W, Dunleavy (Humanities)
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukea
Goodwin F. Berquist, Jr., Chrm.
Department of Speech
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
TRiMCTIONS OF THF
wrora ICilDEIHV
Established 1870
Volume LII
HENRY JAMES AND SCIENCE j THE WINGS OF THE DOVE 1
Harry Hayden Clark
Vice-President (Letters), Wisconsin Academy
Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
HENRY JAMES: A SENTIMENTAL TOURIST AND RESTLESS 17
ANALYST
Donald Emerson
Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
USE OF OTOLITHS TO DETERMINE LENGTH AND WEIGHT 27
OF ANCIENT FRESHWATER DRUM IN THE
LAKE WINNEBAGO AREA
Gordon R. Priegel
Research Biologist, State of Wisconsin Conservation Department
Oshkosh, Wisconsin
THE FISHES OF LAKE MENDOTA 37
Donald C. McNaught
Research Assistant, Limnology Laboratory
University of Wisconosin-Madison
THE GEOGRAPHY OF WISCONSIN’S TROUT STREAMS 57
C. W. Threinen and Ronald Poll
Wisconsin Conservation Department
Madison, Wisconsin
THE MILWAUKEE FORMATION ALONG LAKE 77
MICHIGAN’S SHORE
Katherine G. Nelson and Jeanette Roberts
Department of Geology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PARASITES OF EASTERN WISCONSIN FISHES 83
James D. Anthony
Associate Professor of Zoology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
ZUR KENNTNIS DER SCOLYTIDAE— UND PLATYPODIDAE— 97
FAUNA AUS COSTA RICA
Marian Nunberg
Forestry Institute, Agricultural University
Warsaw, Poland
CHANGING REGIONALIZATION OF SHEEP HUSBANDRY 111
IN WISCONSIN
Stephen L. Stover
Assistant Professor of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
THE DOMESTIC TURKEY IN MEXICO AND CENTRAL 133
AMERICA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURA
A. A. Schorger
Professor Emeritus, Wildlife Management
University of Wisconsin-Madison
THE ZENDA METEORITE 153
William F. Read
Professor of Geology
Lawrence College
CHAUTAUQUA AND THE WISCONSIN IDEA 159
Melvin H. Miller
Associate Professor of Speech
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
DISTRIBUTION AND ACCUMULATION OF COPPER 169
FOLLOWING COPPER SULFATE APPLICATION
ON LAKES
C. Joseph Antonie and Wayne H. Osness
West Senior High School
Madison, Wisconsin
NATURAL LAW AS CHAUCER’S ETHICAL ABSOLUTE 177
Gareth W. Dunleavy
Professor of English
Unversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
THE COMMEMORATIVE PROPHECY OF HYPERION 189
Karl Kroeber
Associate Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
PRINCIPLES OF SOIL CONSERVATION AND SOIL IMPROVE- 205
MENT AS THEY APPLY TO CERTAIN GROUPS OF SOILS
IN SOUTHEASTERN WISCONSIN
M. T. Beatty and A. E. Peterson
Associate Professors of Soils
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A STUDY OF THE NATURAL PROCESSES OF INCORPORATION 213
OF ORGANIC MATTER INTO SOIL IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN ARBORETUM
Gerald A. Nielsen and Francis D. Hole
Department of Soils
University of Wisconsin-Madison
229
NOTES ON WISCONSIN PARASITIC FUNGI, XXIX
H, C. Greene
Curator, Department of Botany
University of Wiscoiisin-Madison
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN 255
NO. 48. COMPOSITAE I-~COMPOSITE FAMILY I
Miles F. Johnson and Hugh H. litis
Herbarium, Department of Botany
University of Wisconsin-Madison
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN 343
NO. 49. COMPOSITAE II^COMPOSITE FAMILY II
THE GENUS SENECIO^THE RAGWORTS
T. M. Barkley
Assistant Professor of Botany
Kansas State University
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN, 353
NO. 50. COMPOSITAE III^COMPOSITE FAMILY III
THE GENUS SOLID AGO-^GOLDENROD
Peter J. Salamun
Professor of Botany
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Earlier this year, a special monograph entitled THE WISCONSIN ACAD¬
EMY LOOKS AT URBANISM was issued. This publication was catalogued as
Transactions Volume LII, Part A. Further copies of the monograph may be
obtained at $2.00 per copy by writing to: The University Bookstores, Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211.
APR 271964
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led THE WISCONSIN
ACADH'-iY LOOKRANSACTIONS OF THE
WISCONSIN AC, Part A.
Please note that the enclosed publication entitled THE WISCONSIN
ACADEI'^iY LOOKS AT URbANISM is Volume ^2 of the TRANSACTIONS OF THE
WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ARTS AND LETTERS, Part A.
THE WISCONSIN ACADEMY
LOOKS AT
URBANISM
A special monograph based upon a series of in¬
vited papers on urbanism presented at the 93rd
Annual Meeting of the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin
May 3-4, 1963
Goodwin F. Berquist, Jr. , Editor
This publication is financed through the joint
support of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts and Letters, the Ford Grant for Urban
Studies of the University of Wisconsin, and the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES: URBAN AND URBANE 1
Wisconsin Academy Presidential Address
J. Martin Klotsche
Rrovost, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
URBAN PROSPECTS, 1970 AND BEYOND 12
Robert 0. Wood
Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF THE METROPOLIS 22
Frank P. Zeidler
Director, Department of Resource Development
State of Wisconsin
CIVIC INFLUENCES AND FORCES IN THE GROWTH
OF THE AMERICAN CITY 31
Coleman Woodbury
Chairman, Department of Urban and Regional Planning
University of Wisconsin-Madison
THE ROLE OF INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH IN THE DEVELOPMENT 41
OF THE CITY
Jack T. Wilson
Senior Scientist, Harnishfeger Corporation
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
iii
iv
Table of Contents
HOW EUROPEANS MOLD THEIR CITIES 46
Joseph F. Mangiamele
Director, Planning and Development
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
MILWAUKEE'S SOCIALISTS AS URBAN REFORMERS 55
Frederick I. Olson
Associate Dean, Extension Division
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
RECENT CHANGES IN WISCONSIN URBANISM, 1950-1960 64
John W. Alexander
Chairman, Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison
THE LANDSCAPES OF RURAL RETREAT IN MILWAUKEE COUNTY 79
Loyal Durand, Jr.
Professor of Geology and Geography
University of Tennessee
THE NEW CLIMATE FOR THE ARTS IN THE AMERICAN CITY: 88
THE GROWTH OF CULTURAL CENTERS
Adolph A. Suppan
Dean, School of Fine Arts
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
TELEVISION AND THE URBAN COMMUNITY 95
Sprague Vonier
Sales Manager, WTMJ-TV
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
OFFICERS OF THE WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES,
ARTS AND LETTERS
President: Aaron J. Ihde
Department of Chemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Vice-President (Sciences): Allen Abrams
First American State Bank Bldg.
Wausau, Wisconsin
Vice-President (Arts) : Ted J. McLaughlin
Department of Speech
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Vice-President ( Letters) : Harry H. Clark
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
President-Elect: Walter E. Scott
Conservation Department
State of Wisconsin
Secretary: Eugene M. Roark
Conservation Department
State of Wisconsin
Treasurer: David J. Behling
Northwestern Mutual Life Ins. Co.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Librarian: Roy D. Shenefelt
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
APPOINTED OFFICIALS OF THE ACADEMY
Transactions : Goodwin F. Berquist, Jr.
Department of Speech
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
'Zditor-Wisconsin Academy Review: Walter E. Scott
Conservation Department
State of Wisconsin
Chairman-Junior Academy of Science: Jack R. Arndt
Extension Division
University of Wisconsin-Madison
THE ACADEMY COUNCIL
The Academy Council includes the above named officers and officials and the fol¬
lowing past presidents of the Academy.
Paul W. Boutwell
A. W. Schorger
H. A. Schuette
L. E. Noland
Otto L. Kowalke
E. L. Bolender
Katherine G. Nelson
Ralph N. Buckstaff
Joseph J. Baier, Jr.
Stephen F. Darling
Robert J. Dicke
Henry Meyer
Merritt Y. Hughes
Carl Welty
J. Martin Klotsche
tjaiTH&’jttiAli
KSTIMtiH
APR 2 7 1964
Preface
The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters is a re¬
markable organization. For one thing, it is an interdisciplinary so¬
ciety as the varied departmental affiliation of several of its present
officers demonstrates. It is also an association widely supported
within the state of Wisconsin. Present membership includes business
and professional men, prominent public officials, high school and
college students, high school and college teachers and administrators,
and a large group of interested citizens. Moreover Academy publica¬
tions reach a national as well as an international audience. Individual
articles in the annual Transactions are catalogued by the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. and copies of the entire publication
are mailed to 642 libraries located on six of the seven continents.
From its beginning in 1 870, the Academy has focused its attention
upon original investigation and the dissemination of new knowledge
both in and outside of the state. Naturally the interests of Academy
members change from time to time. New questions motivate new re¬
search and new articles; new fields of specialization evolve from old
academic divisions. One of the most recent of these changes felt in
the state, the nation and the world is a new interest in urbanism, in
the unique problems of heavily populated metropolitan areas. It was
with this interest in mind that the Academy program committee decided
in February of 1963 to devote a significant portion of the annual May
meeting to a special conference theme, "The Urban Scene. "
Eleven persons were invited to address the Academy on specific
phases of urbanism. Each was a specialist in the area to which he
was assigned. The texts of these eleven addresses appear here.
The editor hopes that in printing this, the first special monograph
in Academy history, he may be setting a worthwhile precedent soon to
be duplicated in other fields of investigation.
Goodwin F. Berquist, Jr, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
i vii
i
\
y
. 5^) 6 / 73
l4j LU 43
The Wisconsin Academy Looks At
Urbanism
Cover Design by Professor Helmut Summ
School of Fine Arts
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Wisconsin Academy Presidential Address
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES: URBAN AND URBANE *
J. Martin Klotsche
I.
In marked contrast to the American pattern of higher education
the great tradition of the European university has been urban. Our
early colleges were located in the countryside and this pastoral image
has persisted until quite recently. But Europe’s ancient universities
originated in medieval towns such as Bologna and Paris, while in more
recent times such cities as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Berlin,
Hamburg have established universities that have gained international
renown. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this urban tra¬
dition in Oxford and Cambridge, a tradition that conditioned the de¬
velopment of American higher education during its early period. Har¬
vard, of course, is the most notable early example. But even the
great state universities of the Midwest established in the 19th century
were not located in what were to become the major urban concentrations
of their respective states. Suchcities asUrbana, Illinois; Ann Arbor,
Michigan; Columbia, Missouri; Madison, Wisconsin; Bloomington,
Indiana; and Boulder, Colorado, illustrate the point.
Why American universities followed the pastoral rather than the
urban pattern is not the purpose of this paper. Frederick Rudolph in
The American College and University suggests that
the development of the English pattern in the New World was not
simply a conscious effort to adapt the collegiate system to Ameri¬
can circumstances. It was at first the only solution to the absence
of large concentrations of population. Not to have the collegiate
*
The materials for this address were gathered during the author's tour of fifteen
urban universities in Britain, Germany, France and Italy in August and September of
1962.
1
2
J. Martin Klotsche
way would have required cities— cities that could offer up sufficient
numbers of students attracted to the college from the surrounding
countryside. In the absence of cities and knowing the English
pattern, the founders of Harvard and other colonial colleges
naturally subscribed to the collegiate way. By the time that the
colleges in Philadelphia and New York were under way, the col¬
legiate pattern was not a necessity, for there were cities. But
by then what had been a necessity had become a tradition, and
from then on the founders of American colleges either adhered to
the tradition or clumsily sought a new rationale.
But, in contrast, most of Europe's distinguished universities are
in cities. Thus every one of Britain's ten largest cities, with one ex¬
ception, has a university. This is all the more significant since there
are only twenty-one universities in all of Britain. In Italy, where there
are thirty-one universities, every city with a population of over250,000
has a university. Turin, in fact, has two and Milan has four. In
We St Germany the same is true. While Tubingen, Marburg and Erlangen
come to mind in listing great German universities (all three of these
cities have less than 100,000 people), yet with the exception of such
Ruhrcities as Essen and Diisseldorf, all of West Germany's large cities
boast of a University or a Technische Hochschule. Even the deficiency
in the Ruhr will soon be remedied with the creation of a new university
in Bochum. France, long noted for its educational concentration in
Paris at the expense of the provinces, with one half of the students
attending French universities studying at the University of Paris, has
few large cities that do not have a major university.
II
European universities located in cities generally have grown hap¬
hazardly, accumulating buildings and property in many parts of the’
city, scattering their holdings and often their faculties over wide areas.
Yet, by and large, they have accepted the limitations implied in such
growth and have accommodated themselves to the fact that the univer¬
sity and the city bump and elbow each other at many points. There are
exceptions such as Birmingham and the Free University of Berlin, but
generally a homogeneous, expansive campus such as is common in
this country is seldom to be found. In most cases, in fact, it is diffi¬
cult to determine where the university quarter really begins. Faculties
are often dispersed over a wide area. In Milan the law and letters
faculties of one university are in one location, and the science facul¬
ties elsewhere. In London, with thirty-three self-governing schools
and a dozen institutes, faculties are scattered all over the city. In
3
European Universities : Urban and Urbane
Paris, the University is scattered through the Sorbonne district with
other centers also being established elsewhere. The University of
Aix-Marseilles is located in two cities, Aix and Marseilles, twenty-
five miles apart.
Tremendous damage to Europe's urban universities resulting from
the second war has compounded many of their problems. Many build¬
ings were completely destroyed and beyond repair, while library and
scientific equipment deteriorated rapidly through lack of care and use.
Those that escaped destruction were often requisitioned as hospitals,
or used to quarter troops. Thus, after the war, in the face of physical
destruction and with universities badly overcrowded, considerable
thought was given to the future location and development of universi¬
ties. Partially as a reaction to the war, which led to widespread in¬
terest in decentralization and diffusion, and partly because of the
heavy congestion and high land costs in the center of the cities where
universities were located, there was considerable sentiment to leave
the city and locate on the outskirts. There was established, for ex¬
ample, a second branch of the University of Paris at Orsy, a Parisian
suburb about twenty-five kilometers from the center of the city. In
operation now for about five years, it hopes to use its 160 acre campus
to draw off the pressure of the 80, 000 students now attending the Uni¬
versity of Paris in the heavily congested Sorbonne district. Similar
experiments with the split campus are being tried elsewhere. In Mar¬
seilles, for example, the concept of the ‘American campus is being
developed on the outskirts of the city in Luminy. Yet, for many uni¬
versities, the pressure to remain in the center of the city is strong.
Tradition is hard to break, while the European student is more at home
in a cafd, on a busy boulevard or in a bistro than on a shaded walk
or on a spacious campus with ivy-covered buildings.
Thus, the tendency now is to rebuild in present locations, to make
piecemeal acquisitions of land as it becomes available, and to build
high within permissible limits. ( In Paris the Committee for National
Monuments keeps a tight rein on building heights to preserve the his¬
toric skyline of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. ) The Technical
University of West Berlin, badly damaged by the war, decided after
considerable thought to remain downtown. Thus its old buildings are
being rebuilt while new high rise buildings, that match the surround¬
ing massive skyscrapers which house West Berlin industry and com¬
merce, are being added. The University of Frankfurt, with eleven
thousand students on a campus originally designed for two thousand,
has plans for a twenty -one story building, and plans to move its medi¬
cine and natural science faculties to another part of the city. It has
reached this decision not only because land is expensive to acquire,
but also because the University has full responsibility for the relocation
4
J. Martin Klotsche
of dispossessed families. The University of Paris, fantastically over¬
crowded, is now building new and high in the Sorbonne district within
limits set by the authorities. But here we have the grotesque example,
in ordernot to incur the wrath of property owners through dispossession,
of new facilities for science faculties being built on stilts over the
archaic and antiquated buildings of the venerable Parisian wine mer¬
chants. In Munich, where great havoc was wrought to University
buildings during the war, rebuilding is going on at a rapid pace, with
the old buildings being rebuilt with an exact duplication of the original
facade. Thus, in one building, to preserve the original outward ap¬
pearance, there are three floors in the front of the building but five
in the back with a "wailing wall" in between to separate the two parts.
Characteristic of the urban university in this setting of central
city congestion, high land costs, and difficulty in relocating dispos¬
sessed families, is the absence of sports and playing fields, and
limited provision for residence halls. Occasionally land has been ac¬
quired some distance from the university for recreational use by stu¬
dents or for residence hall development. A notable example of the
latter is the Citd Universitaire in Paris, a student town which is not
part of the University in the sense that colleges are at Oxford and
Cambridge, but which provides housing for 4, 000 of the 80, 000 stu¬
dents attending the University of Paris. The Citd is located at the
southern edge of Paris, and while separated from the Sorbonne district,
provides a living and social center for many of Paris' students.
Occasionally a university has an opportunity to start from scratch
unhampered by a city that envelops it on all sides. The new plan for
Bremen University is a case in point. This University, which is in
the city of Bremen (eleventh largest in West Germany with a popula¬
tion of 500,000) will consist of over 600 acres with all facilities in¬
cluding dormitories, playing fields, clinics and laboratories in close
proximity to each other. Even adequate provision for parking is being
made, son)ething that does not concern a university administrator in
Europe to the extent that it does here. But Bremen is the exception.
In mostcases the die has been cast. The university will remain where
it has historically been, will make every effort to expand in its pres¬
ent location, build as high as it can and hope for the best.
Ill
What about the establishment of new universities to take care of
increasing enrollments caused by high birth rates and by a higher per¬
centage rate of university attendance? Several such universities are
being planned in West Germany. Reference has already been made to
Bremen and to the projected new university at Bochum in the Ruhr.
5
European Universities : Urban and Urbane
Italy contemplates no new universities. It probably has more than it
needs now. Some thought is being given to this matter in France, al¬
though the greater emphasis is being placed on expanding existing
institutions. It is in Britain that the planning of new universities to
meet future demand is making greatest headway. Here, however, the
plan is not to locate such institutions in the large cities where the
people are to be found. Thus, new institutions recently established
or being contemplated are located in Brighton ( population - 156, 000) ;
Canterbury (population - 28, 000) ; Colchester ( population - 57, 000) ;
Coventry ( population - 260, 000) ; Norwich ( population - 121, 000) ;
York ( population - 105, 000) . There are reasons for this. Since 200
acres is considered the minimum needed to accommodate a student
body of 3, 000, a location away from the center of the city is almost
inevitable. The recruitment and retention of staff will also become
more and more difficult in future years. Hence the amenities of life,
such as adequate housing at reasonable rates, good schools for
children and pleasant surroundings for families are important consid¬
erations.
But perhaps of greatest importance in the location of the new Brit¬
ish universities is the concept that they are national rather than local
or strictly urban institutions. Thus, a new university is being planned
for Coventry, even though a major university already exists at Bir¬
mingham, ten miles away. Britain's civic universities, such as Bir¬
mingham and Manchester, historically began as urban institutions re¬
sponding primarily to the needs of the specific community in which
they are located. This, however, is no longer the case. Already two-
thirds of the students at the University of Birmingham and one-half of
those attending the University of Manchester come from beyond 30
miles, and plans are now underway to substantially augment residence
hall facilities at these universities to make them truly national rather
than local universities. The same will be true of the new universities
that are to be established. Thus their urban location is no longer as
critical as would be the case were they being primarily designed to
provide educational opportunity for the young people in the immediate
area.
IV
Yet the continent' s urban universities differ markedly from Ameri¬
can institutions of the more collegiate type and their British counter¬
parts— Oxford and Cambridge. For most European students who attend
universities in large cities, there is a noticeable absence of organized
social and collegiate life. Students are considered a part of the city.
Here they find their recreation and stimulation whether it is in the
6
J. Martin Klotsche
libraries and bookstalls or in the bistros and beer cellars. Hence
little effort is made by the university to provide cultural or recreational
opportunities. Students either live with their parents or in lodgings
whenever they can be found. Often they are scattered all over the
city. Dining halls or skeleton student unions provide the chief meet¬
ing place and are nearly always crowded and congested. Thus the
spacious setting, the architectural magnificence and the community
life of such universities as Oxford and Cambridge are not to be found
in Europe's more urban institutions. Missing particularly is the op¬
portunity for the student to come into direct contact with scholars
representing a wide range of interest and intellect. In the collegiate
way of Oxford and Cambridge, students and teachers live together
under one roof with the fellowship of men of different backgrounds and
dissimilar views creating an intellectual ferment not possible in the
typical urbc^n universities of Europe.
The most essential function of a university, Hastings Rashdall
concluded in The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, was
"to make possible the life of study whether for a few years or during
a whole career, and to bring together that period face to face in living
intercourse teacher and teacher, teacher and student, student and
student." Such opportunities for varied and stimulating personal con¬
tacts, characteristic of the ancient universities, is not possible for
the many now engaged in university education in the large urban centers
of Europe. Writing about the University of London at the beginning
of the century, Sidney Webb argued that the high degree of affluence
and social privilege on which the older universities rested was not
and never could be provided by London conditions and even if they
could, students might hesitate to take advantage of them. To study
in order to be able to engage in leisure pursuits is contrary to the bias
of many of Europe' s university students who have no financial security,
can enter the university only with considerable financial subsidy and
who must earn their living in a competitive world as soon as their
university work is finished.
Yet there are compensations for the student attending Europe's
urban universities. Devoid of the collegiate life of the ancient uni¬
versity, there is nevertheless stimulation and variety of many kinds.
" In loco parentis," in which the university assumes parental functions
as is so often done here, is foreign to the European university. Not
only does the student have more freedom of choice in the selection of
his courses and inclass attendance, but his interests are broader and
more urbane. He feels a great responsibility for active participation
in the political life of his community, and has an unusual awareness
of his opportunities in this regard. Large numbers of students are as¬
sociated with university political units of national parties, and tend
7
European Universities : Urban and Urbane
to continue the intellectual activities of their university days through¬
out their adult lives.
Nor is the city without its attractions to the university student.
Henry Commager, writing in the Saturday Review of September 1 6,
I960 [issue], points out that when Americans go abroad for study or
teaching, they do not seek out the universities in the smaller towns.
Rather
they head for the big cities. And this is because they know they
can count on an exciting relationship between university and
community in almost every country of the Old World. What lures
the American student is the life of the boulevards, the cafds, the
bistros; it is the Latin Quarter; it is the opera and the ballet, the
theatre and the experimental film; it is the bookshop on every
corner, the dozen newspapers in every city; it is the mature stu¬
dent body, educating itself, joining in the risks of life, taking
an active part in literature, journalism, art, and politics. It is,
too, the beauty of the cities that they know they can count on—
not just the beauty stored away in museums, but the beauty of
houses that have been allowed to grow old, of parks and squares
instead of parking lots, of riverbanks not given over to industry
but to pleasure, of gardens in the heart of town, of bridges that
you can walk across without risk of life, of bicycle paths that
parallel busy boulevards, of sidewalk cafds, and of carnivals on
street comers.
If this is true of the American student who goes abroad, it is equally
tme of his European counterpart, who finds the atmosphere of the city
with its pulsating life and its vitality and individuality congenial and
suited to his needs and requirements.
Writing in 1 930 on the occasion of the University of Manchester's
50th anniversary, the Manchester Guardian concluded that no doubt
should any longer exist about the wisdom of having established the
university in this industrial center.
The day has long gone by when it could be doubted if a great
industrial center like Manchester were the suitable or the best
place for a University. Such doubters forgot the active life of
Florence, where Galileo lived and Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Where the pulse of life is highest, in the great congregations of
men, and men's energies in manufacture and trade are at their
highest strain, there also the other energies have their likeliest
play. Science and the arts are the flowering, and, in one sense
of that vague word, the romance of life. True romance is not,
8
J. Martin Klotsche
however, remote from the daily life; it is rooted in it. It is a
dull eye which cannot penetrate through the dirt and fog of Man¬
chester to its underlying poetry. Indeed Lancashire may claim to
be, even in the face of Yorkshire, the most romantic of English
countries and yet a vast field of industrial work.
V
What of the university's relationship to the community in which
it is located? Many of Europe's leading universities whose origins
date to the Middle Ages, came into being when urban life was condi¬
tioned and controlled by self-regulatory and self-perpetuating corpor¬
ate guilds. In the case of the university, these guilds were composed
of scholars who established their own curricula, set their own stan¬
dards and controlled their own appointments. In terms of their later
development, this fact established a tradition of academic freedom
that became institutionalized and tended to nurture a hands-off tradi¬
tion by outsiders. Quite the reverse was the case in this country
where private groups of citizens or legislative bodies organized col¬
leges and universities and materially influenced the course of their
development in terms of their objectives, functions and scope. But
inEurope, with the exception of the provincial universities established
in Britain in the 19th century, where civic influence made itself felt
from the very beginning, universities were nurtured in an atmosphere
of detachment that is zealously guarded by these institutions, even
to this day. Thus, the lay board of control as we know it here, which
often decides matters of major academic policy, is not known in
Europe, and because decisions of an academic nature are made by
faculties and not by governing boards, universities are less affected
by pressure groups or by special interest organizations.
As for financial control, the state, of course, assumes a central
role. While universities maintain considerable freedom in their op¬
eration, yet a substantial portion of their fiscal support comes from
the national government. Even in Britain where institutions are inde¬
pendent and self-governing, a major portion of their financial support
comes from Parliament through the peculiarly British mechanism, the
University Grants Committee. Appeals are made from time to time to
private and local groups for financial support. Businessmen and in¬
dustrialists in Milan, for example, have recently shown considerable
interest in institutions located there. Thus Italy's largest chemical
industry, Montecatini, sponsors scholarships totalling $10,000 an¬
nually for students studying industrial chemistry at the Polytechnic
Institute. In Florence, the local chamber of commerce recently
equipped a laboratory for the Faculty of Agriculture and provided funds
European Universities : Urban and Urbane
9
for an additional position in the Faculty in Law. But these are excep¬
tions rather than the rule. The universities, steeped in a tradition
of detachment, and receiving heavy financial support from the national
government, have not exploited the resources of their cities or of pri¬
vate citizens in the manner that is often done here.
Most notable exceptions to this pattern are the civic universities
established in the last century in Britain in new centers of industry
and population. They were from their inception created to meet local
needs, were supported by local benefactions, and interested them¬
selves in local industries. The emphasis on metallurgy in Birmingham,
steel at Sheffield, textile technology at Manchester and Leeds, marine
engineering at Liverpool and Southhampton illustrate the point. Here
there was a strong desire to link the universities with the practical
life of the community, with training for work rather than education for
leisure a prime consideration. Thus, shortly after the establishment
of the University of Birmingham, its first chief administrative officer
urged it to
Keep in close touch with the community, do not seek for inde¬
pendence or isolation, encourage the leading men to take a living
and personal interest in college government and give them plenty
of real power. Welcome civic control, do not attempt to found an
isolated institution for imported scholars to continue their re¬
searches and to train youth in learning out of touch with the life
and activity around them. Keep in close touch with that life and
activity and in any new departure carry the community with you.
Yet it goes without saying that European universities, including
those located in large cities, are less responsive to public opinion
or local pressures than is the case here. No doubt there are some
advantages in such a detached relationship. It gives the university
a much better opportunity to focus constantly and continuously on its
primary function—the transmission and extension of knowledge. How¬
ever, a price is paid for this detachment, for often the universities
lose by virtue of their failure to understand the social milieu in which
their institutions operate, thus neglecting the legitimate needs of the
society that supports them.
European universities thus take relatively little interest in the
practical aspects of professional and vocational life. A substantial
portion of the curricula found in our universities would be considered
outside the jurisdiction and scope of European universities. Such
programs as home economics, journalism, commerce and accounting,
applied arts, elementary education and physical education are rarely
found on the continent. Instead these are considered the domain of
10
J. Martin Klotsche
special technical institutes or training institutions, which bear the
major burden of what would be called vocational training. This is true
not only of those universities that date back to the Middle Ages and
are heavily encrusted with tradition. Even the newer ones, perhaps
in their anxiety to achieve status and respectability, place heavy em¬
phasis upon the classics and on the theoretical rather than the prac¬
tical aspects of subject matter.
The innate conservatism of Europe' s universities also discourages
innovation and experimentation. Thus a concern with the field of urban
studies which is now being carried forward at a number of American
universities would not be embraced with equal enthusiasm abroad.
Such an emphasis would be considered "beyond the pale" and scarcely
a proper program to include in a university curriculum. Even the study
of economics is considered in many quarters a radical departure from
tradition, pften existing as an offshoot of the faculty of law.
VI
Thus Europe's universities by tradition and inclination seldom
relate themselves to the immediate city in which they are located.
Even though jostled by the city, there is little disposition to assume
responsibility for rebuilding, beautifying or assisting it in dealing
with the overwhelming problems which it faces. European cities have
great traditions and a rich history which the universities respect and
admire. But the problems of the contemporary city are not of immediate
concern to the university scholar. In a sense this is unfortunate for
the presence of a university in a major city presents opportunities not
always to be found in the more ancient establishments removed from
the influence of an urban environment. Sir Walter Moberly in deliver¬
ing a lecture at the University of Manchester in 1950 commented that
A civic university cannot, if it will, have all the virtue of the
cloister; it should therefore make the most of the virtues of the
marketplace. It cannot be entirely shielded from all that is ugly,
sordid or raucous, because it is in the midst of the hurly burly,
of the rough and tumble of human life; but for that very reason it
can do certain things better than 'Oxbridge. ' It is easier for it
to preserve a sense of proportion and to avoid self-importance.
In a university that is not too remote from 'men unblessed,' it is
easier to preserve a sense of reality.
Sir Walter was suggesting that an urban university can play a
unique and distinctive role in relating itself to the city in which it is
located. It can hold up to the view of the community a profile of itself
11
European Universities : Urban and Urbane
that has the vantage point of perspective and reason. It can examine
the metropolis in its totality, seeing one problem in its relationship
to the whole of the urban scene. It can identify both the shortcomings
and the accomplishments of the community. It can rise above the local
prejudices that stand in the way of progress. It can be a constructive
critic, a standard setter, a balancing force. It can blaze new trails,
it can stand over and above the tumult and shouting of the market
place. It can speak out boldly on matters of principle and bring clarity
to community thought in a climate free from bias and emotion. It can
identify not only what is and can be, but what should be. Thus by its
very nature, it can bring urbanity and sophistication to the metropolitan
area it serves. In short, a university must be both a part of and apart
from its city. Thus, one might view the university and the city as
represented by two overlapping circles which cross at certain points.
At the point at which the two circles overlap, there the common con¬
cern of the city and the university intersect. But there are also large
areas of each circle that are the special domain of the university and
the city and in which each can make its own special contribution.
On the one hand Europe's urban universities have successfully
withstood the pressure of being all things to all people. They have
consistently aimed to be respected rather than popular. And because
they have pursued this goal relentlessly, the cities in which they are
locatedhave viewed them not only with pride but as the focal point for
the preservation and transmission of the intellectual accomplishments
of mankind. But on the other hand, they have not successfully related
themselves to their urban environment using the special skills avail¬
able to a community of scholars as a source of strength to assist the
city in its search for a better life. Our society is urban and will be¬
come more so in future years. But if there is to be an urban civiliza¬
tion worthy of the name, the universities must play their part in mak¬
ing cities centers of civilization, regaining their historic place at the
center of the community and assisting in its regeneration not only as
a market place and workshop, but as a human abode and as the center
of cultural and intellectual energy. For the city will always be needed
as a nerve center of artistic and intellectual development and urban
universities can play a strategic role in achieving this goal.
URBAN PROSPECTS: 1970 AND BEYOND
Robert C. Wood
I approach my assignment tonight with mixed emotions. I am of
course honored to participate in meetings of an Academy that repre¬
sents arts and letters as well as sciences and welcomes professionals
and laymen alike to consider important topics of the day. Yet simul¬
taneously, I confess to considerable feelings of anxiety.
One source of my anxiety relates to the locale. No outside urban
"expert" undertakes a Wisconsin engagement lightly. At least since
the days of John Gaus, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and
now at Milwaukee has been such a center of distinguished scholar¬
ship and teaching in urban studies as to evoke the admiration and oc¬
casionally the envy of other institutions similarly engaged. In recent
years you have added to your historic strength. The presence of Cole¬
man Woodbury, Henry Schmandt, Leo Schnore, Kirk Petshek, Henry
Fagin on your campuses— to name only old friends— multiplies your
resources, attracts new and able scholars and makes possible research
of variety and depth. Moreover, your academic talent is powerfully
supported by Wisconsin's illustrous tradition of practicing urban po¬
litical leadership. So Frank Zeidler, to single out but one example,
served not only this city long and well but contributed significantly
to the national field of urban policy-making. It is natural, then— to
plagiarize from one of my colleagues— for me to feel like a lion in a
den of Daniels.
A second course of anxiety stems from the general state of the
field of urban studies today. To those of you in other disciplines, let
me briefly characterize our current circumstances. We are completing
almost a generation of intense activity and ferment in areas of the so¬
cial sciences once assigned to the backwaters of our respective dis¬
ciplines. In the immediate post-World War II period, to be labeled
a student of state and local government, of urban sociology or of re¬
gional economics, was equivalent to having an epitaph placed on an
12
13
Urban Pros pects , 1970 and Beyond
otherwise promising academic career. Of lectures and sermons in the
field of local affairs we were well endowed. Of systematic empirical
investigation we depended primarily on the fragile foundation of the
muckrakers and the Chicago School of urban sociology.
Yet in the last twenty years, a minor revolution in scholarship
took place. Victor Jones broke new ground for political science, to
be followed by Coleman Woodbury's classic analysis of the process
of urban redevelopment. In the 1 950' s, a national flood tide of research
occurred, spearheaded by the massive St. Louis, Cleveland and New
York surveys. To be sure, to our colleagues in the natural sciences
the financial basis of these efforts may seem puny~some twenty or
thirty million dollars in all. But to the social scientists, not yet ac¬
customed to the lavish ways of the National Institute of Health, the
Department of Defense or the National Science Foundation, the magni¬
tude still seems impressive. Books, surveys, recommendations for
reform tumbled after one another until today a graduate student in our
fields only has to think he might major in urban studies before a con¬
tract to write a textbook is thrust into his hands by an eager publisher.
Now, however, if I read the signs of the times rightly, this initial
burst of energy is past, the bloom is off the rose, and we are in that
hard and tough position of sciences slowly maturing. New models are
increasingly hard to come by; conceptual and policy advances alike
appear more marginal; stubborn problems of methodology beset us.
As a "soft" science trying to come of age, we have passed the stage
of alchemy and the dialectic in our analysis of urban phenomena; yet
we have not yet achieved the status of a genuine science.
It is in this context that I want to analyze American urban pros¬
pects, and essentially in three parts. First, I want to recall the popu¬
lar prognosis for urban life in the latter part of the twentieth century,
the forecast of urban culture which is generally accepted in the Sun¬
day supplement. Second, I would like to comment briefly on the aca¬
demic dissent to these predictions which has emerged only in the last
two or three years— a dissent that often seems to approach a rejection
of the value of continued scholarly work in the field. Third, let me
suggest another view of the future, built upon our new empirical find¬
ings, dissenting just as vigorously from the present conventional wis¬
dom, but still persuaded that there are puzzles and policy problems
aplenty to justify continued and renewed academic efforts.
The Civic Cassandras
Let me begin by recalling briefly the popularized interpretation of
the urban experience in postwar America. In broad strokes, the lines
14
Robert C. Wood
of analysis that predominated in the 1 950' s rested on two assumptions.
First, they held that the pattern of American urban settlement was un¬
dergoing a dramatic transformation touching almost every aspect of our
social and political behavior. In a sentence, the common version was
that at some time between 1940 and I960 the United States passed a
watershed where the compact, visible industrial cities of the nineteenth
century exploded into new" spread" cities, vast new metropolitan re¬
gions, themselves blending into great linear megalopoli. Second, the
more straightforward versions of this thesis promised catastrophe
ahead. Our urban community, our polity, even our national character
were held to be in the process of rapid and unhealthy decline.
The departure point for these prophecies of domestic doom and
gloom was the disappearance of the classic American city, which, as
it was recalled, may not have been admirable but was understandable
and seemed manageable. For all its faults, the Victorian city had
clear boundary lines, sharp demarcations between open countryside
and densely settled city. One knew the limits of the phenomenon.
Moreover, the underlying factors of urban growth seemed obvious.
Cities were established to do business— to produce goods, to conduct
commercial transactions. Hence, a fortuitous physical location, ready
access to transportation facilities or to raw materials important for
industrial processes, with a capacity to attract skilled labor, were
the simple essentials of urban development. The city's predominant
symbol was likewise business in character— the Horatio Alger entre¬
preneur, the millworker, his dinner pail, and his weekly trip to the
beer parlor on payday.
Not only simplicity of purpose but optimism and vigor of spirit
characterized that city of song and story. It was the land of oppor¬
tunity and assimilation, for the immigrant from abroad or from the de¬
pressed farm lands. Even its politics after World War I offered chal¬
lenge for the righteous, a cause for the middle class, if not always
easy victories. There were bosses and political machines to be fought,
cynical land speculators, and transit and utility companies to be sub¬
dued. Though the old city was often corrupt, sometimes cruel, its
benefits seemed clear, its problems, obvious. Toward the end of its
existence, practical policy solutions, especially to journalists and
some scholars, were at hand.
The watershed after World War II, according fo the popular ver¬
sion, fundamentally changed the properties of urban life. More im¬
portant, the transformation introduced new and large uncertainties —
in analysis and prescription. The spill-over of population to the sub¬
urbs seemed enormous. The sudden diffusion of population, industrial
and commercial establishments, were initially hard to comprehend.
The resulting metropolitan sprawl, first into spread cities, then into
15
Urban Prospects , 1970 and Beyond
Jean Gottman' s megalopolis, was difficult to visualize and even harder
to conceptualize. The new pattern of American urban settlement was
ripe for the mournful laments of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs.
Even the more factual analyses were disturbing. The classic
formula of urban location no longer explained differential growth pat¬
terns among cities. As transportation costs fell rapidly, new synthetic
materials replaced native resources, decentralization of industry ac¬
celerated, market considerations became increasingly significant. So
Raymond Vernon could conjecture after directing the New York "metro¬
politan region" study that continued metropolitan growth was a function
of a city attaining a critical mass of consumers. In place of the image
of the worker in the beer parlor or the sturdy entrepreneur, the symbol
of the new spread city seemed more feminine than masculine. To
David Reisman's discerning eye, a new American character was born,
outer-directed, driven by the tastes of others. The new picture of
the national urban life was of a suburban family hitching its new
motorboat to its station wagon, in front of the ranch house on a Sunday,
after-church together.
As the boom in metropolitan commentary continued, other aspects
of our urban progress seemed alarming. The core city no longer ac¬
commodated immigrants who could with surety believe that soon they
would join the middle class. Instead, it became the receptacle for
persons and activities other parts of the metropolitan area did not
care to support: Skid Row, the permanently dis privileged, and the
southern Negro and Puerto Rican who faced a much harder journey up
Samuel Lubell's old tenement trail. New suburbs came to take on the
character of garrison states devoting much of their time to acquiring
the "right people" and the "right industries" and keeping out the
wrong ones. Urban politics was no longer a simple issue of black
hats against white hats, bosses versus reformers. Instead, as the
spread city grew, so, too, grew the number of separate decision¬
making centers. Power became diffused in many municipalities, many
special districts, many elites, many authorities. To many observers,
the critical problem of public policy was how to assemble sufficient
political power of whatever variety to make meaningful and rational
local political decisions. In the metropolitan world of fractionalized
government, the search for a man or an elite who "ran the town" was
increasingly fruitless.
Given a predominant analysis that emphasized the disappearance
of the old form of urban life, radical change stimulated by a rapidly
advancing technology, new styles in economic, social and political
behavior, it is not surprising that urban prospects beyond 197 0 to
many took on the aspects of catastrophe. Where would we find new
community facilities and services for the mushrooming suburbs? How
16
Robert C. Wood
could we save downtown? What would we do with the new immigrants?
How would we relieve traffic congestion and save the commuter rail¬
road? What did the man in the gray flannel suit represent? To some
scholars and to more journalists the conviction grew that the American
urban structure was spinning out of control, pushed on relentlessly
by the geometric expansion of automobiles and the unscrupulous de¬
signs of land speculators and mass housing developers. The metro¬
politan problem moved up sharply on the agenda of public affairs.
Government officials, universities and businessmen alike buckled down
to the task of somehow establishing mastery over the metropolis.
The Academic Dissent
It is paradoxical {but in some ways reassuring) that just as the
new spread city was discovered, its properties identified and con¬
trasted to those of the city which preceded it, and public and political
interest pushed to new heights, the academic students of urban affairs
grew suspicious of the interpretation their own work had stimulated.
AA/hat is impressive about the literature of the last few years in con¬
trast to that of the decade just preceding it, is the new spirit of skep¬
ticism. In sharp contrast to the popular themes of change and revo¬
lution, scholars now emphasize first that the new spread city is sus¬
ceptible to the techniques of traditional analysis. Second, they have
come to view our present circumstances and future direction as little
more than the continuation of long-established trends in American so¬
cial, economic and political behavior.
Sociologists, for example, now often point out the development
of the metropolitan region is principally a function of expanded popu¬
lation and income, of conventional ideology which honors family life
in America, of the predictable consequences of technology. Above all,
they are persuaded that the location of households and the develop¬
ment of settlements within metropolitan areas are best explained by
the time-honored model of class structure. What they see is not the
homogenization of all Americans into an all-inclusive middle class.
Rather, they search for and find a process of sharp, though subtle,
class stratification at work in a larger special context.
In the same vein, many economists find nothing worthy of special
attention in the functioning of our regional economics. To them, the
decline of agriculture, the relatively slow growth of manufacturing and
the rapid expansion of service industries provide an adequate explana¬
tion of changes in the size and composition of the urban labor force.
The movement of the large manufacturing plants to the suburbs in
search of space and easy access to express highways seems to them
Urban Pros pects , 1970 and Beyond
17
a natural occurrence. Though they acknowledge the new market orien¬
tation of the large metropolitan areas, this seems essentially a func¬
tion of size. It requires few adjustments in their traditional tools of
the trade. So, too, the discovery of the new mix of activities in
downtown— as the preferred location of the home office, the confronta¬
tion industries, the small manufacturing plant just beginning— is the
continuation of historical developments that appear both explicable
and predictable in the years ahead.
Even the political scientist, the analyst initially most agitated
over the behavior of ancient local political institutions and processes
in the new metropolitan environment, now appears much less alarmed
than in the decade just past. New research has demonstrated that the
continued popularity of autonomous suburban governments is both
normal and natural. Simply put, these small units provide more ac¬
cess to local officials and more representative government to the
small constituencies involved than do mammoth metropolitan units.
They provide the continuation of grass-roots values embedded in our
national ideology, and these values are at least to the public more
important than the administrative ones the earlier metropolitan reformers
espoused. In spite of their earlier concern, political scientists these
days find that law and order still prevails in the spread city, that
community facilities and services are still somehow provided. Indeed,
some are not persuaded that the existence of many small jurisdictions
within a metropolitan area provide an element of choice in neighbor¬
hoods, schools, and public programs which never existed before. In
short, they see a functioning political system in being, however much
its multiplicity, contentiousness and fragility may offend advocates
of strong, tidy and rational governments.
A New Model
If the line of reasoning employed so far seems plausible, we have
arrived at a curious position so far as the analysis and manipulation
ofournew urban regions is concerned. Just at the time when thinking
laymen and policy-makers are finally persuaded that we have a metro¬
politan problem, the best academic minds in the field are increasing¬
ly doubtful that there is much to concern the nation. Established
methods of analysis are sufficient to explain the phenomena they in¬
vestigate; genuine reasons for advocating major policies of reform
are hard to come by. The drift of affairs is both explicable and by the
values on which theirdisciplines are grounded, apparently satisfactory.
Urban prospects 1970 and beyond for them are simply prospects for
larger and larger areas and larger and larger economic, political and
18
Robert C. Wood
social urban systems. A great increase in the scale of organized
community life has occurred but there are few indications that a radi¬
cal reordering of these systems is likely or desirable. In short, the
result of a generation of effort at new analysis seems to be that we
have researched the problem away.
Yet a case can be made that we have scarcely begun either to
understand or to come to responsible policy conclusions about our
vast new metropolitan areas. It is possible to suggest a new model
not based simply on the more manifest’ properties of the spread city
but rather on more basic forces at work in the metropolitan transforma¬
tion. These forces our first research efforts ignored, or at least gave
scant attention to. A case can be made that the new urban regions
are not the result of traditional forces at work, to be analyzed by the
traditional tools of empirically-oriented behavioral social sciences.
Instead, they can be seen as representative of new aspects of a nation
now propelled increasingly by the process of sustained scientific and
technological innovation. In such a context they pose new problems
for social science analysis and for policy prescription.
Let me begin with the poorly understood and vexing problem of
differential growth rates among urban regions. When one tries to ac¬
count for the explosive growth in southern California, southeast
Michigan or even the limited resurgence of the Boston metropolitan
area, for example, the classic economic analysis, balancing market,
transportation and resource considerations, is not an entirely persua¬
sive explanation. Rather, one begins, as Richard Meier has done,
by positing that the key element in our labor force now is the pool of
scientists and skilled personnel necessary to operate the complex
technological enterprises represented by the growth industries. Here
a different set of considerations come into play. The new engineer
graduates from college with choices, and on his choice of location
turns the future of many an urban region. Further, in these days of
the cold war, the companies bidding for his talent are more likely than
not to be dependent on government research and development support
for the expansion of their activities. It is the interaction of these
two factors, government decision-making in contract awards and pref¬
erences of the critical manpower pool, that may dictate the fate of
many a city.
What does the new engineer look for? Reliable studies have only
just begun on his preferences and behavior, but what information we
have suggests at least three criteria are relevant. One is his desire
for family amenities. Schools, recreational opportunities, the cultural
and aesthetic character of neighborhood development, the environment
in which he chooses to live, are often as important as his working
environment. Second, the need to be able to change jobs quickly and
19
Urban Pros pects , 1970 and Beyond
yet stay in the same house, as one company rises and another falls,
beholden to the changes in the Federal research and development
budget, is relevant. So easy access to an express highway in south¬
ern California where one can move annually from one plant to another
but not uproot the family becomes an advantage. Third, and perhaps
most important, the close proximity of the great university where new
innovations, new techniques, new discoveries can quickly be trans¬
lated to the alert and expanding firms seems increasingly essential.
Urban regions possessing these properties are more likely to attract
the new engineer than those which do not.
From a company point of view, in the new age I have been de¬
scribing, another set of special facilities are relevant. One is the
existence of research parks, in contrast to industrial parks— what
Meier calls breeder building flexibly designed to house initially many
types of smallcompanies just getting started. Later on, the success¬
ful will grow rapidly into facilities of their own, but in the beginning
cheap, adjustable structures— more than tax concessions— may be a
critical location factor. From the company point of view, too, the
availability of communication facilities, great libraries with ample
technical reference service, other companies making related products
to offer external economies, are also compelling considerations.
Finally, the existence of educational institutions equipped to provide
specialized training and retraining of skilled and semi-professional
portions of the labor force may be vital.
The needs and preferences of scientific manpower and scientific
industry suggest some new forces at work shaping urban regions today
and for the future. They indicate that the character and quality of
public facilities— good schools, recreational opportunities, good high¬
ways— have an importance they never possessed in the earlier city.
No longer is it sufficient for urban governments to provide only the
basic structure of social capital, underwriting the private sector of
the economy. Now they need to play a far more conscious role in
community development. The future is fashioned from the stuff of
public policy rather than private enterprise. In short, the behavior of
the public sector becomes a determinate of growth rates, of the rela¬
tive attractiveness among urban regions to the new industries. We
are faced with the urgent question of determining the appropriate scope
and character of the urban public sector and traditional approaches of
welfare economics offer few ready answers.
Take a second component of our new regions, often acknowledged
but only recently seriously considered. That is the behavior and as¬
pirations of the new minority, the Negro. This year has dramatically
revealed the special thrust of that group's drive for status and accept¬
ability. This is a dimension in the urban American experience which
20
Robert C. Wood
cannot easily be accommodated by conventional class analysis. Es¬
pecially in the great metropolitan regions of the North and West, a
more accurate understanding of the urban Negro experience is both
badly needed in academic terms and close to an imperative in public
policy terms. One simply cannot assume that the traditional process
of assimilation associated with rising income and changing occupa¬
tions that characterized the Irish, the Italian, the Pole, the German,
the Jew will take place. Nor can one assume that the Negro willac-
ceptas satisfactory, his present opportunities for housing and school¬
ing. This is a dimension of the new urban region which both scholar
and policy-maker will have to come to grips with before 1970 has ar¬
rived.
Finally, the political scientist has a new task before him. To
date he has analyzed the metropolitan area basically in terms of formal
institutions and formal procedures of government. It is doubtful that
these institutions will be readily manipulated into new formal struc¬
tures of metropolitan government. But this does not mean that a new
metropolitan political system is not appearing or that new and more
sophisticated mechanisms do not need to be fashioned. Today the
political scientist has to think not in terms of the formal government
agency or formal boundary lines but of new enterprises of a quasi¬
public, quasi-private character which serve to knit the region together.
Just as our national defense program now goes forward under arrange¬
ments that join public agencies and private corporations together in
a complex web of contractual relations, so the new metropolitan areas
will probably have ultimately to be governed by far more subtle and
sophisticated processes.
In all probability, the se mechanisms will not bear the formal name
of governments. They will weave together state and federal programs
as well as local. Sometimes they may take the form of planning com¬
missions with no formal statutory authority and involve decision¬
makers who hold no formal office. The seeds of this new enterprise
are already visible. The urban renewal program and the planning
grants of the Federal government to metropolitan regions, the new re¬
lationships established between state agencies and their local counter¬
parts, these are prototypes of the new institutions. How to make them
operational and produce decisions, howto equip them with regularized
procedures and visible deliberations, how to make them popularly
responsible, is the great challenge of urban political science today.
In sum, the arrival of the spread city and the demise of the old
city of the industrial age means neither catastrophe, as popular com¬
mentators would often have us believe, nor acceptance of things as
they are. Urban prospects in the United States beyond 1970 depend
not on secession of scholarly activity but on its intensification in new
Urban Prospects ^ 1970 and Beyond
Z1
directions of inquiry and investigation. We know enough now to have
learned that simple diagnoses and simple prescriptions will not be
sufficient to guide and shape trends in the complex systems govern¬
ing urban human behavior. Now we need to know how to detect the
truly new dimensions of our life, how to perceive choices offered us
in the direction and manipulation of the current trends, and how ulti¬
mately to control the forces which are at work.
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE METROPOLIS
Frank P. Zeidler
There is an intense interest these days in the rapid growth of
cities and in the concentration of population in urban places* Dr.
Philip Sundalj who made a study of Wisconsin's population for the
Department of Resource Development, has noted that
Approximately 84 per cent of the national growth between 1950
and I960 took place in standard metropolitan statistical areas
(SMSA's). These are entire counties containing cities of 50, 000
or more — in some cases more than one county. The 212 SMSA's
in the nation increased by 23.6 million out of a total of about 28
million; of this 17.9 million occurred in the outlying parts of the
SMSA's, and 5.6 million in the central cities. The growth of sub¬
urbia, then, is the main feature of current growth patterns. The
last decade largely repeats the experience of the 1940's.
The Wisconsin SMSA's (Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay,
Racine, Kenosha and Superior— that part in the state only) grew
from 1, 456, 157 in 1950 to 1, 828, 871 in I960. Thus, the seven
counties that make up our six S MSA' s obtained 372,714 out of the
518, 196 gain in the last 10 years— 72 percent of the state's
growth. ^
Dr. Sundal also says that
Between 1950 and 1960 the entire national population gain was
credited to urban areas— basically places of 2,500 or more, plus
fringe areas of cities of 50, 000 or more. The rural population,
which includes places of less than 2, 500 plus the countryside,
declined by about one per cent.
^Philip Sundal, Wisconsin's Population, 1962. State of Wisconsin Department
of Resource Development ( Madison, 1962), p. 11.
22
23
Role of Government in Development of the Metropolis
In a paper prepared for this Academy's annual meeting in 1961,
I described the heavy increase in the seven southeastern counties of
Wisconsin, in which the counties had 64, 4 per cent of the total popu¬
lation increase in the state the preceding year. The three standard
metropolitan areas of Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine, had an in¬
crease of 54. 9 per cent of the state total, while the increase in the
Milwaukee metropolitan area alone represented 44. 4 per cent of the
state's total increase.
As most of you know, the population of the nation is expected to
increase by about 30,000, 000 (barring catastrophe) in the next decade.
If the trends of the past continue, this population increase will be
represented largely by an increase in the suburban fringe of the stan¬
dard metropolitan statistical areas.
The question arises as to what is the role of government in over¬
seeing this expansion of an urban population in the next decade.
The concentration of a great many people in a relatively small
area of land produces the phenomenon of urbanism. Urbanism requires
special controls and special arrangements in the social economic and
governmental order if people are to survive when they are crowded so
closely together. This much is obvious. Urbanism also produces
special benefits and privileges which become prizes to contest for,
asforexample favorable land sites, or access to water rights, or just
the opportunity to enjoy fresh air. Obtaining of special benefits pro¬
duces moneta^ and political power.
Under the twin pressures of the need for laws to control the physi¬
cal, economic and social development of cities, and of the powerful
demands of urban political and economic leaders, national and state
governments have granted charters and special laws to cities and urban
places for the maintenance of physical, social and economic order of
some kind inside the legal boundaries of the city.
In the past century in Wisconsin, the state was fairly generous
in allowing cities to expand and to obtain new powers and new laws
of regulation and control. During the first decade of this century,
however, this attitude began to change. The expansion of cities, and
in this state, of the city of Milwaukee in particular was something
which was not completely to the liking of the legislature. The urban
fringe and surrounding townships of Milwaukee began to exert more
influence on the legislature, so that the growth of the city of Milwaukee
which was the heart of the state's largest urban area did not keep
pace in boundaries with the growth of its urban fringe. If one looks
at a map showing the annexations of the city of Milwaukee, he finds
that these annexations of the last century were in sizeable blocks.
In the 1960's, however, the annexations were often no larger than a
few lots, orperhaps, afew acres. Only the consolidation of Milwaukee
24 Frank P. Zeidler
with two townships provided a major growth for the city in the decade
of the 1950's.
This pattern of state suspicion of the growth of the central city
of our metropolitan areas has not been limited to Wisconsin alone.
Arthur W. Bromage in his book, Municipal Government and Admin¬
istration notes that
State legislators, jealous of their powers over local units, were
reluctant to invest discretion in state officials who were either
independent or semi-independent of the legislature. Moreover,
decentralization of power among thousands of units of local gov¬
ernment served with the states' purposes for many decades. ^
However, the interest of the states in getting into the problems
of metropolitan growth was also checked by the attitude of the muni¬
cipalities, based on their previous experience. Once given their
charters, municipalities have tended to resist state interference with
or without regulation of their internal processes. Special laws en¬
acted by state legislatures to regulate one or another function of mu¬
nicipal governments were usually resisted, whether just or unjust, on
the grounds that they interfered with the right of cities to govern
themselves under their charters. Groups pressing for an advantage
under local government, when defeated by the local council, would
request the legislatures to overrule the local councils, and were suc¬
cessful often enough. This condition set up the cry of "home rule" —
the right of cities to govern themselves without legislative interference.
The demands for home rule have brought some kind of home rule legis¬
lation to substantially more than half of the states. Such laws may
be in the form of new legislation or of amendments to the state con¬
stitution.^
The twin effects of state opposition to growth of central cities,
and the local demand for home rule, has led to a situation of much
friction and trouble in metropolitan areas. States promoted fragmen¬
tation of governments in such areas, and the advocator of home rule
did likewise.
The situation would not have been so bad if each of the govern¬
mental units themselves were absolutely self-sufficient, and the people
living under them did not cross the boundary lines of their own com¬
munities for business and other reasons. But the very essence of
2
Arthur W. Bromage, Introduction to Municipal Government and Administration
(New York, 1957), p. 127.
3
Harold F. Alderfer, American Local Government and AdministrationiHevi Yotk^
1955, pp. 178 ff.
Role of Government in Development of the Metropolis 25
metropolitan areas is the homogeneity of municipal problems, and the
interconnection of social and governmental arrangements. To para¬
phrase the scriptures, "No local government liveth and dieth unto
itself. "
The pressure of urgent problems, or even the belief that certain
municipal problems are urgent even if they aren't, brings on pressures
for the solution of metropolitan governmental problems. Under the
doctrine of home rule and under the fear of the growing political influ¬
ence of the central city in a metropolitan area, states and the national
government should not have so largely abdicated their joint responsi¬
bilities to provide better governmental arrangements in these areas
earlier in the century. They have begun to remedy matters.
Because of the increased complexity of metropolitan areas in
some places of the United States where such areas are multi-state or
international in character, I see an increased role being played in
such areas by the federal government. The solution of multi-state
metropolitan problems may have to be through state compacts, ratified
by the Congress. In the matter of water supply, control of sewage,
air pollution, public health matters, and public transportation, the
federal government certainly will have to play an important role in
setting up standards and objectives, and in encouraging local govern¬
ments to try to attain these standards by the twin efforts of grants-in-
aid and enforcement of federal laws against practices which are de¬
structive of the natural resources on which metropolitan areas must
draw for survival.
I do not limit the types of federal grants -in-aid to metropolitan
areas which will be necessary only to these types mentioned above.
Other types of federal aid now exist, and still other types, such as
federal aid to education, or federal aid for home defense, will un¬
doubtedly be necessary.
Such federal aid will be necessary because as the urban popula¬
tion grows, only the federal government will have access to the proper
funds which can be taxed. States and local governments will be too
limited in these powers to reach the most fruitful sources of taxation.
This type of grant-in-aid I am talking about now is for problems
that exist now and need to be remedied now in our urban areas.
There is another kind of role the federal government will have to
play in the metropolitan areas— the federal government will have to
answer the question as to whether it wants to allow the continued
concentration of the large majority of the nation's population in urban
areas where that population is an easy target. The Congress of the
United States has had a chance to look at this problem a number of
times and has decided not to institute any major policies which would
prevent this trend or reverse it. This issue presents too many difficult
26
Frank P. Zeidler
decisions and is being settled by default. Thus, concentration will
be allowed to build up if that is the way things "naturally" develop.
Perhaps this is wise. It may be that the close proximity of man
to man which urbanism promotes will cause interaction resulting in
new scientific marvels which will provide new weapons of defense
against the overwhelming advantage of the current weapons of offense
pointed at cities.
Perhaps the restriction on further migration to cities would ad¬
versely affect commercial interests of the big cities and this is a price
too high to meet. Whatever may be the reasons for the Congress of
the United States not taking a position on the growth of metropolitan
areas at the expense of more even growth throughout the nation, I be¬
lieve a grave mistake is being made. It is my opinion that eventually
this nation, for its own protection and for the preservation of the nat¬
ural resources upon which metropolitan areas depend, and because of
the mounting cost of government of urban areas, will have to embark
on some kind of industrial zoning to prevent excessive concentration
of vital facilities and people in too few metropolitan areas of the
nation.
To some extent, however, the policies of the federal government
in highway building are tending to diffuse the population, commerce,
and industry of metropolitan areas along interstate highways. We are
only just beginning to see the effects of these roads on urban and
metropolitan configuration and shape. It is probable that the central
cities will become less dense, empty out (with a concomitant decay
of land values), and that the population will spread out for ten or fif¬
teen miles along the express highway within easy reach of it.
This portends unhappy futures for the central cities and for the
small crossroads along which earlier highways ran. People 'will desert
them for the new areas, and to this extent, lessen perhaps their own
vulnerability as urban targets. But this leveling will create new prob¬
lems of public utilities, schools, roads and public services of all
kinds, in the new places where people may now make their habitation.
The role of the states in dealing with the problems of the growing
metropolitan areas ought to be a more positive one. States ought to
scrutinize carefully these areas, and by legislative action provide
one appropriate government for all the metropolitan problems_-in a given
geographic area. Whether this type of government would be a new
multi-purpose metropolitan government, or a new unified municipal
government, or an urban county government is a matter which I will
not discuss now. Any of these three types would be better than the
fragmentation of governments which now exists in metropolitan areas,
and which are unable to come to agreement on several important area¬
wide functions. Prof. Manuel Gottlieb of the University of Wisconsin-
Role of Government in Development of the Metropolis Z7
Milwaukee has offered the novel idea that charters to local govern¬
ments in a metropolitan area ought to be reviewed by the state govern¬
ment periodically. If the governments in the area are deficient in
services and ability to cooperate, the charters ought to be rescinded
and a new charter ought to be issued for a unified government in the
area. There is merit in this idea.
However, around the nation, I do not expect many state govern¬
ments to pioneer; first, because of the vehemence of the adherents of
suburban communities (which enjoy favorable advantages over their
neighbors) to the ideas of home rule; such persons will discourage
legislative inquiry. Second, state legislators in many states, con¬
fronted with the decay of the rural districts and small towns which
they represent, will not do much to try to reverse the trend. Instead,
they will seek to keep the legislative representation of the metropoli¬
tan areas from exercising any considerable increase of voting power
in legislatures because of numbers.
The existence of the decision of the United States Supreme Court
in the case of Baker versus Carr^ on the subject of proper apportion¬
ment for people from urban areas, has sparked a revolt in some state
legislatures which aims at nothing less than the nullification of the
supremacy of the federal government. As long as this attitude prevails
in legislatures among representatives of rural communities, small
towns, or the suburbs of the bigger cities, it is too much to hope for
the kind of positive leadership from state governments that is required
in urban areas to meet the pressing problems. This continual unwill-
ingless of state governments to face up to the implications of urbanism,
may in the long run, lead to the serious diminution of the role of state
government in American life. The states may become vesitigial rem¬
nants of legislative authority as more direct relationships develop be¬
tween the federal government and metropolitan area governments.
It may be that in the long run, metropolitan districts and the areas
over which they exert economic dominance, will receive some kind of
special recognition from the federal government making them more
viable administrative units. Take the situation here in our own state
as an example. The pull of the cultural and economic influence of
the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul is much more dom¬
inant in the northwestern counties of this state than the influence of
southeastern Wisconsin where the bulk of the state's population is.
States can remedy their deficiencies by giving proper legislative
representation to urban populations, and by troubling themselves to
study what is going on in the metropolitan areas, and providing guidance
for the solution of the physical, economic, and social problems that
arise there.
An especially Important role that states can play is in the develop-
28
Frank P. Zeidler
ing of regional plans for metropolitan areas that are not merely advisory,
but which have teeth in them to enforce the proposals of the plan.
Regional planning with enforcement of a properly prepared plan is
needed to prevent pollution of water resources, pollution of air, and
the despoliation of the land into a multitude of unsightly parcels, cur¬
rently the chief characteristic of land use around our great metropoli¬
tan areas. Regional zoning is needed to check the destruction of the
resources upon which a metropolitan area must live.
The role of county government in metropolitan areas is likely to
grow. Except in a few places in this nation such as at Baton Rouge
and Nashville, attempts to create special types of metropolitan govern¬
ments dealing with metropolitan problems have uniformly failed, some¬
times for one reason and sometimes for another. Such specially formed
metropolitan governments are not easy to create. It is much easier
to transfer metropolitan functions from local governments and munici¬
palities to county governments, because the county governments have
strength in every legislature which local governments do not possess.
Consequently the development of the urban county in the United States
is a movement of considerable importance in metropolitan areas. The
urban county is often not coterminous with the urban central area and
urban fringe, but transfer of functions to county governments tends to
alleviate pressure for metropolitan problem-solving.
However, among the counties and county officials there is no
uniform drive to assume urban responsibilities. Throughout the United
States, ruralcounties are suspicious of officials in urban counties and
often refuse them the right to modernize their county governments to
fit urban needs.
The role of local governments in solving metropolitan area prob¬
lems is almost wholly dependent on the policy decisions of the Con¬
gress and the state legislatures. There is some pressure for voluntary
meetings of the heads of all urban governments in a given area, such
as is now taking place around Detroit, and in the New York City area.
Such meetings may be fruitful of small gains, but when it comes to
such substantive matters as providing an equal tax base throughout
a metropolitan area, and equal sharing of the metropolitan load of ser¬
vices, I do not see the favored communities among the urban fragments
of government yielding any advantage at all.
Moreover, as has been noted by others who have spoken on the
metropolitan problem in the Milwaukee area, notably Alderman James
J. Mortier, there is a built-in system of defense of each local govern¬
ment for the privileges held within its own domain, and each public
official by his oath of office is sworn to defend the advantages his
community may enjoy vis-a-vis another community. Voluntary coopera¬
tion cannot be expected to go to the extent that one set of local
29
Role of Government in Development of the Metropolis
officials will readily yield advantages to another set and thus help
solve metropolitan problems except in the case of the bigger central
cities.
In the bigger central cities, certain phenomenon, I think, are ob¬
servable which are going to compound the problems of these areas.
For one thing the flight of the upper income people to the suburbs near
and far is draining the central city not only of technical and professional
talent, but also of its tax base. The concentration of low income
people in the central city at the same time as its tax base is fleeing
to the suburbs, means higher taxes for the remaining industries, which
in turn will be compelled to flee. Only copious federal grants-in-aid
in the future may be able to save parts of the central city from be¬
coming a vast unrelieved slum of physical and social decay resulting
from economic depression.
In central cities where a non-white minority is concentrated and
growing, as in Chicago, this group as it gains political power, may
resist being incorporated in an area-wide government, to prevent the
voice of its demands from being muffled in a government in which the
minority fraction diminishes still further.
In other places where this problem may not be so acute, there is
the tendency of the suburban leaders to become dominant in control
of the affairs of the central city. This is because the cost of cam¬
paigning for leading office in a large central city is now so great that
the chief financial sources for supporting a winning candidate come
from the suburbs, and the policies of the winning candidate therefore
reflect what suburban leaders want. I am not aware of any current
studies on the true power structure which controls central urban cities,
but I am under the impression based on what I know of several cities
that the suburban influence predominates in critical issues, especially
those affecting the lower income people of the city who are struggling
for the basic needs of shelter, jobs, and family stability.
Another debilitating factor in the health of local governments in
dealing with their own ills, is the rise of control over the politics of
the cities in some places by the gangster element. The power of this
element in some states, notably Illinois, reaches into the legislature,
to work adversely to the best interests of the metropolitan area.
Because of the incapacity of city governments in metropolitan
areas to work out effectively equitable solutions for their own prob¬
lems, I see the definite need for the creation of state and federal
departments of urban affairs, with functions similar to the Ontario mu¬
nicipal board which made the recommendations creating the Munici¬
pality of Metropolitan Toronto. We must not allow the concept of
"home rule" to cause the disorganization and disruption of local gov¬
ernment into such warring factions as to make all metropolitan progress
impossibly slow.
30
Frank P. Zeidler
I also see the need for citizen groups to become more interested
and informed on local problems both by formal education and by par¬
ticipation as interested parties in the affairs of the metropolitan area.
What is mostly needed in metropolitan areas is the development of a
broadly represented citizen council which will press at the state leg¬
islature for solution to the metropolitan development problems apart
from the creation of ad hoc or single purpose governmental districts.
Citizen groups addressing themselves to solving particular de¬
ficiencies in metropolitan areas also are needed, especially in such
areas as housing, planning, community relations, crime prevention,
education, cultural development and transportation.
These citizen groups are required to give local government officials
the knowledge that they will not be jeopardizing their political careers
if they act to meet the problems of the metropolitan areas. From such
citizen groups can come the future leadership of elected representa¬
tives in the representative bodies of government at all levels. There
must not be a decay of the quality of representation in legislative
bodies if government is to be both democratic and effective.
The means by which effective citizen groups can be established
to allow government to play an effective role is another subject in it¬
self, but certainly a principal source of leadership must come from the
universities and colleges of the nation, especially those which are
situated in metropolitan areas. It has become apparent in some studies
of medium sized Illinois communities that there has been a loss of
citizen leadership and initiative in those communities which had led
to their stagnation. The restoration of such leadership in many com¬
munities throughout the nation might well be the objective of the ex¬
tension divisions of our land grant colleges and universities.
CIVIC INFLUENCES AND FORCES IN
THE GROWTH OE THE AMERICAN CITY
Coleman Woodbury
The basic premise of this paper is that local communities are in¬
tricate social systems and subsystems that develop and change in
response to the interplay of a fascinating, at times almost a bewilder¬
ing, complex of forces or influences. Every school boy who has been
taught the elementary facts about the human body as a physiological
system or about a forest as an ecological system, knows that signifi¬
cant changes occurring or induced in one part lead to other changes,
often whole chains of them, in the same or other parts. So it is, too,
with social systems. In this paper, these secondary changes follow¬
ing certain measures or programs are usually referred to as by-products
or spill-over effects. In local communities, they and the interplay
of forces that account for them are often very involved and often not
too well understood. It seems only fair, therefore, to remind you at
the outsetthat in any brief discussion of urban communities and their
growth, one must work with a very broad brush and in bold strokes.
He simply hasn't time for the qualifications, exceptions, footnotes,
and outright hedging that would be in order in any more thorough or
systematic analysis.
Let me add one other warning: The forces or influences in urban
affairs, to which I referred a few sentences ago, are often discussed
in conventional terms as economic, governmental or political, social
and socio-psychological. I don't object seriously to these terms; we
seem to have to use them in this kind of discourse. At least, however,
we should recognize that in local community affairs almost no major
operative force is solely or purely economic or political or social
or psychological in the common meaning of these terms. They are
hybrids. Also, for the purposes of this paper I assume that no cate¬
gory of influences is set apart from the others as above and beyond
analysis or evaluation or modification.
Perhaps it will be useful to identify at the outset three major
31
32
Coleman Woodbury
classes of civic influences or forces in American urban life. To be
sure, this is only one of many possible schemes of classification, and
not all of the influences fit easily and neatly into one of the classes.
For whatever value it may have in our discussion, however, here it is:
(1) First, we should note a number of service or activity or, in the
non-technical sense, functional programs in behalf of, for example,
schools, public health, recreation, youth activities, family welfare,
race and inter-group relations, mental health, adult education ( in¬
cluding public libraries), transport and parking, housing, renewal or
redevelopment; (2) Promotional efforts to stimulate economic activity
and to attract new industries and other sources of employment and
purchasing power; and (3) Less frequently ad hoc attempts to reorgan¬
ize the form or structure of local governments and of quasi-public in¬
stitutions, such as welfare councils or community chests.
Of course these are not the only forces shaping urban communi¬
ties— nor even the only major ones. Others that come readily to mind
include actions of national, state, and local legislative bodies and
administrative agencies, the decisions of appellate courts, grants-in-
aid and other inducements offered by the national and state govern¬
ments, as well as changes in the organization and management of
economic life and in the technology of our culture, increases in the
amount and the wider distribution of leisure time, the continual and
pervasive pressure of the media of mass communications, changes in
religious outlook, even the teachings of institutions of higher educa¬
tion, and the less formal but continuous interaction of smaller, in¬
formal groups. I suggest, however, that we concentrate on those in
the three categories named. They seem to me to fit fairly well under
the general heading of civic influences — the first and third clearly;
the second probably with some question.
At the risk of elaborating the obvious, let me comment briefly on
the first of these three categories of community-shaping programs.
Many, although not all of the service or activity programs have
gone through rather similar courses of evolution. Often they have
been proposed first by non-official groups or organizations. Often the
actual starts of the programs themselves have been made by such or¬
ganizations. Later they have been taken over as parts of the activity
of general purpose local governments or entrusted to ad hoc, special
authorities or districts of one kind or another. Thus, in Madison some
of the finest open and recreational spaces were acquired decades ago
by a private group operating under the good, Victorian- sounding title
of the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association. Incidentally,
many of the early city planning efforts had a similar origin. It is
well known that, a few years before, Mr. Burnham had prepared a
similar plan for San Francisco. There the sponsor was "The Associa¬
tion for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco."
33
Influences and Forces in Growth of American City
Often after the service or activity has been taken over by local
government^ the private group continues in the same or altered form
as the supporter^ watchdog and gadfly of the service. Quite often, of
course, one service or program has had more than one group of backers
and particularly in smaller communities, the supporting groups of two
or more services often overlap considerably in membership.
In total, these various services or activities, their proponents
and administrators, have done much for and to urban communities in
this country-much more, In fact, than most of us today fully recog¬
nize. We take them too much for granted. Of course, they, too, have
had their weaknesses. One is the obverse of the urban planners’
former but not disappearing fixation on physical development; the
service-oriented groups, with some exceptions, have belittled or
underplayed the place of a decent, pleasant physical setting for
family, group, and community life. At school or in a boys’ club, a
boy is told that American democracy’s cornerstone is respect for the
worth and dignity of the individual. Within the hour, he goes to his
home in a slum area and encounters there little or nothing that seems
to accord with this fine phrase. Sooner or later he may begin to won¬
der who is kidding whom, and why. This sort of thing happens not
once but many times overthe years. If, following this and many other
experiences, he and his friends set up or join some street gang with
its own and, to us, distorted value system, why should any intelligent
person be astonished?
Also, too many of the service-oriented groups, despite their close
and symbiotic connections with local governments, have been inclined
to be harshly and even unfairly critical of governmental agencies and
officials, particularly when, as is inevitable, they do not or cannot
do everything that the partisans of a service think should be done for
their pet cause. The non-official proponents often contrast "citizen
groups" with government officials or "bureaucrats, " as if a man or
woman ceased being a citizen when he was elected to office or em¬
ployed by an agency of government. Perhaps these antagonistic atti¬
tudes that crop out so frequently are traceable in part to the difficulties
of communication across the social and educational strata of our so¬
ciety* Certainly, however, they often detract from the contributions
these groups make to community life.
Another weakness in this private cum public process of develop¬
ing and administering community services has been the very consider¬
able degree of competition and even mutual interference among them.
Some competition certainly is unavoidable and even desirable, but
quite as clearly it can become harmful or dysfunctional. It tends to
make the proponents of any one service, public officials and non¬
officials alike, narrow partisans in a no-holds-barred struggle for
34
Coleman Woodbury
attention, publicity, money, and even for competent personnel and
spokesmen. Of course, lip service is commonly paid to cooperation
and the genuine article is often seen, but too often it is cooperation
in the spirit of the man who said that although in general he was in
favor of cooperation, just as he was in favor of virtue and motherhood,
in specific instances he would like to know who was going to do the
"co-ing" and who the "operating."
In short, all three of the kinds of programs I listed earlier as well
as Director- Mayor Zeidler's governmental factors and activities have
contributed notably to shaping local community life and affairs. In
my opinion, however, in only a very few localities do their total con¬
tributions add up to, or even approach, an effective grand strategy for
making our urban communities the kind of social entities that we could
reasonably expect them to be. We are not getting optimum results
from the time, effort and money that we are expending through private
as well as public channels, let alone the results that would be realized
if we tapped all of the talent and other resources that are at hand.
This, of course, is a value judgment, a "subjective judgment" —and
a sweeping one at that. I would guess, however, that many of you
would agree with it.
Change in Outlook
If this were all that is to be said on this front, you could fairly
say, yes, yes, of course— and let it go at that. But it isn't all. In
my opinion, the most significant recent events in urban community life
are the signs that some of the proponents and administrators of both
governmental and civic agencies and programs are beginning to look
beyond their self-imposed, traditional boundaries, to recognize the
connections and dependencies of their work on that of others equally
concerned with the community welfare, and to see that in urban com¬
munities, as in other systems, the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts. To be sure, these signs so far are not too numerous, but
they do seem to be increasing in number and in strength. Let me cite
just two examples.
For some years past, the scope of urban public planning has been
widening in several directions. What is sometimes called the ortho¬
dox view (planning only for physical development) is gone in some
communities; it seems on the way out in most others. Just one illus¬
tration; In many localities capital programming, which is essentially
planning in terms of time, money, and priorities instead of space, is
now an accepted and significant part of the process. Many professional
planners now approve the remark by the late Hugh Pomeroy, one of
35
Influences and Forces in Growth of American City
the leading planning practitioners of the past generation, that urban
planning without capital programming is the adult equivalent of writing
letters to Santa Claus. And as planners get into this field (and con¬
comitantly into the hair of some municipal finance officers) they soon
see that capital and operating budgets are inextricably interrelated.
If local governments plan for and produce more playgrounds or school
space, they must maintain and operate. Here any additional annual
expenditures called for have to be considered in relation to those now
on the books for the same and different services. This clearly means
that any major recommendation of an urban planning agency may have
repercussions throughout a wide range of community programs— public
and civic alike.
My second example: Despite some early warnings, enthusiasts
for redevelopment or renewal long looked upon their activity as pri¬
marily the replacing of obsolete and substandard buildings with new
ones. The crucial aids needed were eminent domain in the assembly
of sites and the federal purse in reducing acquisition costs to reason¬
able use values. To be sure, some families and others would have
to be relocated, but, in this earlier, simplified view, this was a minor
detail that would be adequately taken care of by minimum payments
for moving expenses and by hiring a social worker or real estate man
to help the less enterprising residents of the areas to find other quar¬
ters. Today, many, many people know better. Experience and some
reflection have made clear that redevelopment, even on a fairly modest
scale, is surgery that cuts deeply into the social fabric of neighbor¬
hoods and larger communities. It drastically affects churches, schools,
the clientele of professional and business men, local political organ¬
izations, and even sometimes fairly deep attachments to districts,
neighborhoods or other area groupings that may seem from the outside
to be formless and disorganized. Consequences of this nature are not
limited to areas to be rebuilt; often they are only less serious in other
areas to which the displaced families and small businessmen go or
would like to go. This earlier view of redevelopment is now largely
a thing of the past in many localities.
If time and your patience permitted, it would be easy to pile up
more illustrations of this point, but these must suffice. Do the issues
cited seem very, even painfully, obvious? To those accustomed to
think of local communities as social systems, the answer probably is
yes. But the record is quite clear that many well-intentioned persons
active in local affairs either have only begun to think in these terms,
or in the past have shrugged off the by-products or spill-over effects
of the programs and measures they advocated, probably on the grounds
that these were the concerns of someone else— presumably the George
of " let-George-do-it. " What I wish to emphasize, however, is that,
36
Coleman Woodbury
more and more, the separatism or particularism of many persons con¬
cerned with the various facets of urban affairs is giving way to a much
more inclusive and defensible outlook.
Quite possibly we are on the verge of one of these "breakthroughs"
that we hear so much about in other fields. The institutional cocoons
woven so firmly in the embryonic stages of various local community
services and activities do seem to be bursting. More and more,
thoughtful people in community affairs are groping their way toward
some crystallizing idea more useful and fruitful in urban life than more
or less blind addition to physical planning or adult education or in¬
dustrial promotion or a streamlined local government structure. What
seems likely to be that crystallizing concept or idea?
Before suggesting an answer to that query, we should consider
briefly two other questions: (1) What influences seem to account for
this incipient change in outlook on the parts of some local community
leaders and activists? (2) Do these influences seem likely to prove
strong enough in the middlerange future to break most of the cocoons
wide open? Let me try to answer these questions very summarily.
Factors in These Changes
First among the influences making for recognition of local com¬
munities as social systems are the tides of population growth and re¬
distribution in our age. Not only is the nation's population growing
substantially, but it is probably the most physically or geographically
mobile major population in the history of the world since the days of
essentially nomadic societies. Ever since World War II, roughly 20%
of the people in this country have been changing their places of resi¬
dence every year. About two-thirds of these moves are within the same
county, one-sixth from one county to another within the same state,
and one-sixth from one state to another. The net of these flows and
counterflows is concentrating a very large and increasing proportion
of the total population in metropolitan areas and in the smaller, but
otherwise similar, urbanareas. Within these areas, the central cities,
by and large, have been growing very slowly or actually declining in
numbers; the suburbs, the nucleated settlements outside the central
cities, have been increasing substantially; the rural-urban fringes,
those outlying, less densely populated areas that in pattern of settle¬
ment and ways of life are neither urban or rural, have been growing
most rapidly of all—both in rate and total numbers. A strong in-migration
to urban and urbanizing areas is made up in considerable part of the
poorer and even the depressed rural areas. Not only are they poor;
they are unskilled in urban ways of making a living and equally un¬
skilled in the ways of living in an urban environment.
Influences and Forces in Growth of American City
37
As these population changes, in various combinations and mixes,
affect urban areas, they spell stress and strain on local institutions
and individuals, and often considerable bewilderment and even fear.
This is true not only in the areas of rapid increase, but also in those
of stagnation and decline. Theoldways of looking at and doing things
in community affairs just don't seem as adequate and as unquestionable
as they used to.
Closely linked with these population increases and shifts are the
ever tightening financial straits in which most urban communities now
find themselves. Since World War II, the aggregate number of housing
units built is more than 50% of the total stock of non-farm housing in
this country at the beginning of this period. In most localities, there¬
fore, excess capacity in schools, water supply and sewage disposal
systems, hospitals, and other community facilities has long since
been absorbed. Additions are being made at the highest construction
costs in the history of the country. The aggregate volume of local
government debt outstanding in 1959 was 250% of that in 1950, and
higher interest rates have added measurably to its burden. One esti¬
mate is "that in California approximately $13, 000 of public capital
facilities must be provided for every new family coming into the State. " ^
Projections of future needs are even more ominous.
In short, when finances are straightened and community capital
goods are in short supply, the by-product, spill-over effects of addi¬
tions to or major extensions of services or facilities can more quickly
and more readily be seen. The futility or even danger of the single-
track mind in such affairs becomes ever more apparent.
Of course these are not the only influences making for the chang¬
ing view of urban programs and policy, but they do seem to me per¬
vasive and significant ones. Do they or other factors seem likely to
continue the pressure away from the segmented or particularistic to¬
ward the social system conception of urban community policies? My
answer is yes— these forces seem very likely to persist for some time
tocomeand their consequences on this front quite probably will con¬
tinue. Another possibility, of course, is that these pressures of popu¬
lation growth and shift and the tautness of present financial resources
and physical facilities might lead to a loss of nerve among many of
those individuals and agencies, both civic and public, that so far
have supplied most of the motive power for local community programs
and development. Conceivably, they might conclude that their hopes
^ James Gilliefe In Metropolitan California, a study prepared for the Governor's
Commission on Metropolitan Area Problems, 1961— as cited by Catherine Bauer
Wurster in Government in Metropolitan Areas: Commentaries on a Report by the
Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (Washington, 1961), p. 118.
38
Coleman Woodbury
and objectives have been too high, and that all local programs, in¬
cluding their own, must be cut to the bone, "frills" eliminated, the
three R's re-enthroned, etc. Surely some persons will go in this direc¬
tion, but the history of local community activities over the past cen¬
tury or so, in prosperity and depression, suggests that this would not
be the major trend.
In Conclusion
Let me try to restate the argument of this paper and add my answer
to one unanswered question:
(1) Civic agencies and programs have made and are making many
substantial contributions to urban life. To the not uncommon but
cheap sneer about "do-gooders," for me the sufficient answer is that
I'd rather be a "do-gooder" than a "do-badder" or a "do-nothing,"
which would seem to be the other major possibilities.
( 2) For decades past, a persistent if somewhat uneven trend can
be noted in the role of civic organizations vis-a-vis governmental
agencies. Programs started by and often administered by civic groups
are taken over, in considerable part, though usually not completely,
as public or governmental activities. The civic groups then tend to
become primarily supporters and critics. Within very broad limits
this seems to me a natural and desirable evolution.
(3) The principal weaknesses in these programs, both those pri¬
marily in civic and those in public hands, have been particularism
and the kind of competition among them that often amounts to mutual
interference.
(4) More recently, frequent signs indicate that this brand of par¬
ticularism or segmentalism is giving way to a recognition that urban
communities are social systems, the principal parts of which are closely
and intricately interconnected— as one of my friends likes to say—
"inextricably intertwingled. "
( 5) The emerging idea or concept that quite possibly may replace
particularism, mutual suspicion and interference in the civic -cww -
public life of American urban centers, is the process of community
planning. To explain and defend this suggestion would take consider¬
ably more time than my total allotment this morning. May I simply
point out two things; (a) For me, community planning is not an ism.
It is the process of preparing, in advance, in a reasonably systematic
manner and with careful attention to by-products or spill-over effects,
recommendations forcourses of action to achieve accepted objectives
in the common life of communities. ( b) Although the scope of this
planning would take in both capital outlays and physical facilities as
39
Influences and Forces in Growth of American City
well as the principal features of operating programs, I am advocating
a process, not the centralization of all or nearly all planning in one
agency or office. The forms of organization, the machinery, undoubt¬
edly will vary greatly from city to city.
What basically American cities need on this front and what com¬
munity planning of this kind could assure, is a grand strategy to make
optimum use of the money, facilities, brain-power and good will that
are now going into civic and governmental programs plus the additional
amounts of these valuable components that an effective, inclusive
strategy undoubtedly would attract.
Man does not live by bread alone—nor even by bread plus civic
organizations plus community planning. For healthful community life,
one element is even more basic. On this let me read you, in a trans¬
lation by Professor Agard of The University of Wisconsin, a well-known
statement made centuries ago in another and markedly different culture:
Our government is called a democracy because power resides,
not in a few people, but in the majority of our citizens. But every
person has equal rights before the law; prestige and respect are
paid those who win them by their merits, regardless of their po¬
litical, economic, or social status; and no one is deprived of
making his contribution to the city's welfare. We are equally
fair-minded in tolerating differences in people' s private concerns;
we do not get irritated with our neighbors when they do what they
like or show those signs of disapproval which do no great harm
but are certainly unpleasant. In our public dealings we have
respect for our officials and the laws, especially those laws
which protect the helpless and those unwritten laws whose viola¬
tion is generally regarded as shameful.
But we do more than this. We have provided for the happiness
of our people many recreations: athletic games, contests of vari¬
ous sorts, festivals throughout the year, and beautiful buildings
to cheer the heart and refresh the spirit as we see them every day.
Also we enjoy imported goods from all over the world, which add
to the attractive variety of our life. . . .
We love beauty without extravagance, and wisdom without
weakness of will. Wealth we regard not as a means for private
display but rather for public service; and poverty we consider no
disgrace, although we think it is a disgrace not to try to over¬
come it. We believe a man should be concerned about public as
well as private affairs, for we regard the person who takes no
part in politics not as merely uninterested but as useless. We
reach decisions on public policy only after full discussion, be¬
lieving that sound judgment, far from being impeded by discussion.
40
Coleman Woodbury
is arrived at only when full information is considered before a
decision is made.
To sum it up, I claim that our city is a model for all Greece
and that here more than anywhere else a man can become inde¬
pendent in spirit, versatile in accomplishment, and richly devel¬
oped in personality. The proof of our greatness is the way in
which we have made our way into every land and sea, establish¬
ing memorials of our hostility and our favor.
Such is the city for which these men died,- exulting in their
determination that she should not perish. It is fitting that we
who survive should likewise spend ourselves in her service. We
may pray to be spared their suffering, but we cannot be less brave
than they. We must not be content with words— how fine a thing
it is to defend Athens against her enemies— but must fall in love
with our city as we see her engaging in her everyday activities,
and remember that it was men like these who made her great be¬
cause of their courage, their understanding of their duty, and
their self-discipline in performing it. . . ^
In short, it seems to me that civic forces, as well as those of
government and industry, can make their proper contributions to Ameri¬
can urban life only if their activities are imbued with that intangible,
elusive, little understood, but powerful set of attitudes that we some¬
times call a sense of community.
From Pericles' "Funeral Oration" as translated In Walter R. Agard's The Greek
Mind (Princeton, 1957), pp. 118-20.
THE ROLE OF INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH
IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITY
Jack T. Wilson
At the beginning of the 20th century, many leading industrialists
and scientists all over the world began to see that the great techno¬
logical problems which grew out of their rapidly advancing industries,
could no longer be solved by even the most gifted and hard-driving
layman experimenters and inventors. These men observed that a con¬
tinued flow of the many products which stimulated and filled the de¬
mands of increasing markets, must be supported by an increase in
scientific knowledge and also by new techniques of application of this
knowledge to industry.
In the United States of America, many industrial giants, who
molded and shaped the growing corporations which supplied the basic
commodities such as steel, copper, cement, and mineral oil products,
looked to Europe for men who had been trained in science because
American schools at the turn of the century had not yet evolved the
great experimental training centers which could produce the industrial
scientist and also give him the facility in which to work and teach.
The need for a program of active research and development, dedicated
to the support of industry, and the investigation of basic science, was
fortunately understood by many American industrialists who had the
foresight to act effectively.
Andrew Mellon was among the first men to establish a non-profit
organization designed to teach American industry an advanced tech¬
nology. At the dedication of his Mellon Institute, he spoke as follows:
As the result of my reading and observation, it seemed to me
that improvements in the standard of living of the human race
could come about in the future only by reason of new discoveries
and inventions, just as, in the past, the steam engine and other
inventions had been responsible for many improvements in the
standard of living enjoyed by the average man today.
41
42
Jack T. Wilson
It was these things, and not governmental or political action,
that had increased production, lowered costs, raised wages, ele¬
vated the standard of living, and so had brought about a greater
participation of the human race in these benefits.
This statement was made in 1913, and in 1963 we find it is many
times proven. The community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has profited
greatly by Mr. Mellon's gifts and the entire United States now has
many industries which have been fostered and improved by the science
developed in the facilities of the Mellon Institute.
The title of my subject this morning indicates that I will organize
my remarks around the subject of the development of the city as it may
be influenced by industrial research. It is perhaps easiest to illustrate
graphically the influences of centers of technological investigation
upon urban growth by using one of two outstanding examples.
Example number one may be found and observed by a close scru¬
tiny of the city of Boston, Massachusetts. At the turn of the century,
this city was strong in character as a cultural center of the United
States. It had been, and continued to be, a thriving seaport and a
great center of the textile industry. Banking and finance were well-
established and the insurance businesses of many types had grown so
large as to control many of the invested interests of great fortunes
throughout the United States. Boston could look forward to a steady
growth and needed very little help from anyone or any single institu¬
tion to fortify its industrial capacity.
Boston furnished the most natural environment to foster great edu¬
cational institutions. Colleges and universities were established in
this city, and a few of them became great leaders in the rising role of
educational institutions in the United States. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Harvard, Boston University, and others have
awarded many thousands of degrees to worthy students and some of
these men and women have stayed at home after graduation and built
industries of such magnitude as will support the total population of
popular products which enjoy world-wide distribution.
Take a drive in your motor car on belt highway 128 (which girdles
the parts of the city of Boston which do not serve the harbor and face
the waterfront) . You will find new and old industries, housed in a
variety of exciting architectures. Today in the Boston area, perhaps
one-fifth of the population of the most outstanding scientists of industry
in the United States now make their homes. The past twenty-five
years have seen the growth of a science of electronics which has be¬
come the main blood stream of associated industries.
The Boston fever forresearch spread to near-by Worcester. There,
at the end of the nineteenth century, the fervent dream of a Yankee
Industrial Research in Development of the City
43
peddler, John Boynton, created the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Out of this fine school came many great builders of science, including
Robert H. Goddard, who fathered modern rocketry and opened the space
age. We may conservatively estimate that industrial research in the
Boston area has been responsible for a population increase of more
than a million people in the first sixty-three years of this century.
Many factors completely independent of industrial research could
have stimulated population growth in the Boston area. However, unique
to the environment created by such research, will be found a number
of elements which flavor the basic cultural pattern of the urban com¬
munity.
Scientists as a group have a fairly broad educational background.
The curiosity which made them scientists has frequently led them to
explore literature, drama, music, and art. Sports and gardening are
also usually found to be of great interest to scientists, and in the
community structure in which they live, these arts, sports, and hus¬
bandries will prosper. In such a community will probably be found a
symphony orchestra, an art center, and sports -sponsoring organize -
tions.
Industrial research in the city of Boston promotes leadership in
placing a high value on education in colleges and secondary schools.
Surprisingly few scientists in a community may spark the effort to
provide better teaching faculty for high schools, colleges and univer¬
sities. These are the elements which I feel are the strong character¬
istics of scientists; the Boston area illustrates my point.
Example number two can be drawn from a study of our own city,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here on the shore of Lake Michigan, large
basic industries have become leaders in world trade and furnish ma¬
chine tools, earth-movers, material handling equipment, agricultural
tools, electrical controls, and prime power apparatus. We are leaders
in beer production, and all of the sciences of steel fabrication and
welding procedures find advanced development in Milwaukee. With
all of this wealth of industrial production, the basic concept of research
in the larger companies of Milwaukee is now in danger of becoming
only a glorified technique of quality control.
Let us make no mistake and minimize the importance of quality
control. Milwaukee is fortunate in that many of her citizens have
come from Europe where traditions of fine craftsmanship have become
ingrained and dominate the sense of values which govern their indi¬
vidual behavior and productive effort. We must continue to devote
our best effort to improve quality control, and in order to make a pro¬
fit, we must offer a better product at a lower price.
Quality control and the analysis of trouble in manufactured pro¬
cesses, must not be mistakenly called research. I speak now of
44
Jack T, Wilson
research in terms of innovation and the imaginative creation of new
products and new systems. Earlier in my remarks this morning, I
mentioned the great strides in electronic components development
which has taken place in the Boston area. Milwaukee has a water¬
front which by means of better marine engineering can become a most
important port of entry for world trade. We are now the leaders in the
manufacture of materials handling equipment. Industrial research in
Milwaukee can reap the reward of developing new dock facilities which
could make obsolete all primitive docking procedures which over all
the world continue to slow down the transfer of goods from vessel to
overland transport or warehouse.
Milwaukee was here the potential research and development
groups to bring about a renaissance of highway and road construction.
Time required to build streets and highways may be reduced, and per¬
manence of roadway surface may be greatly improved. New materials,
unthought of now, may make safer driving under all weather conditions.
The laws which govern the evolution and development of a cultural
pattern of a nation or a city are probably as inflexible as the laws of
gravity and quantum mechanics. With each new decade of research
in sociology and the dynamics of cultural evolution, we come to see
more clearly the mechanism of periods of ascending development in
urban experience wherein the tone and morale of a community is full
of energy and optimism and the industrial activities are characterized
by growth and profit. To a degree, the citizens of a community can
control the cycle which may oscillate between ascending and descend¬
ing periods of prosperity. One of the ways to prescribe this control
is to make favorable the climate which fosters industrial research.
The best utilization of natural resources which favors any urban area
will come from a body of enterprising research personnel if they are
free to make innovations and derive new systems. These men must
also be given the essential financial sustenance for their work and
personal income.
Perhaps I have shown one very interesting characteristic of the
Boston area in these remarks. I would like to point out the close re¬
lationship between the advanced educational institutions in a com¬
munity and its program of industrial research. Boston has its M. I. T.
and Harvard. From these schools have come many men who have built
large industries in Boston.
Milwaukee has its campus of the University of Wisconsin, Mar¬
quette University, and a number of other colleges. In this city we
are guilty of neglect of generous sponsorship of our universities. If
we do not remedy this condition, we will miss a most important oppor¬
tunity to advance our industrial research. This can be planned with¬
out wasteful duplication of facilities on the campuses of Madison
and Milwaukee.
Industrial Research in Development of the City
45
I opened this discussion by stating that the world' s industrial
problems could not be solved by gifted and’ hard driving laymen. I
want to make it very clear that I believe that only a gifted and hard-
driving individual will be a great and successful research scientist
or engineer. I also want to state that it will be the individual and
not the group who will make the greatest advances in science and in
research. Please remember the individual must have the mechanics
of a research center in order to be a scientist who may make a great
contribution. Industrial research can be the vehicle for maximum de¬
velopment of the individual. The urban community will clearly reflect
the qualities of its individuals.
HOW EUROPEANS MOLD THEIR CITIES
Joseph F. Mangiamele
"Why is it that Americans, who lead the rest of the world in so
many fields, find themselves lagging behind Europe when it comes
to the development of their cities?" This is a question I have often
been asked in Europe by many in responsible positions. In spite of
all that European planners have read about the United States, when
actually visiting the cities of this, "the richest country in the world,"
they have often expressed their amazement at the extent of decay and
the amount of slums. They have been surprised to see the "helter-
skelter" way in which our urban areas have developed.
Perhaps this general European attitude can be better understood
by looking at the way Europeans mold their cities. It seems that tra¬
dition alone gives Europeans a confident basis from which to start
planning their cities and it seems to provide them with the full knowl¬
edge of what cities are and what they ought to be. Because European
planners are backed with centuries of civilization and tradition, they
are not asking themselves what cities are-— or what they ought to be—
questions we often ask ourselves. For they know what cities are.
Butas Americans— of European ancestry— we lack that feeling and
the understanding of city civilization and urban character. Perhaps
the reason for this is that each generation of immigrants, in the pro¬
cess of making themselves American citizens, has lost sight of the
old world culture. So that if they knew what urban life was in the old
country, it has become something of the past to them. And now they
have obviously settled for the ways of the frontier town— which grows
unceasingly on its gridiron pattern, impelled by social values based
on the cost of the land. I do not mean to say that land values have
no significance in the development of cities in Europe. Neither do I
mean to imply that decay and slums do not exist there, especially in
southern Europe. For I am not going to give you a romantic view of
Europe. We all know that many European cities are congested, and
46
How Europeans Mold Their Cities
47
that they have slums. But at least one country in northern Europe does
not have poverty and slums in the traditional sense. But before I talk
to you about this country, which is obviously Sweden, I would like to
talk to you about European cities in general.
The cities of Europe are still alive with traditional treasures of
architecture, music, literature, paintings, sculpture, history, and
customs. They have their opera houses, dramatic theaters, museums,
historical buildings, ancient bridges, and in some cases, portions of
old city walls. It is true that all these buildings are not beautiful;
but many are historical or house a cultural function. And it is not rare
that these structures are both historical, or cultural, and beautiful.
There are hundreds of churches, cathedrals, and ancient universities.
Europe is still rich with folklore and folk music and associated ac¬
tivities, legends and tales, festivals, traditional foods, and enter¬
tainment. It is the recipient of royal, noble, and aristocratic lega¬
cies. Castles, many of them with moats still surrounding them, formal
gardens and parks, and boulevards are among some of these.
Superimposed upon these ancient heritages are the democratic
governments and republics of modern Europe, the latest technology,
and commercial and industrial development. The city is the center of
contemporary life in Europe, and it is a living record of its living
history.
The traditions of American cities are measured in terms of a short
few hundred years and are based first on eighteenth century liberalism
and seventeenth century religious beliefs and strifes, and later, on
an advanced technology, a militant internal commercialism, and a
relatively rapid industrialization.
While ourcities are primarily frontier towns, laid on a grid system
and on virgin soil, the European cities are old towns made up of ancient
elements, which are actual physical parts of today's Europe. Among
other things are their narrow streets for example; they are the factor
which has influenced the size of their cars. But there are many other
residual factors which influence the development of their cities.
Some parts of the European cities, through their very compact form
and tight pattern, repel the extensive use of the car and yet the open
space of their squares and piazzas invite and crowd them in. But the
formal gardens, parks and boulevards, and courts, still are inviting
to the pedestrian.
In Europe the culture of the street still survives. It exists archi¬
tecturally, in the social attitude, in the customs and in the everyday
lives of European. In America, the culture of the street is almost
non-existant. To some extent, the social culture of the street is less
prevalent in the northern cities of Europe, for example in Sweden,
Norway, England, and Holland. But the architectural culture of the
48 Joseph F, Mangiamele
street is very much alive in the cities of all these countries, and es¬
pecially in their capitals.
Of course in America we do not have all these ancient urban ele¬
ments. Some Europeans find these ancient elements a disadvantage
in developing modern cities, so they are not always to be considered
treasures. People living in congested communities do not find these
ancient structures as picturesque as tourists find them, but many of
these physical obstacles prevent European cities from growing and
spreading at random as most American cities do.
So the Europeans have taken new approaches in solving these prob¬
lems of growth. They have been ingenious in the methods which they
have employed in both decongesting their cities and in handling their
growth. Most of the methods that have been used have involved close
relationships between planning and actual development. This has
meant an application of various types of controls. One of the reasons
why planning has not been as successful in this country as it has in
Europe is the innate fear that we as Americans have of controls, re¬
gardless of their beneficial character.
One of the controls generally exercised throughout European cities
is architectural control. Few buildings can be built in Europe with¬
out a regard for other buildings in the area. European city designers
almost naturally talk about town-scape and street-scape. Street-
scaping is the arrangement of a portion of the total street so that it can
be comprehended by the eye in a single view of from various points
of view. It not only takes into consideration the best esthetic effects
but includes within its scope the harmonious relationships of build¬
ings to the space which they enclose. A street is considered to pro¬
duce order, and intimacy; thus, the planners are working constantly
in the human scale— that is, relating the human being to his urban
environment.
In America, the freeway, for example, or the expressway robs us
of ourhuman scale and our relationship to our surroundings. The free¬
way is primarily a mechanical or engineering device; it is not a social
device necessarily in harmony with the human being. The real physi¬
cal urbanity of European cities is stimulating, delightful, both visually
and socially, and the individual finds himself in harmony with it and
feels he belongs there. One of the lessons that we can learn from
European cities is that they have developed and are still being planned
on the ancient precept that a man can walk on his own legs. Ancient
developments within European cities are constant reminders of that
precept, reminders that man is still capable of walking on his own
legs. And it is perhaps for this reason that the Europeans have given
greater stress to the street culture approach in the development and
expansion of their present cities.
49
How Europeans Mold Their Cities
Now I would like to talk to you about some of the controls I men¬
tioned earlier which are being applied in the development of cities in
Europe today. I would like to discuss these controls in relation to
the development of new towns as well as to existing urban areas. In
democratic societies^ controls must have democratic reasons for their
existence. Keeping this in mind^ I would like to talk to you first
about planning in Holland because their controls are more simply re¬
lated to specific problems of development.
The Dutch do not have the same problems of urban sprawl as we
have in the United States. For unplanned suburban construction can¬
not take place at the fringe of the city. Contrary to American procedure,
urban extensions are made by annexing land before the suburbs are
built up. The reason for this is that most of the towns and especially
the new towns in Holland are built on reclaimed land, and the area
must be built up with about seven feet of sand and permitted to settle
for 2 years before any building can take place.
Therefore, drainage, sewers, and street layouts must be planned
before thousands of tons of sand are distributed. For this reason,
few towns in Holland have fringe development problems. Because of
its grand scale, reclamation of land is a public enterprise; however,
all the land does not remain in public ownership. Residual areas are
prepared for private development for builders who enter into agree¬
ments with the municipality. The local authority then carries out the
necessary public works in accordance with the contract or in accord¬
ance with the extension plan. Without the cooperation of the munici¬
pality, urban extensions on private land are practically impossible.
Reclamation projects and canal development go hand in hand in
Holland. The public nature of this type of operation has therefore
made planning essential; so the Dutch have had some very basic rea¬
sons for planning their cities for quite some time. Because of their
careful use of land, they are probably one of the countries which has
made the greatest strides in regional planning.
Rotterdam, Holland's second largest city was almost completely
destroyed during the war. The debris was almost immediately cleared
away after the devastation. While visiting Rotterdam, I was told that
the planning for the new center began only four days after the bombing.
After the people of the city went through an initial desire to reconstruct
a replica of the old Rotterdam, they made a break with the past. Their
whole planning approach did not become one of reconstructing an old
city, but that of developing a city for today and of tomorrow. But the
ancient precepts of what a town is, were there to guide them. The
former prewar shop-lined streets gave way to traffic-free promenades.
Wide streets were designed for modem traffic and narrow streets to
provide an intimate and popular atmosphere for shoppers.
50
Joseph F, Mangiamele
Rotterdam, with an improved version of its 19th century shopping
area, became the postwar model for the development of new towns
throughout the world. I was told that the heart of the city has become
even more important than it was before the war. It is now, not only
the main business center, but the shopping center and the center of
the city's cultural and civic life. At night, when I visited there, the
center was alive with gay music flowing out of the dance restaurants
and cafes. It was beautifully lit with pedestrians strolling in the in¬
timate atmosphere of the gay promenade. The planners have succeeded
in preserving and even adding to the life and attraction of the city
center, something that we in America are still struggling with.
The architectural realization of this redevelopment was made pos¬
sible because of the simple procedure of an extensive program of land
expropriation. The planners of Rotterdam attribute the success of
their plan mainly to the fact that the city was the sole owner of the
developed property. Ownership of land is one of the essential ele¬
ments of redevelopment and renewal, whether in Europe or in America.
The expensive and time-consuming manner of collecting property under
one ownership is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to planning to¬
day. In America we have as yet been unable to come to simple terms
with this problem.
On the other hand, the farsighted Swedish authorities of Stock¬
holm began buying up adjacent agricultural land as the opportunity
arose. This has been done since the beginning of the century and has
permitted Stockholm to expand within the limits of its own land hold¬
ings. The Oity of Stockholm has, therefore, been fortunate enough to
plan and direct expansion. But now it has more or less reached the
limits of land which the City owns. This does not mean that the de¬
velopment has not been contiguous to the City proper. For Stockholm
has built new towns as far as five miles out; that is, within this area
of land which is owned by the City; yet a certain portion has developed
as green belt, i. e. open agricultural land.
The planners expected to run out of land in I960, but nine years
earlier in 1951, a regional planning board was established. By the
end of 1955, a regional plan for the greater Stockholm area was pro¬
duced. This region includes other towns beyond Stockholm's owner¬
ship. The regional plan introduces six regional districts. The small¬
est district will allow for 78, 000 population, the largest for 340, 000
population. One of these districts includes a group of suburbs each
between 1 0, 000 and 15,000 population and built around a local center
(or shopping district), served by subway stations.
Most of the apartments are built within a quarter of a mile of these
centers, usually around pedestrian squares, with parking areas to
serve both the shopping center and the subway station. The row house s
How Europeans Mold Their Cities
51
are built within about half a mile of the subway station. One of these
local centers, Vallingby (which was planned as a new town), serves
as a main center for one of these areas of about 100, 000 people, al¬
though Vallingby is itself about 50, 000 in population.
The centers have a sufficient number and type of commercial es¬
tablishments to encourage competition; this in spite of the many mis¬
conceptions of the Swedish system. Cultural pursuits and entertain¬
ment have been provided to give competition to Stockholm’s traditional
center of culture. Attempts have been made to give as independent a
life as possible, with jobs being created in new industries in these
towns. One of the important things to remember is that all the dis¬
tricts within the region are being developed according to a plan, each
centered around a main pedestrian shopping center, made accessible
by pedestrian lanes as well as by vehicular roads.
Stockholm is about the size of Milwaukee, and those of you who
have been there will probably support the statement that Stockholm
has more of the urban qualities than does Milwaukee. Of course this
is not a fair comparison, because Stockholm is the capital city. It
has 700 years of tradition behind it. Furthermore, it is surrounded by
water, for the City has developed on a group of islands.
For some years now, Stockholm has been developing a new center
within its downtown area. Two subway stations empty out over 200, 000
people each day onto a pedestrian piazza or square, and the same
number arrive to return to their homes. This new center called "the
city" has been built on land acquired as the opportunity arose since
before the turn of the century. Five so-called skyscrapers have been
built as part of this center, each built by a private developer. The
shopping is on several levels. It is one total complex and all build¬
ings are related to each other around open pedestrian space. Swedish
planners have learned a great deal from American experience. One of
the things that they have learned is to plan their suburbs and regions,
but at the same time, not to permit the core of the city to decline.
To discourage people from other parts of the country from gravi¬
tating toward Stockholm and toward one or two of the large cities, the
government is helping to finance the improvement of most of the busi¬
ness centers of towns throughout the country. Even towns of 400 to
500 are getting new and modern town centers. Some are getting new
Stadshotels (these are usually first-class type hotels, which serve
as the centers for many social activities), and these certainly add to
the desirability of living in small towns. Of course new housing is
going up in most of the towns throughout Sweden— much of it in con¬
nections with the renewal of the town center and designed to stabilize
nearby residential areas. Other houses are being developed throughoul
the towns generally and according to plan. There is little or nc
52 Joseph F, Mangiamele
private speculation, although a good portion of the housing is provided
private ly.
Generally the Swedish government is concerned with how industry
and population distributes itself around Sweden— and this in a country
which has lots of space in relation to a small population. But in spite
of its space, mostcities and towns, new and old alike are built around
one main center, a center which is usually surrounded by a district of
apartment houses. The density decreases as the distance from the
center increases. The development of single family houses takes place
at the outer edges of the town toward the planned green belt area.
Consequently, even the smallest towns seem to have an urban appear¬
ance. Towns of 50, 000 often appear to be, and are, more urban in
nature than towns of 100, 000 in either England or the United States.
Holland, too, has been greatly interested in the distribution of
industry in its towns. Although the Dutch have had extensive planning
controls, primarily because their government is engaged in reclaiming
a great deal of land, they have also been genuinely interested in proper
population distribution. Planning controls apply to existing cities as
well as to the new towns being developed in Holland. It might be said
that Holland became interested in planning quite early because of the
scarcity of land. On the other hand, the Swedes have an abundance
of land, but as indicated earlier, they too are interested in the proper
distribution of population and industry, and in the planned growth of
their towns. Great Britain which is from six to seven times greater
in population than Sweden, and about half Sweden's size in area, is
showing the same sort of logical interest in population and industrial
distribution. The new towns which have been built around London
and other parts of Britain are the direct result of this type of thinking.
London, including the surrounding area, has a population of about
10, 000, 000 — more or less in the class of New York City. Therefore,
the London region accounts for about Z0% of Britain's total population.
For this reason, London is not only trying to control its size, but is
in fact attempting to reduce it. It is doing this for the same reason
that the Swedes are trying to keep their people from moving to the
larger cities en masse. For it means, first of all, that more houses
must be built in an already crowded city, while houses in smaller
towns go vacant. This is more true of England, of course, than it is
of Sweden. London has not only drawn away industry and people from
the rest of the country but it has sucked away most of the culture from
the provincial cities. While there are symphony concerts held in Lon¬
don almost every night and many times in the afternoons, there are
only one or two symphony orchestras outside of London worth mention¬
ing. London has many art galleries. It has the National Film Theater
and it is going to have the National Art Theater. It has the best and
How Europeans Mold Their Cities 53
largest department stores in the country. It has the Queen and Her
Majesty's Government. The City of London, which is the financial
center of the country, is located within the heart of London.
Shortly after the war, Britain's government decided that London
was too big and that it must not grow larger— in fact, it was decided
that about 500, 000 people were to be moved out of London. To those
ofyou who are not familiar with the London plans, it may sound strange
to hear that industry, with some exceptions, is not permitted to move
into the London area without government approval.
In the United States, where cities are busily engaged in attract¬
ing industry to themselves, it may sound stranger still to hear that
some industry is being moved out of London. It may also sound slightly
dictatorial that 500,000 people are to be moved out, but this is merely
a voluntary migration of Londoners to the eight new towns being built
within 25 miles of London. They are presently in various stages of
development, with two or three of them near completion. Industry is
being steered from London to these new towns and to various other
parts of the country. Yet this is being done in a typically British,
democratic manner.
This plan aims at preserving the world's largest metropolis as a
commercial and cultural center, permitting it to operate as one great
urban unit and restricting its area growth by instituting a green belt
around it. At the same time, attempts are being made to achieve
modern standards of density and open space within the urban area.
This is being done through the redevelopment of overbuilt areas within
London proper.
In an attempt to control its growth, Paris is initiating what might
be described as a payroll tax. This is meant to discourage industry
and offices from adding to the present congestion of Paris and the sur¬
rounding area. The success or failure of this type of control is still
to be ascertained. On the same point, more recently the British gov¬
ernment has put out a white paper indicating that it will control the
location and development of offices as well as industry.
One of the things I have attempted to point out is that in renewing
the center of their cities, Europeans are conscious of their tradition.
They are reinstituting the street culture and pedestrian areas. They
are also building their new towns in relatively small scale and at¬
tempting to bring a human scale to their large towns. I have concen¬
trated on one or two important elements of planning and development
in Europe today. This by no means exhausts the methods being used
by Europeans in molding their cities. I have tried to point out the
concern that European planners have for relating the scale of their
cities to the human being, and, that their ancient cities are constant
reminders of precepts that still apply to modern living. I also have
54
Joseph F, Mangiamele
tried to point out that public land acquisition is an important aspect
of planning and developing and that the Europeans have not found this
incongruous with democratic life. They have found methods for con¬
trolling the development of peripheral expansion. At the same time
they have tried to discourage this growth by renewing the inner core
of their cities and by making the city proper an attractive place in
which to live. Concern for regional and national distribution of popu¬
lation and industry is not only something that is desirable, but some¬
thing to be planned for, so actual policies have been established which
are aimed at bringing about a better distribution.
I am sure that I haven't answered the opening question, "Why do
we find ourselves lagging behind Europe in the development of our
cities?" But perhaps, by describing what the Europeans are doing
with their cities, I have succeeded in pointing out why they are in¬
clined to ask that question. I have tried to relate these few planning
and development aspects to our own attitudes and to the manner in
which we plan and develop our cities in order to show that we may
need some new approaches to our existing problems.
Although Europe' s problems may be overburdened with custom and
tradition, planners there have not been unimaginative. On the other
hand, unobstructed by tradition, we in the U.S. have lacked direction
and guidance, shown little imagination along these lines and still
hesitate to learn lessons from abroad.
MILWAUKEE'S SOCIALISTS AS URBAN REFORMERS
Frederick I. Olson
Milwaukee’s Socialist movement constitutes the single most
widely known episode in the city's political record of a century and
a quarter, possibly even the most significant in the city's history. ^
This movement came into being as a formal political organization in
1897, although there had been manifestations of local socialist ac¬
tivity, largely non-political, for most of the preceding half century.
Under the leadership of Victor L. Berger, the first Socialist congress¬
man, and of Daniel W. Hoan, for 24 consecutive years mayor of Mil¬
waukee, the party was well organized for both propaganda and cam-
paiging and developed a most effective and efficient use of grass¬
roots party membership.
Milwaukee’s Socialists must be judged as a local third party with
state and national political affiliations rather than by the standards
appropriate to the Democratic and Republican parties. ^ Their electoral
^Thls paper is based largely on the writer' s unpublished doctoral dissertation,
"The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897-1941" ( Harvard University, 1952). A detailed ac¬
count of Socialist party development in Milwaukee appears in Marvin Wachman,
History of the Social-Democratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897-1910 ( Urbana, Illinois,
1945) . Both Wachman and the writer drew on the official party records in the Mil¬
waukee County Historical Museum. The community in which the Milwaukee Socialists
operated is described in Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison,
Wisconsin, 1948).
^The history of the Socialist party nationally is documented in Howard H. Quint,
The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Columbia,
South Carolina, 1953); Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912
(New York, 1952); Daniel Bell, "The Background and Development of Marxian Social¬
ism in the United States, " in Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, editors. Social¬
ism and American Life (Princeton, 1952), I, 213-405; and David A. Shannon, The
Socialist Party of America: A History York, 1955). For an interesting local
Socialist study with suggestive comparisons to Milwaukee, see Henry G. Stetler,
The Socialist Movement in Reading, Pennsylvania, 1896-1936: A Study in Social
Change (StOTTSy Connecticut, 1943).
55
56
Frederick I, Olson
successes were indeed spectacular. Beginning in politics in 1898,
they increasingly set the tone and made the issues locally. Their can¬
didates won office for the first time in 1904. Thereafter, until the
1940's, Socialists sat in the Common Council, the County Board, both
houses of the state legislature, and Congress; and they held other
city-wide and county-wide offices— mayor, city attorney, district at¬
torney, sheriff, judge, to name only the most important. They swept
to a spectacular victory in the 1910 election in three-way voting, and
for two years controlled, at least in name, the administrative and the
legislative machinery of the city and county. In each of the next three
decades they came close at some point to their 1910 achievement,
most notably in the city election of 1932. For reasons which need not
detain us here, the party was adversely affected by state and national
events of the 1930’s, and could not survive the defeat-in 1940 of its
seemingly perennial incumbent in the mayor' s office, Dan Hoan. Frank
P. Zeidler restored the mayoralty to a Socialist party member between
1948 and I960, but he did so through a new political vehicle, and the
party itself ceased to wield any power. For our purposes, indeed,
the period of significant Socialist ascendancy would be the first four
decades of the twentieth century. ^
Before we examine the Milwaukee Socialists as urban reformers,
we should ask ourselves: who and what were they? Not surprisingly
they had strong antecedents in the European socialist movement and
in foreign-born groups. First and second generation Germans always
formed the strongest single element in party leadership, party member¬
ship, and as nearly as can be determined, in voting strength. Smaller
foreign language elements in Milwaukee were always represented in
party activities, but the primary objective of the party's ethnic appeal
was to Milwaukee' s large Polish population. Despite serious deterrents,
particularly the party's reputation for being anti-religious ( anti-
Catholic in particular) and strongly German, many Poles gravitated to
the Socialist banner. As local Socialists acquired for themselves, and
to some degree for their movement, a respectability and a reputation
for accomplishment, it became more difficult to distinguish their fol¬
lowers and opponents by simple ethnic, class, social, or even political
lines. Even the constant provided by an early alliance with the local
labor union movement, perfected by an extraordinary interlocking
directorate, was not quite so pervasive as it seemed; some labor
leaders and considerable working class segments opposed the Social-
^Frederick I. Olson, "Milwaukee's Socialist Mayors: End of an Era and Its Be¬
ginning, " Historical Messenger (Milwaukee County Historical Society) , March I960,
pp. 3-8.
57
Milwaukee’ s Socialists as Urban Reformers
ists at all times. ^ Conversely^ Berger^ Hoan, and the Socialists
generally obtained some support from time to time from small business
and professional people, not unlike their Populist antecedents; they
also received financial assistance and votes from prominent local
capitalists.
Foremost among their intellectual characteristics was the fact
that Milwaukee's Socialists were not really revolutionaries and did
not expect to overthrow capitalism. While many of them paid lip ser¬
vice to Karl Marx and scientific socialism, they were actually com¬
mitted to political action and gradual evolution toward a more perfect
social order. Had they wished to institute public ownership of the
means of production on the basis of their local victories, they would
have confronted a series of legislative, constitutional, and judicial
obstacles far beyond their powers. They clearly preferred to obtain
and hold local public office in order to effect as far as possible those
immediate gains toward ultimate socialism that had come to be known
as revisionism. Successful in local politics over a long period of
time as none of their colleagues in the national party in other cities
and states were, they inevitably became alienated from the more radi¬
cal Socialists in the nation. Some of their New York brethren applied
to them the derisive term "sewer Socialists." Only in the depths of
the depression of 1929 did a segment of Milwaukee Socialism again
flirt with the gospel of revolution.
Milwaukee's Socialists were therefore not revolutionaries pre¬
pared to overthrow an established social order by violence but local
reformers or perhaps evolutionaries who hoped to move steadily toward
a better world in their own community. As such they differed in em¬
phasis and perhaps in ultimate objective, but not in major immediate
goals, from other urban or municipal reformers of the Progressive era.
A major commitment of the progressives of fifty years ago was to re¬
form the city, and Milwaukee's Socialists form an interesting variant
on such Progressive era reformers as Hazen S. Pingree, Seth Low,
Golden Rule Jones, Tom Johnson, and their followers. In Milwaukee
as elsewhere the reform movement benefited from public reaction to the
growth of big business and monopoly, the struggle over public service
corporation franchises, the warning of Lord Bryce and others of the
dangers from widespread corruption in local government, the manifest
evils of working and living conditions in larger cities; in short, from
popular shock and shame over the economic, social, and political
health of modern society. Add to this, the new tendency of the magazine
4
Frederick 1. Olson, "The Socialist Party and the Union in Milwaukee, 1900-
1912," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 44: 110-16 (Winter 1960-61).
58
Frederick /. Olson
and newspaper press to concentrate on exposure of the raw side of
life; the new winds of doctrine blowing over the land, some of Euro¬
pean origin and some indigenously American, but all critical of the
present order; and the appearance of the new academic disciplines
in the social sciences with methodologies useful in studying the city. ^
Parenthetically I would like to point out a few of the significant
differences between the approach of the Progressive era city reformers
and our present attack on urban problems. Note immediately that half
a century ago one was disposed to "reform," that is, to try to restore
to an earlier, more virtuous state of affairs, whereas today, less
hopefully, we simply aim at a treatment of" problems" with little op¬
timism that permanent solutions are possible. Today, moreover, al¬
most every candidate for local public office admits there are problems
and frequently agrees with his opponent in identifying them, differing
at most over the solution to be sought and not always over that. But
half a century ago the reformer sought to throw out the rascals and
thus wrest control of government from corrupt economic and political
forces. This concept was, incidentally, of substantial assistance
to Milwaukee's Socialists in 1910. The voters, convinced that the
ascendant Democrats were corrupt, and disillusioned by an experiment
with a Republican administration in 1906, turned to the only remaining
alternative, the Socialists. Whereas in other American communities,
as Lincoln Steffens discovered to his dismay, the voters soon returned
the rascals to power as the reform impulse waned, in Milwaukee the
strength of the Socialists brought about a political equilibrium in which
they shared with their non-partisan opponents for 30 years a reputation
for honesty, administrative efficiency, and above average civic
progress. ^
Although only philosophically committed to socialism, Milwaukee's
Socialists were serious about the more limited objective of public
ownership and operation of public utilities, and in general favored an
expansion of governmental activities and services short of taking over
the means of production. Many other Progressives favored public
ownership of utilities, and even of steam railroads, because of their
monopolistic and franchise aspects, but they usually settled for state
regulation on the Granger pattern. Milwaukee' s Socialists gained
power after a decade of belaboring the public utilities, especially the
^On the Progressive movement, see Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Des¬
tiny: A History of Modern American /2e/orw?( New York, 1952); Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New York, 1955); Samuel P. Hays,
The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957); and George E. Mowry,
The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 ( New York, 1958).
^Frederick I. Olson, "Milwaukee' s First Socialist Administration, 1910-1912: A
Political Evaluation, " Mid-America, 43: 197-207 (July 1961).
Milwaukee' s Socialists as Urban Reformers \ 59
street railway and electric company. Their city attorney from 1910 to
1916, Hoan, used all of his legal skill and that of his excellent staff
to employ against the utilities and the railroads the regulatory powers
of the Railroad Commission, for the city had to all intents and purposes
been divested of such authority by state law. Reasonably successful
but disillusioned by the experience of dragging cases laboriously
through commission and court proceedings, Hoan continued to argue
for public ownership.’^ He finally carried the case for municipal owner¬
ship and operation of the electric utility to the people in a referendum
in 1936 and was badly beaten, thus contributing to his own and his
party's early demise.
Milwaukee's Socialists were keenly aware of criticism from within
their party and amusement from without over their failure to bring about
public utility ownership. Only the waterworks was municipal, and
that had been so for more than forty years before the Socialists came
to power. On the other hand, they did expand in modest ways the
scope of government activity whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Most of these were minor, such as production of street and traffic
signs, and direct employment rather than contract work, and became
so acceptable that only the most doctrinaire anti-socialist has seri¬
ously suggested a change.
While Socialists generally proclaimed the need for establishing
a new social order based on production for use and the brotherhood of
man, non-socialist Progressives hoped to regenerate America by pro¬
posing new political devices. Among the most important such devices
on the local scene were the initiative, referendum, and recall, the
direct primary, non-partisan elections, short ballot, small council,
home rule, and the commission and city manager forms of municipal
government. The objectives were to increase popular as against par¬
tisan control over public officials, reduce corruption and increase ef¬
ficiency, and divorce local from state and national politics. The
Socialists, while seldom opposing any of these openly, found little
to commend them. They scorned such political tinkering as a diversion
from important social and economic questions. But they also valued
partisanship and worked hard to instill it in their own members. Their
position was subsequently vindicated. The outstanding Milwaukee
attempt to employ the recall was aimed at Socialist Mayor Hoan in
193 3 and was thwarted by the organizational efficiency of his party.
Borrowing from European practice and ignoring the American pref¬
erence for "good men," the Socialists insisted upon party discipline
for all members and office holders. They selected their candidates
'^Daniel W. Hoan, The Failure of Regulation (Chicago, 1914).
60
Frederick I, Olson
for office by intraparty methods, bypassing the public primary. They
promised the voters that their candidates would perform according to
platform pledges and party decisions, and they sought to enforce dis¬
cipline through party financing of all campaigning, officeholder cau¬
cuses, and undated, pre-signed resignations from office. They alien¬
ated independent reformers by their intense partisanship, especially
their opposition to non-partisan election laws. Their increasing elec¬
toral strength between 1 898 and 1910 had been leveraged by the local
three party system. Fusion by Democrats and Republicans defeated
the Socialists in the Spring of 1912, however, and a non-partisan
election law ensured a two-way runoff beginning in 1914. While the
Socialists professed to welcome this clearcut choice between Social¬
ist and anti-Socialist and speedily accommodated themselves to the
new system, their leverage was gone.®
On the other hand the Socialists were consistent supporters of
municipal home rule. Like their opposition to non-partisan elections,
their stand could be interpreted as self-interest, but in this case it
agreed with the dominant reform view. To the degree that the Social¬
ists could gain local power only, it was to their advantage to maximize
the control Milwaukee had over its own affairs, especially as they
aimed at changes in the existing order. After failing to approve home
rule in 1914, the state waited a decade before acting favorably, only
to circumscribe the new freedom by legislation in 1929. During the
three decades of their hegemony in Milwaukee, the Socialists were
generally unsuccessful in enlarging the capacity of the city for control
over its own affairs. Through their own members in the legislature,
through their informal relations with Progressive Republicans during
the administrations of Governors McGovern, Blaine, and Phil LaFollette,
through unremitting lobbying in Madison in conjunction with labor and
the Milwaukee legislative delegation, especially in the Hoan era, the
Socialists kept Milwaukee's case before the legislature and state ad¬
ministrative agencies, but with spotty success. At times the legis¬
lature responded to a contrary pressure to reduce the authority of offices
occupied by Socialists, as in 1911, when Mayor Seidel was stripped
of direct control over the police chief. Shortly after assuming office.
Mayor Hoan complained of the inadequacy of the city executive's
power, but he never achieved any improvement here, either. One may
conclude that Hoan not only reconciled himself in time to the nominal
weakness of the office, butevencame to understand the uses of power
not spelled out in charter and law.*^ For all their desire to bring about
Erich C. Stern, "The Non-Partisan Election Law: Reform or Anti-Socialism ?",
Historical Messenger , Se^itemhev pp. 8-11.
9
Daniel W. Hoan, "The Powers of a Mayor," Marquette Law Review, December
61
Milwaukee’ s Socialists as Urban Reformers
changes in the economic and social order and their understanding of
the importance of political structure, the' Socialists left almost no
mark on the framework of government.
While the Socialists, whether from self-interest or principle, dif¬
fered from contemporary Progressives on the need for structural reform
in government, they agreed with them on the need for professional
public servants, for the application of modem methods of public ad¬
ministration, for efficiency and economy in government services, and
for inteivention by government when private enterprise was inadequate
to the task. Underpinning their attitude was the faith and the hope
that proper management of public business at present levels would
convince voters that the Socialists could be trusted with development
of an all-embracing socialist state.
Between 1910 and 1940 Socialist officials compiled a superior
record in handling appointments to departmental posts and to bureaus,
boards, and commissions. Despite opposition charges of packing the
City Hall with card-carrying Socialists, the Seidel and Hoan regimes
actually defended civil service, sought competent appointees outside
party ranks, and resisted rank-and-file expectations of patronage to
a surprising degree. Under Seidel, Professor John R. Commons of the
University of Wisconsin was called to set up a Bureau of Economy and
Efficiency. Its primary responsibility was a thorough study of the
functioning of city government. Its most useful achievements seem
commonplace now— inventory of city property, cost accounting on city
functions, regular audits, scientific budgeting. Then as well as later
the Socialists were remarkably receptive to the use of experts and to
the application of the latest findings of researchers.
More suggestive of the future was the survey, also undertaken
under the direction of Commons and his Bureau, to determine the social
and economic health of the city and of its people. The Socialist
premise, of course, was that man is inherently good but the system
under which he lives and labors is evil. Therefore the Socialists were
deeply impressed by revelations of slum conditions and sought to
remedy them by fundamental steps. They sought slum clearance,
public housing, enforcement of building codes, expansion and improve¬
ment of free Health Department services, special attention to child
welfare, public employment offices, and, from their puritanical streak,
eradication of the red light district in the shadow of the City Hall.^°
1918, pp. 40-42, and City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment ,
(New York, 1936).
10
JohnR. Commons, Myself (New York, 1934), pp 151-53, and Eighteen Months* s
Work (Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Efficiency, Bulletin No. 19, Milwaukee,
1912).
62
Frederick /. Olson
Uninhibited by doctrinaire notions of the limit of municipal action,
the Socialists also encouraged public programs to lift the spirits of
the people— the social centers in the lighted schoolhouse, free or
cheap public band and orchestra concerts and dances, and park pro¬
grams. During the 1920's and 1930' s such efforts were strengthened
by legislative support and sound administration. Perhaps the most
unusual enterprise, to combat the high cost of living after the first
World War, came when Hoan personally undertook to market consumer
items to create a price yardstick.
Yet such objectives seemed remedial and ameliorative. What
really distinguished the Milwaukee Socialists was their positive vision
of what a city could be physically. They had no ideological objection
to planning but rather encouraged it through their own programs and
by creating instruments for carrying on planning. The Socialists did
nothing more significant for the future of Milwaukee than to provide
opportunity for Charles B. Whitnall. Under AAdiitnall' s urging, city
and county planning agencies were created, zoning and land use plan¬
ning grew, park proposals took shape. The concept of a city beauti¬
ful spawned such long range projects, yet unrealized, as a Milwaukee
River drive reaching to the northern edge of the county and a Civic
Center. Soon after the first World War, Hoan also brought into being
the Garden Homes housing development, experimental in its financing
and in its community layout.
No such range of public enterprises could fail to threaten the tax
rate of any city. Milwaukee between 1910 and 1940 was not faced
with the revenue crisis that haunts every large city today, but it was
required to live within the taxing authority and debt limits imposed by
law, and to face the challenge of tax delinquency during the great
depression. The Socialists were neither profligate spenders— an im¬
possibility in a community noted for frugality— nor inveterate opponents
of higher government expenditures. They favored sound budget and
tax policies, but additionally embraced in the early 1920's a pay-as-
you-go program. While they did not originate this scheme for a debt
amortization fund which ultimately wiped out the city's bonded indebt¬
edness, they embraced it warmly, for it coincided with their opposi¬
tion to the payment of interest and to dealings with investment bankers.
The effect of this policy, however, was to preclude adoption of many
expensive public programs, however desirable, because of their tax
or debt implications, and even to postpone or eliminate necessary
public works.
To sum up the urban program of the Milwaukee Socialists: They
were realistic enough not to expect to bring about revolution or the
Socialist state. They were skeptical of most tinkering with govern¬
mental machinery, and viewed some of it from the standpoint of sheer
Milwaukee' s Socialists as Urban Reformers
63
self-interest. But they favored municipal ownership of public utilities
and welcomed opportunities to expand government activities. They
sought to manage public affairs competently in order to demonstrate
that socialist proposals could be carried out. They believed in ap¬
plying the new insights of the expert and the scholar and the techni¬
cian to the business of the city, and they believed planning was es¬
sential. To some degree they shrank from the financial implications
of carrying out their programs. When the Socialists ceased to wield
influence and power in Milwaukee, about twenty years ago, their
program was incomplete, indeed some of their objectives and some of
their visions seemed as remote as ever. Urban problems were as in¬
tractable to the reformer then as now.
Perhaps we should close with a story told by Carl Sandburg. He
had come to Milwaukee from the Illinois prairie shortly before 1910
and soon became a poetic evangelist for the Socialist movement. The
reward for his street corner campaigning for Seidel was appointment
as the mayor's confidential secretary at the munificent salary of $900
peryear. Following the mayor' s inauguration, he returned to his office
with stars in his eyes as he pictured himself about to embark on a
crusade to establish the brotherhood of man in Milwaukee. His first
duty, unfortunately, was to comply with a telephone request to remove
a dead dog from the street.^ ^ Like their comrade Sandburg, Milwaukee's
idealistic Socialists often found themselves engaged in the more pro¬
saic tasks of removing dead dogs from the streets.
^^KarlDetzer,
1941), pp. 81-84.
Carl Sandburg: A Study in Personality and Background (New York,
RECENT CHANGES IN WISCONSIN
URBANISM, 1950-1960
John W, Alexander
The objective of this paper is to investigate three questions about
urban population in Wisconsin: ( 1) How much change in total urban
population occurred between the last two censuses of population,
195 0 and I960? (2) What areas within Wisconsin were distinguished
in terms of urban change? ( 3) To what other phenomena might these
spatial variations in urban population change be related?
I. How much change in total number of urban people occurred
between 1950 and I960?
In 1950, Wisconsin had a total population of 3, 434, 000. The
urban component was 1, 987, 000 — 58% of the total.
During the next ten years all three of these measurements in¬
creased (Table 1). The total population expanded to 3, 951, 000. The
urban population increased to 2, 522, 000, which raised the urban
percentage from 58% to 64%. Obviously, then, Wisconsin's urban
population is growing vigorously, and it is growing faster than the
state' s total population.
TABLE 1
Wisconsin: Population 1950 and I960
1950 1960
Change 1 950 to I960
Absolute Relative
Urban Population 1, 987, 000 2,522, 000
Total Population 3, 434, 000 3, 951, 000
Percentage of Urban 58% 64%
+535, 000 + 26%
+517,000 + 15%
+ 6 % +10%
to Total
Source: United States Census of Population, I960.
64
65
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
II. areas of urban change are .distinguishable? Where
were urban increases located? Where were the decreases? To answer
this question, a series of maps will be helpful.
Figure 1 shows the location of population agglomerations ( all
incorporated settlements plus all unincorporated places having at least
1, 000 inhabitants) . Places which grew between 1950 and I960 are
shown by black dots; those which lost population are shown by white
dots. Several areas stand out on this map. The " southeastern tri¬
angle" (bounded by Lake Michigan, the Illinois border, and an imag¬
inary line from Green Bay to the southwest corner of the state) is
clearly a region of growing settlements. Almost every dot in this area
is black; conversely, most of the black dots on the map are in this
area. A second area of growing settlements is the "west-central" and
can be delimited by an imaginary border running from St. Croix Falls
on the Mississippi River eastward to Wausau, south to Stevens Point,
thence southwestward to La Crosse on the Mississippi. Within this
area most of the dots are black. A third region is one of loss and may
be termed the " southwestern area." Located between the southeastern
triangle and the west-central area, it contains most of the white dots
on the map; conversely, most of the area's dots are white. A fourth
and final region is "northern" Wisconsin, north of a border from St.
Croix Falls on the west to Green Bay. In this part of the state, the
dots are sparser but most of them are white, making this the second
major area of shrinking settlements.
Figure 2 shows the locational pattern of change in those settle¬
ments which the census classifies as urban — places with a population
of 2500 or more. Notice that this is a map of change {het^eenl^S0-
1960), not a map of number of inhabitants. Change is expressed in
terms of either absolute increments or absolute decrements. For ex¬
ample, the municipality of Milwaukee grew from 637,000 to 741,000—
an increment of 104, 000. (Note that this is the growth of, not the
Milwaukee metropolitan area, but the central city!) Accordingly, on
this map Milwaukee is represented by a large circle whose area is
proportional to the value of 104, 000. This figure exceeds the total
population of the entire city of Madison in 1950. In other words, if
we could have taken Milwaukee as of 1950 and Madison of 1950 and
added the two together, we still would have had a city smaller than
the actual Milwaukee of I960.
On this map, the black indicates loss. For example, the city
of Superior had 35, 000 inhabitants in 1950; by I960 the number had
shrunk almost to 33, 000, a loss of 2, 000.
The light gray color indicates a settlement which in 1950 was in¬
corporated but too small to qualify as urban. By I960 it had qualified.
There are 13 light gray circles on this map, largest of which is Me¬
nomonee Falls.
66
John W, Alexander
WISCONSIN POPULATION
CHANGE, 1950-1960
NCORPORATED AND UNINCORPO¬
RATED PLACES OF 1000 OR MORE
GAINED
LOST
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
67
TOTAL POPULATION
CHANGE 1950-1960
68
John W. Alexander
The dark gray color indicates a settlement which was not incor¬
porated in 1950 but now is an urban place. There are thirteen such
circles on this map, largest of which is Brookfield.
The uncolored circles indicate settlements which were urban in
both 1950 and I960, and also grew.
TABLE 2
Wisconsin: Urban Places Ranked by Increment or Decrement
1950-1960
GAINERS
( of at least 1 0, 000)
By Amount of Gain
LOSERS
By Amount of Loss
'lUn Milwaukee Urbanized Area
Source: United States Census of Population, I960
Table 2 lists Wisconsin cities in terms of amount of change in
population 1950-1960. There are many other methods by which urban
changes could be portrayed, but since space is limited, the answers
to the second basic question can be summarized as follows:
( a) Most of the increment in urban population was in the south¬
east triangle: 90% of the urban growth was here. And every single
one of the large circles on Figure 2 is in the southeast triangle.
(b) The greater Milwaukee area is prominent; 66% of Wisconsin' s
urban increment was in the Milwaukee-Racine-Kenosha urbanized
areas.
69
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
(c) Other areas of conspicuous urban growth are the Rock River
Valley (from Beaver Dam to Madison, Janesville, and Beloit); the
Fox River Valley (from Fond du Lac to Green Bay) ; and the west-
central area within which the upper Wisconsin River Valley and the
Chippewa Valley are prominent. There was comparatively little incre¬
ment in the southwest. Indeed, La Crosse had so little growth (only
forty people) that it hardly shows on the map. The larger circle in
this vicinity is not La Crosse but Cnalaska.
( d) Cnly twelve urban communities lost population, and almost
all of them are in the north. Similarly, the northern part of the state
has comparatively few cities— -but almost all of them lost— from Superior
in the west to Marinette in the east.
III. To what other phenomena are these locational patterns re¬
lated? Four have been selected for consideration: (A) change in
total population, ( B) size of urban settlement, (C) migration, and
( D) commuter labor.
(A) Total population
Figure 3. This map shows the location of change in total popu¬
lation on a county basis. In broad generalization, one can say that
half of Wisconsin lost population and half gained. The gaining coun¬
ties are located in five general regions. The largest is the southeast¬
ern triangle. Every county in this triangle was a gainer. A second
area of gain is the upper Wisconsin River Valley. A third and still
smaller area of gain is the Chippewa River Valley. A fourth area is
in the westernmost part of the state ( particularly St. Croix County) .
Cutside of this quartet of areas, there was only one county of gain:
La Crosse. All other counties lost population between 1950-1960.
If we compare this map of change in total population with the map
previously observed, of change in urban population, we notice a marked
similarity. Generally speaking, the growing counties are the ones
containing dynamic cities. The shrinking counties generally have
either no cities at all or else contain shrinking cities.
( B) The second relationship, that between size of urban place
and amount of urban increment, can be observed by comparing Figure
2 with Figure 4, a map showing Wisconsin cities in terms of their
present size (as of I960).
The symbols are spheres, the size of which is proportional— not
to change— but to 1960 total population. (Table 3 lists the twenty
largest cities in terms of size.) The most prominent area is the south¬
eastern portion again, particularly the greater Milwaukee-Racine-
Kenosha cluster. The Rock River Valley stands out, as does the Fox
Valley; and there is at least a brief hint of the upper Wisconsin Valley
and the Chippewa Valley. The glaring anomaly is La Crosse— a size¬
able sphere on this map (indeed, it is the state's ninth largest city)
which scarcely shows on Figure 2.
70
John W. Alexander
TABLE 3
Wisconsin: Twenty Largest Cities, I960
Source: United States Census of Population, I960
In general, however, the overall similarity between the patterns
on Figures 2 and 4 suggests support for the hypothesis that the larger
the city, the larger the growth.
However, there is another device for checking this relationship—
a scatter diagram ( Figure 5) . On this scatter diagram the horizontal
axis has been calibrated in terms of size of urban place. Notice that
a logarithmic scale has been used. The vertical axis is calibrated in
terms of change in urban population. Again a logarithmic scale has
been used.
The dots tend to align with an upward slope from left to right, in¬
dicating a positive correlation. Clearly, there is a strong tendency
for larger urban increments to be located in the larger urban places.
But there are two kinds of exceptions to this rule. One consists
of large places which had comparatively little growth. These are
represented by dots on the lower portion of the slope on the scatter
diagram (e. g. La Crosse, Rhinelander, Waupaca, etc.). Most such
places are located in the northern and western portions of the state.
The second type of exception is the smaller city which experienced
an unusually large increment. These are represented by dots on the
upper portion of the slope on the scatter diagram (e.g Menomonee Falls,
Monona, Fox Point, Greendale, etc.). These are mainly satellite
cities; in a sense they are being carried along on the coattails of a
dynamic larger city, such as Milwaukee or Madison, on whose per¬
iphery they are located.
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
71
WISCONSIN URBAN PLACES: SIZE, I960 &
increment GROWTH IN POPULATION, 1950-1960
Population
100.000 Miiwoukee*
50,000 —
20,000 —
I 0,000
5,000 -=
2.000 -
1,000
500
100
50
Menomonee Foils <
Monona |
Fox Point*
Greendale •
• I
• Wousau
► Stevens Point
► Chippewo Falls
••••
• Sturgeon Boy
• Proirie du Chien
^Sportal
» Richland Center
► Clintonville
> Berlin
• Rhinelander
J _ I M I I I I
JLUJJL
2,000 5,000 10,000
50,000 100,000
1 ,000,000
Size of City, Population
72
John W, Alexander
Still another view of the relationship between change and size is
portrayed by Table 4. This table summarizes the number of settle-
ments (Column A) ^ the number of gaining settlements (Column B),
and the number of losing experiments (Column C) in terms of size of
settlements. To illustrate: there were fifty-two cities with a popula¬
tion between 2, 500 and 5^ 000; of this number, forty-seven gained
and only five lost population between 1950 and I960. By contrast,
there were 118 settlements listed in the census with a population be¬
tween 250 and 500; of these, seventy gained while forty-eight lost.
All told, there were 563 settlements listed in the Census and 164 of
them ( 29% of the total) lost population in this decade. In some re¬
spects, Column D is the most significant column in Table 4 for it in¬
dicates clearly an important relationship between (a) size of settle-
mentand(b) change in population for the 1950-60 decade in Wiscon¬
sin: the smaller the settlement, the greater the probability that it would
lose population. Indeed, 75% of the smaller settlements (those with
less than 250 inhabitants) listed in the census were losers.
Notice that all the urban losers are in northern Wisconsin except
for West Allis and Shorewood, The former is an industrial suburb (of
Milwaukee) where tax policies favor industry which is expanding into
residential areas. Shorewood is a residential suburb (of Milwaukee)
of middle and high income groups almost exclusively developed in the
1920’s. The decline in population here is the result of aging of the
population, children having grown and moved away. The second wave
of families with young children has not yet moved in.
(c) The third relationship to be considered regards urban growth
and migration of population, I am indebted to colleagues in the de¬
partment of rural sociology for data upon which these comments are
based. Data on migration between 1950 and I960 are arrived at by
starting with the 1950 population figure, adding the number of births
in the next ten years, then subtracting the number of deaths in those’
ten years. Suppose the resulting total exceeds the actual I960 popu¬
lation: this means there has been a net migration outward. Suppose
the resulting total is less than the actual I960 population: this means
there has been a net migration inward.
In 1950, Wisconsin has a total population of 3, 434, 575. Births
exceed deaths in the next decade by 565, 477 (Table 5). In I960,
therefore, the state should have had a population exceeding 4, 000, 000—
if there had been no migration. But the I960 population was less than
this figure, the differential being 48, 275—which means that the num¬
ber of people departing Wisconsin exceeded the number coming in by
over 48, 000.
When this system is applied to individual counties, the result is
astonishing. There were seventy-one counties in the state between
Selected changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
73
TABLE 4
Wisconsin: Incorporated Settlements and Unincorporated
Settlements Exceeding a Population of 1000
Number of Settlements by Size Category and by
Population Change, 1950-1960
A _ B C D
Number Number
of of
Population Settle- Gainers
1 960 ments ______
Number Losers
of as
Losers % of Col. A
Identity
of
Losers
7
7 0 0
50, 000
10, 000
5, 000
Z, 500
1, 000
500
250
Total
1950 and I960; of these, fifty-nine experienced a net loss from out¬
migration, and only twelve counties experienced a net gain from in-
migration (Table 5-B) .
At this point the question arises: where are these twelve counties
located, the twelve which succeeded in keeping their natural increase
(that is~excess of births over deaths) and also in attracting more in-
migration than they lost in out-migration? More specifically, is there
74
John W, Alexander
Wisconsin: Population, Natural Increase, and Migration
1950-1960
A. State Totals
Total Population 1950
Excess of births over deaths
between 1950 and I960
Tentative I960 population
had there been no migration
Actual 1960 population
Net out-migration
3, 434, 575
565. 477
4, 000, 052
3. 951. 777
48, 275
B. Leading Counties in terms of:
Source: I960 U. S. Census of Population and Wisconsin Board of
Health as tabulated in James S. Bang, et. al. Population
Change and Migrations 1950-1960 , Population Series
No. 1, p. 33-35.
any relationship between the location of these dozen counties and the
location of urban growth.
Figure 6 gives a partial answer. Each county is shaded in terms
of percentage of net migration relative to the 1950 total population.
The fifty-nine which failed "to hold their own" are shown by lined
symbols. The severest rates of out-migration blanket the northern
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
75
WISCONSIN PERCENTAGE
POPULATION CHANGE
CARTOGRAPHIC LABORATORY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
76
John W. Alexander
and the western portions of the state. The twelve counties which
succeeded in "holding their own" and attracting more people from
elsewhere are shown with dotted symbols. All twelve are in the south¬
east triangle. A trio of areas stands out: the greater Milwaukee-
Racine-Kenosha zone, the Rock River Valley, and the Fox Valley.
This pattern resembles that of Figure 2.
The conclusion on this point is that the presence of vigorously
dynamic cities tends to pull in a positive net migration; and that the
presence of mildly dynamic cities tends to ameliorate the severity of
outward migrations— as for example the upper Wisconsin River Valley,
the Chippewa Valley, and St. Croix County.
(D) The fourth relationship to be considered is that between urban
change and commuting labor. The 1 960 census for the first time con¬
tains information on location of where people work relative to where
they reside. On this basis. Figure 7 has been constructed.
Each county is shown in terms of a percentage or ratio in which
the denominator is the total number of workers who reside in the
county; the numerator is the number of those resident workers who
travel to another county to work. The two lowest counties are Mil¬
waukee, with 2.0%, andDane, with 3.3%. Both contain dynamic cities
which import commuting labor. Notice that both are surrounded by
counties with very high percentages. The highest percentage in the
state is 44% for Waukesha County. Thus the highest percentage in
the state and the lowest percentage in the state are adjacent. This
suggests the following hypothesis; a large, growing city tends to act
as a powerful magnet upon commuting labor causing its own county to
have an abnormally low percentage on this map while causing contigu¬
ous counties to have unusually high percentages. The result might
be compared to a doughnut with low values in the center surrounded
by high values which in turn are surrounded by lower values. Further
support for this theory can be observed in the Fox Valley where Green
Bay and Neenah-Menasha repose in lower value counties surrounded
by higher ones. Also, Sheboygan, Manitowoc, and Wisconsin Rapids
are of this type. This theory might well explain the high values in
Grant County ( commuters from here work in Dubuque) and St. Croix
County (commuters from here work in Minneapolis-St. Paul). Florence
County in the extreme northeast has a low percentage, not because of
a dynamic city but because the few people there are located too far
from other-county employment opportunities to warrant much commuting.
At the moment the question is open to speculation as to why
Barron and Rusk Counties should have such low values and why Iron,
Bayfield and Douglas Counties such high values on Figure 7.
Selected Changes in Wisconsin Urbanism , 1950-1960
77
WORKERS RESIDING
IN COUNTY BUT
WORKING ELSEWHERE
AS % OF TOTAL
WORKERS RESIDING
IN COUNTY
WISCONSIN
COMMUTING LABOR, 1960
CARTOGRAPHIC LABORATORY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
78
John W. Alexander
Summary . At the outset three basic questions were raised: How
much urban change occurred in Wisconsin between 1950-60? Where
was that change located? It was mostly in the southeastern triangle,
with the southeastern lake shore, the Rock Valley and the Fox Valley
being most pronounced. To what other phenomena was this change
related? Four relationships were observed: That urban change was
positively associated with total population growth. It was positively
associated with size of city. The greatest urban growth correlated
with counties which, like vacuum cleaners, were attracting in-migra¬
tion at a rapid rate. Growing cities appear to be associated with a
considerable flow of commuter labor.
THE LANDSCAPES OF RURAL RETREAT
IN MILWAUKEE COUNTY
Loyal Durand, Jr.
This paper deals with the landscapes of the present rapid rural
retreat in Milwaukee County. The hedgehopped subdivision, whose
advent during the late 1930’ s and whose rapid post- World War II ex¬
pansion has been a major factor in the inclusion of rural forms of the
landscape in urbanizing districts, has introduced a new dimension in
city expansion; no longer does a city expand by continuous accretions
along its borders nor by growth along star points alone. These last
methods, although continuing at present of course, formerly steam¬
rollered the adjacent rural territory into urban settings. Now the farmer,
even some distance from the city, is pressured by adjacent subdivi¬
sions, rising taxes, demands for schools, sewers, parks and other
necessities and amenities engendered by the presence of the rural non¬
farm population of the subdivisions— a population with in general a
city background and an urban psychology.
Urban expansion of Milwaukee in the past eliminated farm land,
of course. If a few personal reminiscences may be forgiven, some
random examples of this during the writer’s youth may be cited. The
famous celery area, oriented to the New York hotel market, and lo¬
cated on muck lands on the present far southwest side succumbed to
the expansion of Milwaukee and West Allis. The large farm territory
that separated Milwaukee and Wauwatosa, including the one-time
famous brewery-owned farm where heavy draft horses were reared for
the beer wagons, became urbanized. Five blocks north of where we
now are, the farm owned by the resident of a large home on the lake¬
side side of Lake Drive, and cultivated by a Mr. Livingston, lay be¬
tween Downer Avenue and Lake Drive from west to east, and present
East Keefe Avenue (then Edgewood) and Capitol Drive from south to
north. Just northwest of us, farms stretched northward from the present
corner of Oakland Avenue and Capitol Drive. The Country Day School
in Whitefish Bay was truly in the country, with farm land to its west,
79
80
Loyal Durand, Jr,
south, and north. The writer helped in an oats harvest on a farm
stretching along Lake Michigan; the farm house and bam was at the
corner of Lake Drive and Silver Spring Road, a couple of blocks from
the present high class stores of the suburb. Blue Mound Road, west¬
ward from the present Milwaukee County Stadium to the County Line,
wound through farm land. But, during that period, the farmer could
see the inexorable advance of the urban roller toward him. Today,
with hedgehopping, he may awaken, even though ten, twenty, or more
miles from the urban fringe, to a rabbit-warren subdivision of 600
houses rising across the line fence or on a neighbor's back forty.
Milwaukee County has declined agriculturally within thirty years
from one of the 100 leading counties in the nation in certain items to
its present negligible position, and from a position as the leading
dairy county of the state when measured on the basis of milk produc-
tioji per acre of crop land or of farm land to the situation where the
remaining farms of the county contribute less than one per cent of the
city's milk supply, and where only twenty-five farmers still produce
milk for the Milwaukee milkshed and but six still ship to Chicago.
The decline in agricultural land has been rapid, from more than half
of the county's area to less than a tenth, from more than 600 dairy
farms alone, more than 300 market gardens, to only some thirty to
thirty-five dairy farms and three dozen vegetable growers. Farms on
the Milwaukee milkshed dropped in numbers from more than 400 at the
close of World War II to the present few. Within the two years shown
on the slide the drop was from 111 to forty-one. Note that the broad
subdivision zone of the early 1960's is in effect the milkshed of the
1920's. Even by the time of the Census of Agriculture of 1959 just
about half of the $7, 000, 000 valuation of the county's agricultural
production was contained in the output of 119 enterprises producing
greenhouse products, field-grown flowers, nursery stock, shrubs and
trees; in considerable part, no doubt, the market for the nurseryman-
is the homeowner in the subdivision — the owner is faced with the land¬
scaping of his bare surroundings and the attempt to grow a lawn on the
subsoil left by the bulldozer of the subdivider.
The landscape of the zone of rural retreat around American cities
reflects the setting of the particular city — the geographical scene into
which the expanding city and its present vanguard of hedgehopped
subdivisions and other visible aspects of urbanism is moving. Thus,
in part of the Los Angeles region, relict citrus orchards and walnut
groves remain between and among subdivisions; near many eastern
centers, such as the Connecticut suburbs of New York City, the sec¬
ond or third growth forest has been invaded by urban forms; in the
Middle West the general relict forms are those of agricultural use of
the land. In Milwaukee County, and in the suburbanized portions of
81
Landscapes of Rural Retreat in Milwaukee County
adjacent counties, the most striking relict feature of rural retreat is
the large, basement dairy barn. However, isolated fields, cash-
cropped farms, and unused land awaiting " development" remain between
and among the urban landscapes.
The intermixture of new urban landscape forms and of relict forms
left from past agricultural use of the land, characterizes the zone of
rural retreat. The intermixture is essentially the result of the present
hedgehopping in the expansion of the city. The slides to follow illus¬
trate types of this scene, one common today, unusual thirty or more
years ago.
The shifting land uses that result from the urban sprawl are several.
One of the most common, if the farm is still in use as a relict among
other landscapes, is cash-cropping of grain. Animals are eliminated.
In part, the cessation of dairying and the shift to cash grain was
coupled with the change of the Milwaukee milk distributors from the
collection' of milk in cans to its collection in bulk tanks installed on
the farm. The costs of installation, from $3, 000 to $5, 000 or more,
depending on the size of the herd, the incurrence of a debt for the
amortization of this capital equipment (even with some financial help
from the dairy companies), and the uncertainty of the length of time
it could be used, helped cause a rapid decline in dairying. Also,
cash-grain farming is a response of many farmers to the competition
of the nearby city and suburban factories for the labor necessary for
an animal enterprise, and to the variety of pressures upon their farm
land. Furthermore, the operator can devote part of his time to farming
and part to off-farm work, something not too feasible in an intensive
dairy economy. On a 120 acre farm not far north of here, one acre has
been sold for a house, the father has taken a fulltime job elsewhere,
the son lives on the farm, works in the city, but cash crops the entire
acreage. Today more than half of the cultivated acreage of the county
is devoted to corn, soybeans, and small grains ( including flaxseed)
and nearly all of the wheat, more than half of the corn, and a third of
the oats are sold from the farm. The sales were of such magnitude on
some two dozen commercial farms to result in their classification by
the last census as cash-grain farms.
Otherfarmers, evenclose to the city, and with farms among urban
features persist in their full time farming. It is the writer's opinion
from field experiences that farmer resistance, or perhaps more proper¬
ly, persistence in the continuance of his enterprise has been more
determined in Milwaukee County to the inexorable forces facing him
than in the usual urban county in most of the country where the rural
population has been and is now more speculative on the whole. The
interpretation of this persistence for as long as possible, I believe,
lies in the cultural background of many of the third, fourth, or fifth
82
Loyal D'Arand, Jr.
FIGURE 1
An unused relict dairy barn. The former barnyard
is now deep in weeds and grasses.
FIGURE 2
An unused relict dairy barn on a farm now devoted to crops alone.
Cultivation extends right to the foundation, and the former barn¬
yard has been added to the field.
Landscapes of Rural Retreat in Milwaukee County
83
FIGURE 3
Relict dairy barn remaining in a subdivision.
FIGURE 4
One of the 25 operating farms on the Milwaukee milkshed. Sub¬
divisions and other urban forms of the landscape lie in all
directions.
84
Loyal Durand, Jr.
generation farmers of German descent, farmers whose antecedents
settled the land in the late 1830's, the 1840's, and early 1850's dur-
int the migration of the so-called "48ers" from the German states of
the time — Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, and others. Love of the soil, ex¬
treme pride in herds and bams, and a tradition among many that a son
take over the home farm or else be established upon one by his father,
have been operative. Many of the German settlers brought with them,
or developed, an emotional tie to the land as a permanent home to be
handed down in the family; some of the remaining farm operators are
fourth or fifth generation on the same farm. In contrast, many of the
early American and Irish settlers looked upon the land as a temporary
location, to be developed, sold at a profit— then to repeat the process
on a new frontier.
The writer has collected a list from various sources of farms cul¬
tivated by 4he same family for a century or more, the longest on the
list now having been in the family for more than 125 years. The list,
far from complete, has been compiled from plat books, field work,
correspondence, interviews, historical records where available, and
from the century-certificates granted from time to time by the Wiscon¬
sin State Fair. At least eight of the "State Fair" farms are now within
the city or subdivided. All on the writer's list are operating farms,
some surrounded by subdivisions, and thus in effect relict landscape
features themselves.
Of the some thirty-two century farms to my knowledge, twenty-
five are farms of families of German origin; they date from 1837 to
1856. Three are Irish names, four of English origin. The preponder¬
ance of German names is expectable, considering the fact that most
of the remaining farm land is in districts settled by these people, just
asmostearly American settlement was near the village of Milwaukee.
The Irish farms and one or two of the eastern American are or were
residual islands in the areas of Germanic settlement; plat books and
other records show that the vast majority of Irish settlers and many
Americans sold to Germans quite early.
There apparently are islands or districts of persistence. One
such in the southern part of Milwaukee County contains thirteen cen¬
tury farms within a two and one-half mile radius, through which sub¬
divisions, major highways, night clubs, restaurants, and other fea¬
tures penetrate.
Two sample operating century farms will illustrate. One, in
northern Milwaukee County, has been in the family since the first
settler arrived from Bavaria in 1848. It is now operated by a member
of the fourth generation— in his thirties. Nearby are all the cultural
features of urban sprawl, ranging from single box-like, nonfarm homes
to a subdivision of more than 650 generally similar houses. A small
85
Landscapes of Rural Retreat in Milwaukee County
estate is in the same section^ and nearly half of the section is owned
for speculation. Seventy dairy cows, about half milking herd and half
young stock, are maintained on eighty acres, a good example of the
carrying capacity of Milwaukee County land. Most feed is home¬
grown and all pasturage is on the farm. Income is derived from the
sale of registered calves as well as from milk.
Afarmonl27 acres in the southern part of the county is virtually
surrounded by all the features of urbanism— -subdivisions to its south,
southeast, and west; solid city three miles north; gasoline stations,
outdoor movies, drive-ins, taverns, and other commercial property
lie across the highway; street lights burn all night. Factories and
their associated parking lots are located less than a mile from the
back corner of the farm. The brothers who operate the farm, descen¬
dants of an Alsatian who settled it in 1844, have no intention of sell¬
ing. In fact they have invested several thousand dollars in bulk milk
tanks, modernization of barns for the dairy herd of fifty cows, and in
other equipment. Offers of options at $3,700 an acre have been re¬
fused; only one small lot has been sold for $3, 000. This is their
home and life; they intend to farm on the family homestead.
Elsewhere, if time permitted, the enlargement of family-operated
farms through the setting up of sons in the activity through the years
could be illustrated. The descendants of a Prussian immigrant who
obtained eighty acres in 1839 now operate contiguous farms totalling
368 acres near an urban sprawl zone. Four members of another nearby
family, dating from 1853, now operate non-contiguous farms totalling
278 acres.
The dairy farmers offered the major resistance through the middle
1950’ s, until faced with the investments connected with bulk tanks.
They were able to persist, no doubt, as compared to the market gar¬
deners, because of their peripheral location and economic situation
of a regular monthly milk check— and they did not face the competition
of frozen vegetables. Furthermore, if pressed financially, small areas
of their farms could be sold for dispersed rural nonfarm homes; the
market gardens were too small for this. Dairy farms persist on some
of the busiest main highways of the county; the owner can lease
frontage for filling stations, commercial establishments, billboards,
experiments with exposure of painted boards to the elements, and
other uses, can operate stands and sell some produce at retail prices,
and still retain considerable acreage for his principal activity.
The future? No doubt much if not all of Milwaukee County will
become urban in its landscapes. But it is impossible to forecast with
any certainty. The county is now entirely in incorporated villages
and cities. Every farmer is a city resident. Hedgehopping has jumped
into all adjacent counties, in part because of lower taxes and auto-
86
Loyal Durand, Jr
IS14 1^20
SEC.H^TiN. RaiE (^H3 A.)
ini
Francis
SCHRO-
EPEL
^0 A
FRANK
AAUTZ
OR. 60A.
EU&ENE GENGLEf?
So A.
ROBERT
6AUERN-
FEIND
PETER
SCHMIDT
So A.
FIGURE 5
An example of a section ( square mile) wherein farms have re¬
mained in the same family for a century or more, and are op¬
erated by descendants of the original settler. Note that the
"Irish-owned" farms of the 1870's were sold to Germans. The
Cudahy landholding of 1961 is a country estate.
87
Landscapes of Rural Retreat in Milwaukee County
mobile insurance rates. It is entirely possible, under our present
patterns in the United States that relict farm land will remain for a
considerable period of time. So far as the county itself is concerned,
however, it is too late to do what has been done in southern Cali¬
fornia-incorporate cities to keep people out, cows and crops in.
RaiE- — RME
FIGURE 6
Urban land uses and century farms near the Milwaukee city lim¬
its. Black = subdivisions; lined = County Park land; F= factory;
H, M, S = century farms. The numbers refer to sections on either
side of U. S. Highway 41, the wide double line is the projected
route of a new Interstate Highway.
THE NEW CLIMATE FOR THE ARTS IN
THE AMERICAN CITY THE GROWTH OF
CULTURAL CENTERS
Adolph A. Suppan
That indefatigable observer of the culture of cities, Lewis Mum-
ford, has written that in the history of civilization, one of the chief
functions of the city was to enlarge and transmit the cultural heritage. ^
If this thesis about the metropolis is correct, then in our society
there is taking place a transformation in regard to the arts which will
ultimately make many of our cities the stimulating cultural centers
which so many of the great cities of the past have been. For, in the
last decade, there has taken place in the towns and on the campuses
of our nation what has been described as a cultural explosion. It is
the purpose of my talk here today to describe briefly and explore ten¬
tatively that phenomenon.
First, let us look into statistics concerning these far ranging
manifestations in the arts in our cities, remembering that one authority
recently stated that only ten years ago "art was one of the unmention¬
ables" among many people in our society. ^
According to the Stanford Research Institute,^ consumer spend¬
ing in the arts in the last seven years has risen well over 100%, or
considerably more than twice as fast as spending on all recreation,
and better than six times as fast as outlays for spectator sports or
admission to movies. One hundred million Americans attend cultural
events each year; twice as many attend concerts and recitals as see
major league ball games. Fifty million Americans actively participate
^Lewls Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961), pp. 432-433 ( descrip-
tiori of Plate 56, "University City") .
^Mark Schubart, "Music: We Appreciate It— Do We Like It?," The New York
Times Magazine , September 23, 1962, p. 17
Arnold Mitchell, "Marketing the Arts" (Stanford Research Institute, n.d. ) , p. 6.
( Unpublished lecture) .
88
The Growth of Cultural Centers
89
in amateur art activities; some seventy-five local cultural centers of
varying kinds are built or are in the planning stage in twenty-nine
cities.
In the field of music the explosion has taken on volcanic quali¬
ties. Sales of instruments, sheet music and supplies increased from
$230 million in 1950 to almost $600 million in I960. Some thirty
million Americans now play musical instruments; there are more piano
players in the United States today than licensed fishermen. Total
record sales jumped from $1 7 2 million in 1950 to $492 million in 1960.
There are 1,252 symphony orchestras in the United States, and classi¬
cal record sales in ten years have gone from fourteen and one-half
million to over ninety million.
To turn to the drama: there are 5, 000 community theatres and up¬
wards of 1 00, 000 play-producing groups of all sizes. ^ (U. S. theatre¬
goers outnumber boaters, skiers, golfers and skindivers combined. )
Even the so-called "art movie houses" have risen in number, from
twelve to over 500 in the last decade.
In the art market there has been an incredible upward trend. A
Jackson Pollock painting in 1956 brought $3, 000— it is currently on
the market at $100,000. Twenty years ago. New York had twenty gal¬
leries— a recent estimate is 325. Macy's, Gimbel Brothers, and super¬
markets stock original paintings; Sears has introduced the "Vincent
Price Collection of Fine Arts" in some of its retail stores.^ Everyone
remembers the record-breaking auction of Rembrandt's "Aristotle Con¬
templating the Bust of Homer " which went to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art for $2, 300, 000 in the fall of 1961. Surprisingly enough, though
there was grumbling by some New York taxpayers, the Metropolitan's
new acquisition seemed to have overwhelming approval. Here in Mil¬
waukee, attendance at the new Saarinen-designed art center last year
was nearly four times the combined attendance at the old Layton gal¬
lery and Milwaukee Art Institute in 1954-55. ^
According to one writer,’’’ the forces responsible for this new look
at the value of art are an increased recognition of the significance of
art in our schools; our having homes, offices, and furniture contem¬
porary in design which need the company of new painting and sculpture;
a higher quality of artistic design and photography in our advertise¬
ments; and increased leisure time for many Americans in this era.
4
"Fact Sheet, " National Cultural Center, Washington, D.C., p. 1.
5
Homer Page, "Art As Investment, " Think, February, 1963, p. 15.
^Gerald Kloss, "Culture Boom Here? A Decade of Activity," The Milwaukee
Journal. (Part 2), April 7, 1963, p. 1.
Page, p. 1 6.
90
Adolph A. Suppan
Another possible reason for this new interest in painting and sculp¬
ture is the snob appeal element which is relating itself to art in our
society. Arnold Mitchell prophesies "a major swing to conspicuous
aesthetics"® and points out that great corporations are even altering
their corporate image in the eyes of the public through the associations
evoked by simple contemporary design. We can surely assume that
the arts have had an historical association with status in Western
civilization and that a new set of status symbols is coming into our
society. As will be evident from the data I will give later in regard
to the construction of cultural centers, local pride also plays a part
today in the advance of culture. Citizens boast about their symphony
orchestras as well as their baseball teams and a Saturday Review
article recently revealed that Louisville, Kentucky, insulted some
years ago by a national magazine's describing it as a cultural desert,
has undergone tremendous cultural rehabilitation through the efforts
of civic groups and committees.*^
Additional evidence of a cultural explosion in our nation is seen
in the emergence of state arts councils. The most conspicuous and
well-heeled of these organizations is the New York Council on the
Arts, which received $450, 000 in 1961 with which it subsidized per¬
forming arts groups in major cities to tour through the smaller rural
communities which otherwise could not afford them. Other state arts
councils have been formed in Wisconsin, Washington, Virginia and
the Carolines, and Minnesota. There are also civic councils ortheir
equivalent in Cincinnati, Louisville, New Orleans, St. Paul, Winston-
Salem, and Milwaukee.
Ralph Burgard^® points out that some of the councils are more than
just vocal promoters of the arts. In one year, the Cincinnati and New
Orleans councils each raised $400, 000 for the arts in those two cities:
St. Paul raised $160,000; Louisville $150, 000; and Winston-Salem
$60, 000. The advantage of such councils is that they can become
valuable coordinating agents for numerous civic arts groups. These
groups, by themselves and apart, could not possibly have the influence
in regard to public attention and financial resources which they gain
through the councils.
Not all social commentators and critics have climbed on the band¬
wagon of optimism in their interpretation of this boom in the arts in
America. Some estimate that the boom has affected only thirty-six
^Mitchell, p. 19.
^John Tebbel, "Newspapers and the Cultural Beat," Saturday Review, April 13,
1963, p. 77.
^^Ralph Burgard, "Arts Council— A New Approach to Cultural Leadership," Arts in
Society, II, No. 2 ( 1962), 125.
91
The Growth of Cultural Centers
million people, or Z0% of the population. The Milwaukee Journal
recently pointed out that nearly 200 American singers have maintained
their professional lives abroad because they could not find work in
their own country; that, though 6, 000 members of the Actors' Equity
Union are looking for work on the Broadway stage, only 7 50 of them
find such work and that, if the play for which the actors were hired
was unsuccessful, their tenure was soon ended. The world-famous
dancer and choreographer, Agnes de Mille, writes: "We have demon¬
strated, we American dancers, remarkable creativity, diversity and
vitality. And equally remarkable and enduring poverty." She goes on
to point out that there are between four and five million dance stu¬
dents, and adds, "Andyet, and yet we starve." Miss de Mille also
says that ours is the only nation without national sponsorship of the
performing arts and the only country, great or small, which does not
have a folk-dance group— "an organization dedicated to the maintain¬
ing of our heritage. " Other skeptics raise the question as to whether,
though we tend to support the arts out of intellectual conviction, we
are not far behind other countries in developing a real feeling of love
for art.
One might also, at this point, raise the question as to what is
being done in a meaningful way about our young people who show
promise and genius in the arts and who might be the Rembrandts and
Mozarts and Shakespeare s of the future. As everyone knows, we have
an overwhelming supply of scholarships, fellowships and general fi¬
nancial assistance for students showing ability in the sciences; how
long will it take for us to get similar, massive support for equally
worthy students in the arts?
We come now to the physical phenomena which relate themselves
to this new climate in the arts of our society— the great cultural centers,
often massive and strikingly contemporary in design, which are rising
in ourcities and on our campuses. One authority estimates that 1, 000
theaters and multi-purpose art buildings will be constructed in the
United States and Canada during the coming decade, at a cost of at
least four billion dollars. Truly, the creative and performing arts
are being brought to main street. W. McNeil Lowry states that so
Harry Ferguson, "Artists in Doldrums Though Arts Thrive, " The Milwaukee
Journal (Parti), April 4, 1963, p. 20.
12
Harry Ferguson, "Arts in America Are Enjoying a Boom," The Milwaukee Journal
(Parti), Aprils, 1963, p. 25.
Agnes de Mille, "Dance: 'We Deserve A Fair Showing'," The New York Times
Magazine, September 23, 1962, p. 19.
14
Schubart, p. 43.
^ ^Mitchell, p. 4.
9Z
Adolph A, Suppan
many cultural centers are on the drawing boards in many U.S. com¬
munities that "our country's businessmen or municipal and state of¬
ficials appear to think that art begins with real estate. Skeptics
have also made salty comments about these new centers. One com¬
plains that the National Cultural Center in Washington will be "virtually
wrapped in a spaghetti of highways. " Winthrop Sargeant, the music
critic of the New Yorker magazine, had fears that Lincoln Center
might " turn out to be a sort of Alcatraz of the performing arts. " Others
have worried about the same center becoming a "cultural supermarket"
and an "island of pomp" that forgot the creative arts while focusing
upon the performing arts.
Nevertheless, critics aside, cultural centers are sprouting up all
over our nation— from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Seattle and from New
York and New Jersey to Los Angeles, California. Some of the most
notable (and expensive) are— first— The Lincoln Center of the Perform¬
ing Arts which, when completed, will cost $14Z million. The opening
of Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall on September Z3, 196Z, focused
the attention of the world on the arts and their importance to the Ameri¬
can people. Capacity audiences almost daily through the center* s
first months enjoyed performances by the center' s constituent, the
New York Philharmonic, and by visiting orchestras and individual
artists.
The National Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., will cost
$30 million; the Los Angeles Center, $25 million; others are being
planned or are in operation at Pittsburgh, Syracuse, St. Paul, Milwau¬
kee, Seattle, and Trenton. Most of these large centers will include
facilities for concerts, opera, ballet, theater, and art exhibitions.
Some of them include museums and meeting rooms. A few, like the
famous Aspen, Colorado, center, are more interested in spending their
money on the performers than the buildings. Aspen, for instance,
uses a rather elaborate tent for concerts, and spends $300, 000 a year
(though its boxoffice income only amounts to around $40,000) in get¬
ting notable performing units and artists. The balance of the money
is raised by fund drives involving institutions and individuals.
Similar cultural centers are being built on the campuses of the
nation's universities and colleges. Some of these are planned (or
^ ^W. McNeil Lowry, "The University and the Creative Arts," Educational Theater
Journal, XIV ( May 1 962) , 103.
17
Wolf Von Eckardt, "A Center for Drive-In Culture," The New Republic, Decem¬
ber 22, 1962, p, 28.
1 8
Wlnthrop Sargeant, " Musical Events: Culture, Inc.," New Yorker, October 6,
1962, p. 94,
19
"Cultural Centers Across the Land, " Mewsweefe, September 24, 1962, p. 54.
93
The Growth of Cultural Centers
already in existence) at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Lawrence, Knox and
Maryville colleges, and at Indiana, Wisconsin, and Boston universi¬
ties. These generally include the same facilities housed in the civic
cultural centers mentioned above, as well as classrooms, workshops
and studios. One of the most notable campus cultural centers,
which combines its architectural beauty with a practical philosophy
in regard to its students, is the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth. This
is so situated in the center of the college campus that students, whether
they are in the arts or not, find it almost necessary to walk around or
through the center in going to and from their classes. Dartmouth of¬
ficials describe their center as a "cross-roads site to bring creative
art into the daily lives of every student on campus." I am sure you
know that the proposed Elvehjem Art Center in Madison will also house
many of the arts; and you, yourselves, are listening to me in a new
Fine Arts building on the UW-M campus, which is the first of a series
of buildings ultimately constituting a fine arts complex, housing mu¬
sic, theater, art and the dance.
These centers, whether in the town or on the campus, will cer¬
tainly bring fresh new experiences in the performing and creative arts
to all our people. As Leonard Bernstein points out, what is really ex¬
citing about these structures is that they ^ ill young people
closer to the arts.
In heralding this new climate for the arts in the United States,
and in telling the almost unbelievable story of how these cultural
centers are being built and enjoyed by millions, we must not forget
the fact that all art begins with the creative genius— the painter, the
playwright, and the composer— who creates the work of art to be pre¬
sented. Without him, there obviously would be no art; and these
contemporary cathedrals for the arts would be hollow and empty shells
without life or motion or sound within them. It would be tragic if, at
the same time we are spending billions of dollars in the next decade
(on these buildings) , we would not be doing everything in our power
tocreatea more healthy climate for the artists themselves— a climate
in which, for instance, the finest oboist in a great metropolitan city
would not have to work in a machine shop during the day to supplement
his meager income as an orchestra player. It is unfortunate that we
are not providing many more scholarships and fellowships in the arts
for the nation's talented young students. Why should Agnes de Mille
have to say about her brilliant young dancers, "And yet, and yet we
starve. " ?
I have, in this brief general survey, discussed America's amazing
20
Burgard, p. 124.
21
"Cultural Centers Across the Land," Newsweek, September 24, 1962, p. 55.
94
Adolph A, Suppan
cultural explosion, the factors which seem to have motivated it, the
new climate in the arts in our society, some skeptical comments about
it, and the great new cultural centers rising in our land. I have also
raised a question foryou to consider: as encouraging as the signs are
for the arts in our time, are we likely to forget that the artists need
assistance too?
TELEVISION AND THE URBAN COMMUNITY
Sprague Vanier
Some of what I will say is hyperbole.
Some of what I will say is statistical fact.
Some is considered opinion and some is prediction, or an attempt
at prediction.
It is all designed, however, to bring into focus, with the ring of
dramatic as well as literal truth, the magnitude of the communications
revolution— and, thus, the cultural, social, economic, psychological
and political revolution — which has come to pass almost casually in
less than a decade.
Arthur Schle singer Jr. , writing in an introduction to a recently
published paperback edition of a McGuffey reader, observes that that
venerable handbook of frontier learning had the virtue, in its time, of
providing a common frame of cultural reference to people in scattered,
isolated communities and of vastly divergent cultural backgrounds.
Regardless of the merits of its contents or its value as a tool in teach¬
ing, it did help unify a nation by giving the nation' s people a handy
set of common literary references, perhaps even a common set of
popular values.
The point is interesting and difficult to dispute.
Is it possible that much of the same thing is happening to this
nation as a consequence of television? but on a much more universal
scale? Is it possible that we— as a people— are drawing strong im¬
pressions of what our rights before the law may be by watching " The.
Defenders?" Or that we are drawing conclusions as to what we expect
of our medical men as the results of impressions gathered by watching
"Ben Casey" and "Doctor Kildare?" Perhaps even the least sophisti¬
cated, the most underprivileged, even those kept in ignorance for
generations are drawing more than entertainment from the television
tube— perhaps they are even drawing some conclusions.
95
96
Sprague Vanier
Just as surely as the McGuffey reader once represented the com¬
mon cultural background of the literate American, television today
represents the common cultural background of the American with elec -
tricity in his home~and that’s nearly everyone.
Just as surely as the people of India once drew their impressions
of America from watching silent Westerns and Charlie Chaplin movies,
the American today draws his impression of the world beyond his
doorstep from what he sees on the television screen.
How vast and how complete is this process of homogenizing the
popular attitudes, impressions and standards of our nation? Ninety-
three percent of all the homes wired for electricity in the United States
have television sets. There are fifty million homes with television
sets in the nation today. It has never before, in all of human history,
been possible to get so many people together on one thing, except
perhaps the need to breathe.
The 'mere fact that a vast number of people have in common a
physical possessioncould be of no significance in drawing conclusions
about our society. Nearly everyone has in common some sort of shelter.
Nearly everyone wears some sort of clothing.
American television, however, is projecting upon the public a
point of view, an outlook, an attitude and a set of standards that is
very near to being of uniform and consistent character.
This point of view may be characterized as "the standard, northern
United States, urbanized outlook." For easy handling, call it the
"urban outlook. "
The "urban outlook" may be summarized as a series of popular
attitudes which comprise the general orientation of most northern city
dwellers. Hospitals are well equipped. Society is prepared and able
to come to the rescue in time of desperate individual crisis. Fair
play is important. Judges are sober. Policemen should be even-
handed, calm and incorruptible, strong, brave and understanding.
Everyone is entitled to speak his mind. Lawyers are smart. Everyone
is entitled to the best education he can handle, at least through high
school. The able and diligent will, with a little luck, do well in the
world. Alcoholism is a disease. People should be kind to animals
and children. Everyone is created equal.
Now, the northern, urban citizen may not always behave as if
these were his standards and he may find out that many of his fellow
citizens don't either; but, if he were asked to check each of those
statements as "true" or "false," he would regard nearly all of them as
true.
The hugely successful television programs which may reach more
than one-third of all the television sets in the nation in a single night—
sometimes 20 million homes— all reflect some aspect of this "urban
outlook." Take a look at the following.
Television and the Urban Community 97
The Beverly Hillbillies : Money talks. Much of what passes for
culture is shallow snobbery practiced by pretentious phonies.
The Naked City: Senior police officers are wise and patient;
young ones may be hot-headed, but they learn.
Car 54: Policemen are dumb but good-hearted.
The Doctors Kildare and Casey: Doctors are dedicated. All
the forces of modern medicine will be unleashed to relieve a human
in agony, regardless of cost.
The Defenders : Justice will be served.
Sing Along with Mitch: We are essentially a happy, optimistic
people.
Jack Paar: Americans can go anywhere. Publicity is good.
This list, obviously, could go on for many pages, but the above
examples serve to illustrate the point. And the point is that these
attitudes are being projected effectively, repeatedly and with great
dramatic force into corners of our society which have never been
touched by them. Moreover, urban dwellers themselves are acquiring,
through the television habit, a common source for and uniformity in
these attitudes.
Couple this information with the observed phenomenon that life
tends to imitate literature and we have the makings of social revolution.
Saying it another way, constant exposure to "standard urban
values" is very likely to lead some 160-million tube-watching Ameri¬
cans to expect reality to take on the attributes of the television fic¬
tion they have come to love so well.
Contemplating the above premise may lead one to picture a nation
bemused by dreams born of television; such a picture may not be en¬
tirely distorted.
The acquisition of some or even many of these "standard urban
values" may well be of benefit both to the individual and to his society .
Certainly a nation whose people believe that men should expect equal
justice and should have the right of self-expression is equipping itself
to survive as a democracy, even though the lesson may have been
learned through the emotional experience of identifying with characters
in television dramas.
When the television viewer confronts a reality which is at sharp
odds with his standardized, popular viewpoint, however, his reaction
may be hostile and even violent; especially if he has absorbed his
set of values over a long period of time starting in early childhood.
A danger asserts itself, therefore, when education to reality and
education to the skills implied in equality and self-expression, fail
to keep pace with the aspirations of men, however acquired.
Television offers a unique opportunity to communicate directly and
simultaneously with nearly the entire population, in a way that not
98
Sprague Voniev
even radio did with its many outlets and, consequently, fractionalized
audiences. Television communication, contrary to commonly held
opinion, is not directed to a "mass of people" —but is directed, in¬
stead, to one or two or a handful of people at a time, each group re¬
ceiving the message simultaneously with the others but isolated and
remote from the others.
Thus there is an opportunity to influence tens of millions of people
in an instant without any interaction between them and without an op¬
portunity on their part tocounter-react to the originator of the influence.
Why does this matter? It matters, I believe, because television
causes us to short-circuit one vital step in the classic and traditional
process of forming public opinion. Classically, public opinion has
been formed by (1) an event stimulating (2) individual reactions and
opinions, which are ( 3) discussed with and checked against the re¬
actions of others. Cross-checking and discussion leads to (4) the
recasting and modification of individually held opinions and, finally,
to ( 5) the jelling of a discernible "public opinion."
It is step number 3 and its outgrowth, step number 4, which may
be by-bassed in the age of television, unless careful education imbues
the viewer with emotional and intellectual prudence.
Instant, direct and powerful communication may cause opinions
to jell long before the opportunity for public discussion arises. Nor
is television the only force in our age which tends to replace true
public opinion by mass passion. It should be pointed out, also, that
opportunities for public discussion were disappearing rapidly in our
society long before television became a major factor on the American
scene; but television has reduced the time lag between action and re¬
action so greatly that spontaneous over-reaction by the public seems
to be an ever-present possibility.
As an example, during the Cuban crisis, one had the feeling that
great masses of the public might, at any moment, bolt from the cities
without any clear plan or destination had the news not been handled
with the utmost care. The instantaneous, simultaneous character of
such a reaction-arrived at independently by each family group— could
be appalling. A foretaste of such hysteria was implicit in Orson Welles'
famous "War of the Worlds" panic, triggered by radio.
This is not to say that mass hysteria never existed before man
learned mass communication, but it is to say that the speed with which
hysteria could strike in the age of electronics stuns the imagination.
Intelligently used, of course, mass communications may also be em¬
ployed to forestall and stem mass hysteria.
It is, perhaps, our society's instinct of self preservation that
accounts for the popularity of discussion programs on television, es¬
pecially those discussions which follow major events and major
Television and the Urban Community
99
addresses by public figures. These programs provide some measure
of discus Sion by proxy and compensate for general public discussion.
We are fortunate, however, as a nation, that no skilled television
demagogue has seized the affections of the viewers during this period
when education lags behind communications technology. (On a primi¬
tive scale, Castro typifies this corruption of mass communications. )
Those politicians and public figures who have been successful
on television thus far — and how very successful they have been! — are
crude practitioners alongside the monsters of seductivity who may be
easily envisioned by the professional communications man. The really
dangerous montebank of the future will be confidential in his manner.
He will not address his viewers as if he were addressing a crowd nor
will he reflect the coldness of official in power.
He will seem to be the private, personal partisan and confidant
of each viewer. He will fill, through careful design, the private image
of the leader as woven into the mind of each viewer as a part of "the
standard urban outlook." He will feed back to the viewing public their
own dreams.
It is this dreadful danger— a hazard inherent in the power ot total
communications— against which both the educator and the communi¬
cator must guard.
The communicator must guard against it by preventing the use of
television to control, rather than liberate, men's minds. And it is my
conviction that the communicator is actively aware of this responsi¬
bility.
The educator must guard against it by immunizing the public against
easy beguilement. The vaccine to be used is the development of
critical judgment and heightened awareness of reality on the part of
more and more people in our population.
In this the broadcaster can and will help.
No social phenomenon, however, is isolated, we may see — side-
by-side with the reinforcement in TV fiction of what I have called the
" standard urban outlook"— an increased exposure of the public, through
television, to reality itself.
All through the nation, television stations are expanding their
local news programs and, in so doing, reaching out into the community
to find stories and to show their viewers what is happening.
The national networks, through their great journalists and docu-
mentarians such as Fred Friendly, Dave Brinkley, Eric Severe id and
Chet Huntley, are reaching into reality to engage and inform great
masses of people.
Real lawyers talk about the law. Real doctors debate medical
problems. Real policemen may defend their actions before the eyes
of the public they serve.
100
Sprague Vonier
With each opportunity the public enjoys to confront objective
reality through television, the viewer perhaps checks this reality
against his acquired "urban outlook" and asks himself whether he might
not shape the world closer to his heart's desire.
This, then, is the great contribution that television can and will
make to the "urban community" (and I might say that it is my conten¬
tion that our entire society, through television, is becoming urbanized
in outlook) : Television can feed back to the immense audiences it
serves the reality of the environment in which they live. It can and
does bring them face to face with the people in power, so that they
judge for themselves what the world is like. It can and will show them
what is going on in the world— -as it did in the documentaries, "The
Battle of Newburgh," "Harvest of Shame," and" The Alabama Sit-Ins."
Because all television stations— both commercial and educational—
depend for their survival entirely upon an audience commitment to them,
they must be constantly at the work of soliciting that public commit¬
ment. This means that they must reflect the community they servein
order to gain audience loyalties.
Increasingly, in my opinion, local television stations will seek
out the articulate elements of their own communities and use these
elements to involve and interest audiences not only with fiction but
with the real problems of our times.
The solutions which most people will find satisfying for real prob¬
lems may depend largely upon the content of the "standard urban out¬
look" which is being shaped so widely and so rapidly by television
fiction.
Whether those " standard urban attitudes" are adequate to the task
is a massive subject in and of itself. That question, however, may
very reasonably be turned back to the educator in the terms that Gilbert
Seldes— prominent educator and television critic — sagely advances:
I don't give a hoot for the few intellectuals that criticize tele¬
vision. I want five million active critics. I would sacrifice
reading and writing of a report on Ivanhoe if every student would
write a report on Gun, Will Travel, If we had a GI Bill that
the one course you must take is "Mass Media," we would now
already have those five million families who view with a critical
eye.
Mr. Seldes, it seems, would change the " standard urban outlook."
If he is successful, he will also change television in the process.
1'
-iW,
Cover Design by Jeffrey Homar
Junior, School of Fine Arts
Title Page Design by Gail Mitchem
Senior, Art Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
HENRY JAMES AND SCIENCE: THE ]H1NGS OF THE DOVE
Harry Hayden Clark
‘‘The critic’s first duty in the presence of an author’s collective
works,” Henry James says in discussing George Eliot, “is to seek
some key to his method, some utterance of his literary conviction,
some indication of his ruling theory.”^ There are dozens of such
comments in James’s work which declare his central interest in
philosophical and ethical attitudes — an area which recent criticism
of James has neglected in its concern with formal technique rather
than content. But it seems only logical to turn more fully to con¬
tent in order to learn more about that area of James, the writer,
which he as a critic centered on in other writers — an ethical
sense. For, as James wrote in French Poets and Novelists, “Be
the morality false or true, the writer’s deference to it greets us as
a kind of essential perfume.”^ In view of the weight James placed
on moral questions and motivation, then, let us consider The
Wings of the Dove, 1902, the culmination of some thirty-six years
of thoughtful fiction and criticism, in terms of its philosophical and
ethical attitudes.
James was, as is well recognized, especially concerned in gen¬
eral with the distinction between surface appearance and inner or
psychological reality. But, holding that the novel “should begin
with a picture and end with an idea,” he was just as concerned
with ways in which he could flesh out his characters’ distinctively
psychological conflicts. In fact, the quest of such ways, such images,
seemed to James the very “essence of poetry.” Hence, the critical
interpreter has the problem of finding what James himself called
“the figure in the carpet” represented in the configurations of
images in a given story, assisted by what he said in non-fictional
work about his general ideas.
Such an approach to The Wings of the Dove suggests that here
James is ultimately concerned with a struggle for existence which
* Grateful acknowledgement is made of the fact that I have been much aided in
getting this study into its present form through several versions by Mr. Clinton Bur-
hans and Mrs. Carol Scotton, Research Assistants generously provided by The Grad¬
uate School of the University of Wisconsin. They deserve much credit.
1 Views and Revieivs (Boston, 1908), p. 1.
^French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878), p. 114.
1
2 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
is economic at center, though it is a struggle in which Milly Theale
excels because of superior moral force. Further, the terms in
which James describes this struggle — his images — suggest that
Social Darwinism influenced his conception of the novel.
That James had such a view of the world is apparent from his
other writings. “James saw [the world] a place of torment,’’ his
personal secretary Theodora Bosanquet wrote, “where creatures of
prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the
doomed, defenseless children of light . . . He . . . saw fineness
sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. . . .
He hated the tyranny of persons over each other,”^ And in his non-
fictional English Hours James makes clear he saw society in gen¬
eral as well as business in terms of “the steady rumble of that deep
keynote of English manners, over-scored so often, and with such
sweet beguilement, by finer harmonies, but never extinguished—
the economic struggle for existence.”^ As James sees meaning in
society beneath its smooth surface, we should look for significance
in The Wings of the Dove beneath all its surface “sweet beguile¬
ment.”
One related consideration is important, and that is the novel’s
reflection of Jame’s lifelong concern as an expatriate writer with
the theme of international contrasts. For the struggle for existence
is embodied in terms of these contrasts in The Wings of the Dove,
This theme of international contrasts is considered not only be¬
cause of James’ travels and his conscious attempt to play the ob¬
servant “cosmopolite,”® but because of his interest in the theme of
“the great and admirable Taine” (on whom he wrote five essays)
that a given book is determined by a writer’s time, place, and race
or nationality.® Along this line, Professor Christoff Wegelin in
The Image of Europe in Henry James argues that in The Wings
of the Dove the two contrasting heroines, “Milly and Kate are
representative of the civilizations which formed them.”^ And Mr.
R. P. Blackmur says that Milly Theale, with Maggie Verver of
The Golden Bowl, “although victimized by Europe, triumph over
it, and convert the Europeans who victimized them, by the positive
strength of character and perceptive ability which their experience
of treachery only brings out ... By these means, in the figure of
the American girl, candor, innocence, and loyalty become char-
Henry James at Work (London, 1924), p. 32.
^English Hours (Boston, 1905), p. 71. (First edition, 1875.)
^Portraits of Places (New York, 1948), p. 115.
« I have elaborated on these matters in “The Influence of Science on American
Literary Criticism, 1860-1910, Including- the Vogue of Taine,” in Transactions of the
Wisconsin Academy (XXXIV, 1955), 109-164.
’Christoff Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas, 1958), p. 117.
1963] Clark — Henry James and Sciences 3
acteristic through not exclusive American virtues which redress
the deep damage done by a blackened Europe/’®
As we explicate The Wings of the Dove, then, let us watch for
reflections of the influence of the current scientific determinism
(v/hose teachings in general James had access to in hundreds of
contacts) and the influence of Taine’s thesis of the author being
a spokesman of his time and place. By approaching this book in
the light of ideas associated with science- — an approach hitherto
unexplored in depth — I do not claim that James was directly in¬
fluenced by Darwinism. My point is only that in The Wings of the
Dove James sees his characters’ psychological conflicts and the
essential conflict of the novel in terms of images of destruction,
counterpointed at the end by an ethical renunciation associated
with what Emerson called “the internal check.” These images re¬
flect current scientific ideas which make plausible in 1902 his inter¬
pretation of the socialite life of that time.
There is in Milly Theale’s situation in The Wings of the Dove
more than a suggestion of the evolutionary concept of the survival
of the fittest in a struggle for existence. James, characteristically,
is not interested primarily in the struggle in a life and death sense ;
he is concerned chiefly with the struggle of Milly, the wealthy
young American who is dying of an incurable disease, to achieve at
all costs life’s fullest potentialities. As such, her struggle and quest
is a matter of sensitivity and realization, not of breath and
blood; its arena is not the jungle of fang and muscle but rather of
drawing-rooms and galleries, of intellectual conversations and so¬
cial graces. And it is here that Milly encounters the forces — mem¬
bers of London society who view her in economic terms — forces
which would inhibit her quest.
James turns to upper-middle class English society because it has
the conditions he considers necessary for the realization of life’s
highest potentialities. And, though this arena has its beguiling
social aspects, it is a psychological jungle and James is as con¬
cerned with the moral and ethical problems of its conflicts as are
those who deal with more obvious and basic jungles.
The essentially savage nature of English society is revealed by
Kate Croy in her description of it to Milly Theale. For Kate speaks
in terms of a “monster,” to which one must be introduced and en¬
abled to “walk all round . . . whether for the consequent exag¬
gerated ecstasy or for the still more . , . disproportionate shock.
Milly’s immediate social success in London is discussed one evening
in similar bestial terms at a dinner party from which she is absent.
8R, P. Blackmur, in Literary History of the TJ.8., ed. R. E, Spiller et al. (New
York. 1949), pp. 1056-7,
» Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York, 1930), Modern Library Edi¬
tion, I, 302. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
4 Wisconsin Academy of Science^, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Milly's friend and companion, Mrs. Stringham, is pictured as ob¬
serving the discussion “very much as some spectator in an old-time
circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the
arena, mildly, caressingly martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling
not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the
joke” (II, 46) .1^ And for Merton Densher at the same party, Milly's
success is best described with similar animal images. He sees the
situation in terms of competition within nature : “The huddled herd
had drifted to her blindly — it might as blindly have drifted away.
There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was prob¬
ably the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast
would come and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It
was at all events characteristic . . .” (II, 47). James thus describes
English society as an arena in which a struggle for existence akin
to that in primeval nature is constantly going on.
Nearly everyone of English society in the novel is engaged in
this struggle; more important, almost all are selfishly and unscru¬
pulously using their personal relationships to advance their material
and social interests. Kate’s despicable father is a prime example,
for he hopes to gain wealth and position through Kate’s relation¬
ship with her wealthy aunt, Mrs. Lowder. Kate is ready to give
up Mrs. Lowder because her aunt has offered her a home only on
the condition that Kate have nothing further to do with her father
and sister. But her father, insensitive to the insult and very greedy
for money, refuses such a plan: “One doesn’t give up the use of a
spoon because one’s reduced to living on broth. And your spoon,
that is your aunt, please consider is partly mine as well” (I, 17) .
Mrs. Lowder also sees in Kate a means of achieving her goals
— in this case, attracting guests to enable her to outdo other com¬
petitors for social prominence. She feels that her money combined
with Kate’s charm and beauty will produce a marriage with the
highest social connections. In the most economic of terms, Mrs.
Lowder explains to Merton Densher her “feeling” for Kate: “I’ve
watched [Kate’s presence] long ; I’ve been saving it up and letting
it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and you may judge
whether, now it has begun to pay so. I’m likely to consent to treat
for it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and
I’ve my idea of the best” (I, 92) .
Kate, whom we shall see has had her sordid family background
to teach her the meaning of a struggle for existence, realizes she
In a non-flctional essay on “London,” 1888 James remarks, “A sudden horror of
the whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of home-sickness . . . London was
hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all over-whelming ; whether or not she was ‘care¬
ful of the type’ (as in Tennyson’s view of evolution), she was as indifferent as
Nature herself to the single life.” (James’s Art of Travel (New York, 1958), pp.
176-77.) On p. 189 he envisages London as an “ogress devouring the poor.”
1963]
Clark — Henry James and Sciences
5
has “been marked from far back” (I, 32) for Mrs. Lowder’s preda¬
tory purposes. She goes to live with her aunt, but secludes herself
in her room as much as possible where she thinks of herself as “a
trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come,
but sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of [Mrs.
Lowder] the lioness” (I, 32-33). While Kate ponders her fate,
James makes his most telling comment on the savage character of
the situation: “Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the
dangers of life and of London? Mrs. Lowder ivas London, was life
— the roar of the siege and the thick of the fray” (I, 35).
Yet Kate, too, is involved in the struggle as selfishly and un¬
scrupulously as the next. She is in love with Merton Densher, the
penniless but cultivated and charming journalist; but she refuses
to marry him until her Aunt is reconciled to the marriage, for she
doesn’t want to lose the material affluence which life with Mrs.
Lowder means. In a conversation between Kate and Densher on
this subject, James seems clearly to indicate the basic nature of
the struggle for existence which characterizes the society he is de¬
scribing :
“ don’t see,’ [Kate remarks,] Vhy you don’t make out a little more
that if we avoid stupidity we may do all. We may keep her.’
He stared. ‘Make her pension us?’
‘Well, wait at least till we’ve seen.’
He thought. ‘Seen what can be got out of her?’
Kate for a moment said nothing. ‘After all I never asked her; never,
when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.’
‘You speak,’ Densher observed, ‘as if she were a vulture.’
‘Call it an eagle — with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great
flights.’ ” (I, 82-3)
It is into this unscrupulous social struggle for existence that the
American Milly Theale steps upon her arrival in England. She
is innocent, not as one who is unaware of the art of living, but as
one who is uncorrupted. And, suffering from an incurable disease,
she is herself engaged in a struggle for existence far more im¬
portunate than that which she enters. In his preface James indi¬
cates explicitly — as does finally the entire novel — that his concept
of a social struggle for existence is not the simple one between life
and death ; the struggle is rather to live up to life’s fullest potenti¬
alities. “The idea,” writes James in the preface, “reduced to its
essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for
life, but early stricken and doomed . . . while also enamored with
the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately
desiring to ‘put in’ before extinction as many of the finer vibrations
6 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the
sense of having lived’’ (v)
It is essentially in the struggle of life and not in the fact of
death that James is interested. Of the artist and his characters
James says, “It is still by the act of living that they appeal to him,
and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and pre¬
scribe the battle. The process of life gives way fighting, and often
many so shine out on the lost ground as in no other connexion”
(vii). James, then, meant his tale in no way to be “the record
predominately of a collapse” (viii) but rather the portrayal, of an
ethical triumph. Thus, in the novel “powers conspiring to a sinister
end” are yet “in such straits really to stifle the sacred spark” that
Milly as “a creature so animated, an adversary so subtle, couldn’t
but be felt worthy, under whatever weaknesses, of the foreground
and the limelight” (viii-ix).
When Milly arrives in England, she immediately is seized upon
as all things to all people — all in an economic context in the strug¬
gle for existence. In Milly, Mrs. Lowder, who was Mrs. String-
ham’s classmate in girlhood, sees the person who will marry
Densher and thus eliminate him as a threat to her plans for Kate’s
marriage to a man of social prominence. When Kate learns that
Milly is dying and that her physician. Sir Luke Strett, feels that
only happiness can prolong her life, she tries to arrange a marriage
between Milly and Densher. Such a marriage, Kate feels — though
she is secretly engaged to Densher— will bring Milly happiness and
bring Densher, after Milly’s death, the wealth which will make
them independent of Mrs. Lowder. Milly and Mrs. Stringham leave
London for Venice and Milly rents an ancient palace which be¬
comes the scene of action. They are joined there by Mrs. Lowder,
Kate, and Densher. Densher has agreed to Kate’s plans, if in defer¬
ence to his conscience he is a passive rather than an active partici¬
pant. But Lord Mark, a penniless aristocrat whom Mrs. Lowder
wants Kate to marry and who had met Milly in London, comes to
Venice to ask Milly to marry him. As much involved as anyone in
the economic struggle for existence, Lord Mark too is after Milly’s
money. Milly refuses him and he realizes that she loves Densher.
Lord Mark then returns to London to ask Kate to marry him, but
she also refuses. Now he discovers the scheme which she and Den¬
sher have to obtain Milly’s money and he returns to Venice (moti¬
vated by animal-like jealousy and frustrated greed) to tell Milly
Leon Edel in Henry James: The Untried Years (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 226—38
and 323—33, discusses James's youthful devotion to Mary Temple, and the extent to
which she served as an inspiration to his creation of Milly and others. Mr, Edel's
many studies of James and his editing have placed all who study James deeply in
debt to his expert knowledge and rich insights.
1963]
Clark— Henry James and Sciences
7
of their secret engagement, and hence of Densher’s duplicity. This
is the greatest of blows for Milly and she turns “her face to the
walF^ (II, 294).
At this point Mrs, Stringham goes to Densher and describes
Milly's struggle to live :
“ ^She^s more than quiet, She^s grim. It^s what she has never been. So
you see — all these days, I can^t tell you — but it^s better so. It would kill
me if she were to tell me.’
‘To tell you?’ He was still at a loss,
‘How she fells. How she clings. How she doesn’t want’ ” to die (II, 299),
But Densher can’t tell a direct lie by going to Milly and denying
Lord Mark’s accusation, as Mrs. Stringham asks. A few weeks
later Milly dies. But her physician, Sir Luke, had convinced her
that Densher meant well in trying to prolong her diseased life,
and Milly had seen him before her death. She sends him home in
order that he might not see her die.
Densher’s relation to Milly has been a very subtle one; he has
been a passive participant in Kate’s plan, but he has 'become in¬
volved with Milly on their own terms to the exclusion of other con¬
siderations. And he finally realizes he is in love with her memory.
He refuses to marry Kate (“I won’t touch the money”) unless she
joins him in renouncing the money. She replies she will if he can
deny he is in love with Milly’s memory. But this he cannot do, and
they both realize there is too much between them— Milly’s wings,
the wings of the dove— to permit their marriage.
Both in the English society he describes, then, and in the char¬
acter of Milly Theale, James seems to reflect the influence of the
evolutionary concept of the survival of the fittest in the struggle
for existence.
The fact that James’s characters are clearly products of heredi¬
tary and environmental factors also reflects the influence of evolu¬
tionary science in The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy’s family back¬
ground is one in which personal attachments are weighed in terms
of financial value. To her father and her destitute sister, Marian,
as Kate so clearly recognizes, “My position’s a value, a great value,
for them both. It’s the value — the only one they have” (I, 80). In
the light of such conditioning, Kate’s actions in this pattern toward
Milly Theale are easily understood. And Kate heavily feels the
burden of her heredity, her natural affinity for family and its un-
hapy consequences: “Her haunting harassing father, her meanac-
ing aunt, her portionless little nephews and nieces,” writes James,
“were figures that caused the chord of natural piety superabun¬
dantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself — but more
8 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
especially in respect to Marian — was that she saw what you might
be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity’' (I, 36).
In his preface James leaves little doubt of his intention with
Kate as the product of corrupted heredity and environment. He ex¬
plains her thus: “The image of her so compromised and com¬
promising father was all effectively to have pervaded her life, was
in a certain particular way to have tampered with her spring . . .”
(xviii). And in a conversation between Kate and Densher, James
again indicates the fruits of heredity, for to Kate her father’s dis¬
honor has become a part of her, and she concludes, “How can such
a thing as that not be the great thing in one’s life?” (I, 77) Kate
‘“sleeps” with Densher to encourage him to continue to make love to
Milly!
Quite ironically, Milly Theale sees Kate as the “wondrous Lon¬
don girl” (I, 190), the particular product of the London environ¬
ment of whom she had read. But as the two girls become close
friends, Milly perceives more than Kate’s turns of head and tones
of voice; she sees the Kate who is straining in an earnest com¬
petition. Significantly, James describes this element in Kate in
terms that reflect both his conception of a social struggle for
existence and his concern with environmental determinism.
“Wasn’t it,” he writes, “that the handsome girl was, with twenty
other splendid qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn’t she sug¬
gest, as no one yet had ever done for her new friend, that there
might be a wild beauty in that, and even a strange grace?” (I, 201) .
And, as James continues, Milly soon saw the reason for such a
bold approach to life, for “There were more dangers clearly round¬
about Lancaster Gate [Mrs. Lowder’s ostentatious home] than one
suspected in New York or could dream of in Boston” (I, 201).
In the case of Merton Densher, James depicts an individual in
whom the qualities have yet to be shaped by his environment into
a final character. And of course in the novel it is Kate’s plan and
Milly’s splendid fortitude, coupled with his renunciation of Milly’s
money, that determine the final form of his character.
It is significant that the two characters in the novel who see the
final circumstances of Milly’s death as a sort of ethical triumph
are those two who are not distinctly products of any one environ-
^J. A. Ward (The Imagination of Disaster (Lincoln, Neb., 1961), p. 130) in his
analysis of The Wings of the Dove scarcely mentions its reflections of evolutionism
but he does call attention to “hereditary predestination.” “Both Milly and Kate, we
are told, are destined to suffer for the sins of their ancestors, Milly by dying early
and Kate by committing a great sin. Milly’s family has been plagued by a long history
of early deaths and widespread disaster. Kate also partakes mysteriously in the
failure and disaster that have visited all her relatives and ancestors. Early in the story,
Kate thinks of her family : “Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on
such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to
break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without
a reason?’ ” (N.Y. ed., XIX, 4).
1963]
Clark — Henry James and Sciences
9
ment, that is, Densher and Susan Stringham. These characters also
are the ones who, with Milly, spiritually gain something from the
total experience encompassed in the novel. Thus, Densher, who had
lived abroad, is delineated as ‘‘but half a Briton'' (I, 101). Mrs.
Lowder notices his “want of the right marks, his foreign accidents,
his queer antecedents," (I, 101), and Kate discovers “how many
more foreign things were in Merton Densher than he had hitherto
taken the trouble to catalogue . . ." (I, 103). Densher himself in¬
sists he had come back “to being a Briton," but James observes,
indicating clearly his partial belief in environmental determinism,
“Brave enough though his descent to English earth, he had passed,
by the way, through zones of air that had left their ruffle on his
wings .... Something had happened to him that could never be
undone" (I, 104), Densher's final renunciation of Milly's money is
also explained in part by the fact that his father was a clergyman
whose idealism the son inherited.
Mrs, Lowder and Mrs. Stringham are as much products of their
backgrounds as the other characters, but background has fixed
the London society matron into a rigid pattern of behavior and has
left the New Englander all the more flexible for her experience. In
renewing her childhood friendship with Mrs. Lowder when they
were classmates in Switzerland, Mrs. Stringham notes the differ¬
ences between her London friend and herself. To the questing New
England companion of Milly, Mrs. Lowder appears now as con¬
cerned only with the fundamental “business" of life. Mrs. String¬
ham sees it thus: “The joy, for her, was to know why she acted—
the reason was half the business ; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there
might have been no reason: ‘why' was the trivial seasoning-sub-
stance, the vanilla or the nutmeg, omittable from the nutritive
pudding wihout spoiling it" (I, 187-8) .
Mrs. Susan Stringham is the perfect companion for Milly, whom
she worships as a princess, because her character's development is
determined throughout the story by the demands of the new en¬
vironment, as was noted of Densher’s character. Like Densher, she
had spent part of her life in foreign lands ; her mother had given
her daughters five years abroad , which was “to stamp the younger
in especial— Susan was the younger— with a character [which]
. . . made all the difference" (I, 133). Coming equipped with the
simplicity and directness of a New England background and the
perspective of travel, Mrs. Stringham does develop — under the de¬
mands of a new environment— a character subtle enough to per¬
ceive by the end of the story the involved but untold relationships
between Merton, Kate, and Milly, “She has seen for herself," Mer¬
ton tells Kate, “I’ve told her nothing. She’s a person who does see"
(11,358),
10 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
James makes it clear in his preface what he intends of heredity
and environment for Milly. “She should be the last fine flower, —
blooming alone, for the fullest attestation of her freedom — of an
“old' New York stem . , (x) , Going with this, James sees a pecu¬
liar American background, for he speaks of “a strong and special
implication of liberty, liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation,
of contact — proceeding from sources that provide better for large
independence, I think, than any other conditions in the world” (x) .
When Susan Stringham visits Milly in New York, it is Milly 's
New York background which impresses, a background which is an
“imense, extravagent, unregulated cluster, with free-living an¬
cestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
aunts, persons all busts and curls, perserved, though so exposed, in
the marble of famous French chisels , . (I, 124), Milly is upper
class New York to Mrs. Stringham, is undeniably the product of
her environment. And what Milly represents is “all on a scale and
with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it was a New
York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation . . (I, 118), But
most of all, James stresses, Milly represents, “in respect to the
mass of money so piled on the girl's back, a set of New York possi¬
bilities” (I, 118). This is what makes Milly ''the thing you were”
(I, 136) for with her vast wealth and complete personal freedom
she is truly “the heir of all the ages” (xi), with an unparalleled
opportunity to encompass in herself all of the past which remains
worthwhile.
Aware that the opportunity is hers but that the time is limited,
Milly feels the need to grasp quickly the influences of the European
cultural heritage. It is ironic that it is this heritage which kills her,
but which also completes her in leaving her with an acute awareness,
of life, and which she triumphs over in her forgiving generosity to
her false lover, because of the hereditary and environmental power
of her ethical innocence and goodness.
It is Milly's awareness of what she is that makes her a truly
tragic character. She is never blinded by the London she encounters
(except in the case of Densher). For, noticing the difference at a
dinner party in Lord Mark's attitude toward Kate Croy and her¬
self, Milly reflects that it was Kate, “one of his own species,” who
made him uncertain. But toward Milly his attitude is confident, for
“about a mere little American, a cheap exotic, imported almost
wholesale, and whose habitat, with its conditions of climate, growth,
and cultivation, its immense profusion but its few varieties and
thin development, he was perfectly satisfied” (I, 184). As the
product of such an environment, born with every conceivable ad¬
vantage but without the vigilance which experience usually in-
1963]
Clark — Henry James and Sciences
11
spires, Milly can flourish only for a moment’s brilliant intensity
and then die, knowing that her deceitful lover had been mainly
actuated by mercenary motives.
What is most interesting in James’s portrayal of Milly Theale’s
physician. Sir Luke Strett, is that James makes him on the sur¬
face a sort of demi-god and quite as much a psychiatrist as he is a
physician. Throughout the story Sir Luke acts as the prime dis¬
penser of understanding, sympathy and commands to action. And
he is interested on Milly’s behalf 'fln other questions beside the
question of what was the matter with her. She accepted such an
interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind — -his being
the even highest, magnificently . , (L 263), In this role, as some¬
thing of a psychiatrist in the era of Walter Pater, he urges Milly
on in the “pursuit of happiness.” He tells her, “You’ve a right to be
happy ... You must accept any form in which happiness may
come” (I, 265) , Thus, Sir Luke, whom we may take as representing
James’s ambivalent attitude towards science, plays a strange role :
unwittingly, he paves the way for Millie’s gullible acceptance of
Densher’s pretended love, but he also administers “therapy” which
may have been a factor in Milly’s partial foregiveness of Densher.
James appears (judging by his scientist in Confidence and Wash¬
ington Square) to have absorbed something of Hawthorne’s gen¬
eral view that the scientist has an inadequate insight into the emo¬
tional needs of distinctively human beings (cf Beatrice Rappaccini) .
Thus, James shows that Sir Luke in his prescibed treatment fails
to predict that Lord Mark’s jealous nature will motivate his telling
Milly of the plot of Kate and Densher, and to realize that Milly’s
being told of Densher’s duplicity will kill her. He also does not
realize that Kate will lose Densher because of the wings of the dove
which have eventually caused Densher to refuse to marry Kate if
she keeps Milly’s money secured by such duplicity.^^
The rapid contemporary development of the science of psychol¬
ogy (in which his brother William’s pioneering early studies were
synthesized in 1890 in his Principles of Psychology^^) influenced
James’s writing of The Wings of the Dove, As we have noted,
Henry James is most obviously concerned with the psychological
factors of consciousness and motivation. He seldom deals with his
“ In “Lady Barberina/’ in a contexture contrasting- the idle life of the British aris¬
tocracy with that of his hero, an American physician, James says the latter’s “re¬
pression of pain, the mitigation of misery, constitute surely the noblest profession in
the world.” But the brilliant and cold-hearted Dr. Sloper in Washington Square illus¬
trates James’s ambivalent attitude toward men of medicine.
“All my life I have . . . unconsciously pragmatized,” Henry James wrote William
(Letters, II, 83). “You are immensely and universally right” in evaluating ideas and
conduct in terms of practical consequences as contrasted with Platonic absolutes.
Densher fears that his duplicity (eventually brutally revealed to Milly by Lord Mark
in his jealousy) will kill Milly in her delicate condition. She should have been more
vigilant and pragmatic.
12 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
subject directly in an omniscient way; rather, he treats it from dif¬
ferent points of view in terms of the varying consciousness of the
observers. Thus, when Mrs. Stringham and Milly are introduced,
their ‘'more or less associated consciousness . . . deals “unequally
with the next presented fact of the subject” (xxviii), James notes
in the preface.
James is even more concerned with the factor of motivation, for
he is constantly probing for the “motive still finer” beneath the
apparent actions and passions of his characters. The development
of Densher and his reasons for becoming involved in such deep
duplicity is a masterful study in motivation. Beginning as the son
of a chaplain, Densher agrees to Kate’s plan. This depends on many
subsequent factors including love for Kate, financial needs, and the
idealistic belief that his pretending to love Millie will prolong her
life.
The influence of science is reflected in much of James’s literary
theory and practice, for he frequently refers to the “laws” which
underly his writing. In developing his plot, James proceeds much
after the scientific fashion of a construction-engineer. He describes
the “fun” of establishing successive centers so that the portion of
the subject commanded by them and accordingly treated from them
would constitute “sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material,
squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carry¬
ing power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect
and to provide for beauty” (xvi). For example, James conceives of
Kate Croy as “such a block (xvi). Thus, it is in Kate’s conscious¬
ness at Milly ’s party in Venice that the drama is brought to a head,
for there Kate “takes the measure of her friend’s festival evening,
squares itself to the same synthetic firmness as the compact con¬
structional block inserted by the scene at Lancaster Gate” (xxiii).
James feels this scientific method of plot development- — of devis¬
ing blocks of action — is the best: “I have never . . . embraced the
logic of any superior process,” he says in his preface (xxi). The
writer “places,” he states, “after an earnest survey, the piers of his
bridge — he has at least sounded deep enough, heaven knows, for
their brave position; yet the bridge spans the stream, after the
fact, in apparently complete independence of these properties, the
principal grace of the original design” (xvii). Thus he sees The
Wings of the Dove as blocks, each governed by a new center, al¬
though he deplores his “regular failing to keep the appointed halves
of my whole equal.” (xxiv) .
James’s method of describing persons and events through the
consciousness of his characters is equally scientific and geometrical.
He manipulates their consciousness like high-powered searchlights.
1963]
Clark — Henry James and Sciences
13
revealing with dimensional intensity the elements of his story when
they are turned on the object. Thus in the suspenseful final sections,
while the center ‘‘dwells mainly ... in the depths of Milly Theale’s
‘case' (xxviii), it is through the other characters that actual
events are related. In discussing the functional purpose of Milly's
party in her Venetian palace, James very clearly describes his sci¬
entific and mechanical method of reflecting persons and events.
“My registers or ‘reflectors,’ ” he writes, “as I so conveniently
name them (burnished indeed as they generally are by the intelli¬
gence, the curiosity, the passion, the force of the moment, what¬
ever it be directing them), work ... in arranged alternation ...”
(xxii) . So it is in Venice that Kate Croy is “turned on . . . where
the appearances, rich and obscure and portentous ... as they have
by that time become and altogether exquisite as they remain, are
treated almost wholly through her vision of them and Densher’s”
(xxii) .
James, then, engineers his scenes around carefully selected
centers of consciousness which, in turn, are the determined prod¬
ucts of their heredity and environment and which color the scenes
in these terms.
His concern with environmental determinism is also reflected in
his use of environment as an organic and quite functional back¬
ground for his story. Mrs. Lowder’s home is more than a simple
setting for her part in the novel ; it is Mrs. Lowder, and it gives her
a dimensional expression beyond the power of direct descriptions.
When Densher visits her he is dismayed by the massive and osten¬
tatious furnishings of her house. He takes in “the message of her
massive florid furniture, the immense expression of her signs and
symbols ...” (I, 85). He feels the “language of the house itself”
speak to him, “writing out . . . the ideals and possibilities of the
mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything
so . . . ugly — operatively, ominously so cruel” (I, 87). In
Venice, when Lord Mark tells Milly of Densher’s duplicity and
Milly “turns her face to the wall,” the weather immediately re¬
flects the psychological climate. The sunny days end and the city
becomes “ a Venice all of evil .... A Venice of cold lashing rain
... of general arrest and interruption, with the people engaged in
all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cyni¬
cal, under archways and bridges” (H, 283) . With the arrival of Sir
Luke and with Milly’s psychological improvement, the weather
changes and comes “into its own again” with “a suffusion of
bright sound that was one with the bright color . , .” (H, 320).
In summary, it seems apparent that James’s interpretation of
life in The Wings of the Dove, as imaged in the destructive aspects
14 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
at least, is parallel in many ways to the ideas associated with the
science of J ames's era. These ideas certainly mesh with his concept
of the social struggle for existence which underlies his presentation
of English society in Kate Croy, “the modern London girl,” in con¬
trast with the American Milly Theale. The same parallel to current
science is also evident in James’s concern with partially^^ explain¬
ing conduct in the light of heredity and environment, and in his
ambivalent attitude toward Milly’s physician-psychiatrist. Sir Luke
Strett. Finally, James’s concern with motivation, presented in all
its complexity, and his psychological concern with “centers of con¬
sciousness” and other practices of literary artistry and formal pro-
portioningi® also parallel current ideas in science, A reading of the
novel in these terms seems to make most potent the significance of
the struggle for existence which James is depicting, for the un¬
scrupulous world over which Milly must triumph is most terrify¬
ing in its determined animalistic aspects.
One must finally recognize, of course, that in The Wings of the
Dove the struggle for existence in terms of money-getting and
grasping for happiness in the face of disease which medical sci¬
ence cannot cure is counter-balanced by an anti-materialistic ideal¬
ism. Thus, Milly’s ultimate victory over Kate’s predatory spirit is
the more triumphant for its non-materialistic, ethical and moral
basis. Several students of James have concluded that the common
denominator of the climaxes in his major fictional works involves a
free-willed renunciation of something of price for something price¬
less, especially for one’s self-respect.
While James never joined any sectarian religious group, it has
been said that he develops his favorite characters as if they were
approaching a religious state of grace after an initiation which
had warned them that they should have been more vigilant of the
world’s evils of a naturalistic kind. The very title phrase, “The
Wings of the Dove,” from Psalm 55 suggests that Milly, after
learning how she had been betrayed, might have yearned for the
“wings of the dove” in order to escape from the city of deceit and
fly from those who pretended to be her friends.^^
For a discriminating- discussion of this question, see Arnold Goldsmith, “Henry
James’s Reconciliation of Free Will and Fatalism,’’ Nineteenth Century Fiction XIII
(Sept., 1958), 109—126, a discussion condensed from his doctoral dissertation written
at the University of Wisconsin.
In addition to James’s reg-ret that this novel, unlike The Ambassadors, is not lim¬
ited to having- all the action refracted throug-h only one unifying “centre of con¬
sciousness,” he deplores (in his Letters, 1920, I, 403) the fact that “The centre . . .
isn’t in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn’t in the centre but ever so much too near
the end, so that what was to come after it is truncated.” For a discriminating- analysis
of such formal matters, see Joseph Warren Beach’s The Method of Henry James (New
Haven, 1918).
1'^ See also the subtle study of Ernest Sandeen, ^^The Wings of the Dove and The
Portrait of a Lady”, PM LA LXIX (Dec., 1954), 1060-75.
1963] Clark— Henry James and Sciences 15
Another strong influence on James was the semi-platonic Emer¬
son, the spokesman of a spiritual self-reliance, Emerson distin¬
guished sharply between the “law for man’^ and the “law for
thing” (materialism). And James, who wrote three appreciative
essays on him, concluded that Emerson, while prone to have a too
“ripe unconsciousness of evil,” was right in seeing that “the prize
was within,” Of course James’s devotion to George Eliot (on whom
he wrote five essays) and other Victorians such as Arnold would
also have militated against the materialism of the English upper
class. Such materialism struck him “in many ways very much the
same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy
before the revolution-— minus cleverness and conversation.”^'®
Whatever the sources, the great renunciation scene at the end
of The Wings of the Dove in which the chaplain’s son “won’t touch
the money” and will not marry Kate unless she too gives it up, is
beautifully moving evidence that, fully as James realized the paral¬
lels to Darwinism in the socialite life of his time, he also paid hom¬
age to the need for the protective and contagious power of ethical
innocence and goodness.^®
Letters, I, 124.
In the latest book-length study of Henry James, The Madness of Art (Lincoln,
Nebraska, 1962, p, 55-56) Walter F. Wright follows his predecessors in scarcely men¬
tioning social Darwinism, But he does show insight in finding a recurrence “in novel
after novel” of two conflicting commandments, “The one commandment was ‘Live
all you can !’ The other was ‘Renounce, renounce !’ The symbol of the first was often
Europe ; of the second, America, and particularly puritan New England. We should
hasten to say that we are speaking only of those instances in which the geographic
terms were used as symbols.”
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HENRY JAMES: A SENTIMENTAL TOURIST
AND RESTLESS ANALYST
Donald Emerson
Henry James wrote accounts of travel over nearly forty years.
In the rage of anthologizing which has rescued from magazines
even his earliest uncollected accounts, critical attention has dwelt
heavily on James’s report of what he saw. The more interesting
subject, however, is James himself, for the travel literature power¬
fully confirms James’s realization that he was exclusively, for
whatever vivid or deficient reactions the fact might involve, a man
of imagination. Thus the travel accounts add striking brush-strokes
to the self-portrait which he sketched in his notebooks, letters, and
criticism, as well as in more forthright self-revelations.
In the autobiography written in his last years, he recalled him¬
self as a small boy always dawdling and gaping, and saw in that
memory the very pattern of his always wanting ‘'just to he some¬
where . . . and somehow receive an impression.” He remembered
feeling that to stop looking would be to take a long step towards
not living at all. When in his twenties he began writing travel
sketches, he made picturesque contrasts, impressions, and sketch-
able details one of his constant subjects. His other chief subject is
the reaction of his powerful imagination, which at first outran
actual experience and later suffered correction.
For at first he yielded to a tendency to “make images in ad¬
vance.” As a youthful “sentimental tourist” he gave Saratoga in
anticipation “a shape and figure ... a certain complexion, a certain
colour.” When he found the place different from the construction
of his imagination, he acknowledged that his unsophisticated vis¬
ions gained by their transmutation into fact. “There is an essential
indignity in indefiniteness,” he acknowledged; “you cannot allow
for accidents and details until you have seen them. They give more
to the imagination than they receive from it.”^ The Saratoga of
reality proved more satisfactory than the “all-too-primitive Ely¬
sium” he had constructed in advance. But three years later, in the
Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore, he reflected that his
* Paper read at the 93rd annual meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters.
^Portraits of Places (London, 1883), p. 324 f.
17
18 Wisconsin Academy of Science^, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
''perfect feast of fancy’' was largely the product of his "capricious
intellect.”^ Over the years, James found that in the realm of travel
experience "the virtue of the business” rested more in what he
brought by imagination than in what he took by observation.
The travel accounts express James’s reaction to acts of posses¬
sion. He had seen Europe in childhood and received part of his
education there, but when he returned in 1869 he went to seize it.
He wrote of his experience then and later, but even after forty-five
years, in his final recollection of the experience, he expressed noth¬
ing so keenly as his avidity for impressions and the complexity of
his imaginative response.
England and Italy held the greatest charm for him, and after
them, France; the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Germany had
lesser appeals. He never saw more of Spain than San Sebastian,
and never attained his wish to visit Greece. He longed vaguely for
the East, but he had scant interest in remote parts of the world.
He wrote most interestingly of his own country after twenty years
of absence had given him an eagerness to penetrate mysteries much
like the receptiveness with which he had approached Europe in his
youth.
The collected travel accounts are more or less connected series
of essays arranged to give the impression of continuous tours.
James generally attempts to compose his details into a pleasing pic¬
torial account of the places he visited.^ He evolved a casual, easy,
and graceful style for his travel pieces, and cultivated a cosmo¬
politan urbanity of tone. This is the manner of the "sentimental
tourist.” The "restless analyst” who much later wrote The Ameri¬
can Scene speaks with a different voice.
James seldom muses on scenery. Even as a small boy he was
"positively conscious” that the social scene would say more to him
than anything else, and it was the human note he wanted, even
among impressions of nature. In Switzerland he found that there
was "a limit to the satisfaction with which you can sit staring at a
mountain,” and he preferred "the more equal intercourse between
man and man.”^ In the placid English countryside he found his
chief delight in the human associations of a scene in which "every-
^ Transatlantic Sketches (Boston, 1875), p. 125 f.
3 He criticized Stendhal for failing to do this, noting that Stendhal . , is never
pictorial ... he never by any chance makes an image . . . his want of appreciation of
the picturesque — want of the sketcher’s sense — causes him to miss half the charm
of a landscape.” A Little Tour in France (Boston, 1900), p. 220 f. Gautier, on the
other hand, seemed to James ‘‘the prince of travellers” because he simply looked and
enjoyed, and his fancy was always on the alert. Unsigned review of Theophile
Gautier’s A Winter in Russia, Nation, XIX (Nov. 12, 1874), p. 321.
4 Transatlantic Sketches, p. 36
1963]
Emerson-Sentimental Tourist
19
thing . . , has a history^ has played a part, has a value to the
imagination/'^
His human associations with natural scenes were frequently
drawn from history and literature. At Poitiers, for example, he
could look out from the Promenade de Blossac, through uncertain
whether he was regarding the actual battlefield, and lose himself
in reflections and associations. In Warwickshire, he peopled the
landscape with characters from Trollope, and regarded his doing
so as an example of the way Americans must bring imagination
into play in the presence of English life.® He complained that the
American scene was deficient in the poetry of association, whether
from history or literature/ and by contrast cited the way in which
the Roman scene provided an unbroken continuity of impressions
at once ''historic, literary, and suggestive."®
What James termed his "historic imagination" is actually a
sentimental attachment to a sense of the past. He was almost en¬
tirely deficient in the sense of history, so far as that involved un¬
derstanding of the motives and values of other times. He cared
little for accuracy; his having a subjective impression was quite
enough. His reflections on the battlefleld of Poitiers sufficiently in¬
dicate the type of reaction he repeatedly experienced.
It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a
vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five cen¬
turies ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of
another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the
cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful
motto graven round the image of the Black Prince as he lies forever at
rest in the choir of Canterbury: a la morte ne pensai~je mye. Neverthe¬
less, the victory of Poitiers declines to lose itself in these considerations;
the sense of it is part of our heritage, the joy of it a part of our imagina¬
tion, and it filters down through the centuries and migrations till it titil¬
lates a New Yorker who forgets in his elation that he happens at that
moment to be enjoying the hospitality of France. It was something done,
I know not how Justly, for England; and what was done in the four¬
teenth century for England was done also for New York.®
In like fashion, the Citadel at Quebec evoked for James an image
of the English past, as the Chateau d'Amboise recalled the French
wars of religion.
In the same way that literary reference added interest to natural
scenery, it created at times the very appeal of a church or a city. In
the Cathedral at Tours, James found that the "profane name of Bal¬
zac" added an interest to the venerable sanctuary, and he wrote
5 Portraits of Places, p. 271.
p. 256.
Hawthorne (New York, 1887), p. 12.
® Transatlantic Sketches, p. 153.
® A Little Tour in France, p. 164 f.
20 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
rather more of Balzac’s novel, The Cure of Tours, than he did of
the church. In the end he went in search of the house of one of
Balzac’s characters.^® At Angouleme he found the chief interest of
the town in the fact that Balzac’s Lost Illusions had “placed” the
characters of the fiction there for him. He even congratulated him¬
self that those personages were more real than mere historic in¬
dividuals, and successfully avoided the “vagueness of identity”
that was the misfortune of historical characters.^^
As for the suggestive— -so far as it may be distinguished from
what James regarded as the literary or the historic — it was an
essence he frequently detected. He felt that “a general impression
of the past” was the chief thing Siena had to offer a casual ob¬
server. In summing up his reactions to the Boboli Gardens of Flor¬
ence, with the view of the Pitti Palace which recalled to him the
generations of the Medici who had lived there, he defined at once
what the past furnished him in Europe and what he missed in
America. “What remains . , , now is a mere tone in the air, a vague
expression in things, a hint to the questioning fancy. Call it much
or little, this is the interest of old places. jt could even evoke the
ghosts of the past. At Haddon Hall in the growing dusk James felt
that if there had been a ghost on the premises he would have seen
it, and decided afterwards that he had. “I did see it, as we see
ghosts nowadays. I felt the incommunicable spirit of the scene with
an almost painful intensity. The old life, the old manners, the old
figures seemed present again.’’^
There were times when he felt a strong reaction in favor of the
actual, but this mood was infrequent, and James habitually valued
places and scenes in proportion as they carried a weight of associa¬
tion or suggestion, a value for the imagination. Calculated cere¬
mony had little charm for him; he absented himself from London
during the celebration of Victoria’s jubilee. He preferred the lei¬
surely, individual impression, and he gave advice on the best hours
for avoiding crowds.
It is typical of James that his reactions to places should fre¬
quently depend on childhood impressions. Nothing in all the travel
writing is more charming than his account of an excursion to
Greenwich :
It is doubtless owing to the habit of obtrusive and unprofitable reverie
that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich ob¬
servatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this use¬
ful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem un-
^Ihid., p. 16.
^lUd., p. 166.
Transatlantic Sketches, p. 256.
p. 26.
1963]
Emerson— Sentimental Tourist
21
reasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child, in
woodcuts, in school-geographies, in the corners of large maps which had a
glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in unexpected places, in
dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that my eyes
could reach only to the lower corners, and these corners usually con¬
tained a print of a strange looking house, standing among trees upon a
grassy bank that swept down before it with the most engaging steepness.
I used always to think that it must be an immense pleasure to hurl one’s
self down this curving precipice. Close at hand was usually something
printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees ‘east
of Greenwich.’ Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the child¬
ish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and
seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of
geography — the countries of unintentional outline and the lonely-looking
pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the precise point
from which the great globe is measured; there was the plain little facade
with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be
so delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old
to find that I was not even tempted to begin.^^
To such experience as this more is brought than is ever taken ; it is
in fact memories and associations that make the experience itself.
The most sentimental tourist, however, cannot foverver continue
at the active pitch. In one ancient city on a hill-top, James found
that his imagination refused to project into the dark old town 'That
sympathetic glow which forms half the substance of . . . genial im¬
pressions.'’^® He recognized, too, the fact that observation of for¬
eign lands is at best extremely superficial. At times he questioned
the value of travel at all, if it meant leaving home only to see new
forms of human suffering. There were moods of reaction against
“beautiful useless things,” though James reflected that the health¬
ier state of mind was to allow time for intelligence to “make . . .
its connections.”^®
At the end of his first visit to Rome in the early 1870’s he de¬
parted with the “insistent faith” that his gathered impressions
would “emerge into vivid relief if life or art should demand them.”
His art demanded a good many of them, and they emerged with
sufficient vividness when he had had time to “make connections”;
but he never mistook them for insights into the real life of Italy.
England was another matter; it was never “foreign” to him, like
Italy and France. After he settled in England he discarded the
manners of the tourist and the relaxed enjoyment of impressions,
for in England he was accepted into society, and he took his effort
of understanding seriously. And within England, London provided
a “banquet of initiation” which prolonged itself for years, until
Portraits of Places, p, 221 f.
^ Transatlantic Sketches, p. 290.
p. 287.
22 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
James felt that it had fed his intelligence more than any other
sourced^
In all James’s accounts of travel before the turn of the century
his imaginative experience forms the substance of the essays. He
does not report, guide-book fashion, what is to be seen, but presents
the experience of his own visit, with all its personal, imaginative
accompaniments. This is the method of the sentimental tourist, as
he frequently styled himself. But his interest in travel accounts de-
declined as the freshness of impression which prompted them gave
way to accumulated impressions that nourished his fiction.
When James returned to America in 1904 after an absence of
twenty years and reported his journey in The American Scene
(1907), he considered himself now a “restless analyst,” capable of
criticism as he had not been in Europe. There is some irony to this
delusion, for The American Scene differs from the earlier travel
essays chiefly in the even greater quantity of what James “brings”
and the richer and fuller notation of what he “takes.” Like all the
travel accounts, it is primarily a record of imaginative experience,
now raised to a pitch which James exceeds only in his autobiogra¬
phy. But by an enrichment of irony, James actually does succeed
in penetrating further into the American scene than the European
by the very intensity of his entire reliance on impressions.
For one thing, expatriation had now made it possible for his
imagination to respond to America as it could no more react to
Europe. European complexity had become for him usual and cal¬
culable, while “with his relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp im¬
agination once more on the stretch” James could now find “ro¬
mance and mystery — in other words the amusement of interest,” in
America.!® He had always valued the intensity of first impres¬
sions ; he found now that they were accompanied by trains of asso¬
ciation that receded to the dimness of his extreme youth. This
struck him as a great advantage; besides the freshness of the in¬
quiring stranger he had also, he felt, the acuteness of the initiated
native ; he was convinced he would vibrate with more curiosity than
the most earnest of foreign visitors.
He was fully aware that he was incapable of providing informa¬
tion on “immensities of size and space, of trade and traffic, of or¬
ganization, political, educational, economic.” He would have noth¬
ing to do with statistics; his record would speak only of his per¬
sonal adventure. “I would take my stand,” he declared, “on my
gathered impressions, since it was all for them, and for them only,
that I returned ; I would in fact go to the stake for them,”!® Direct
17 The Middle Years (New York, 1917), p. 60.
The American Scene (New York, 1907), p. 351.
Ibid.j p. V.
1963]
Emerson — Sentimental Tourist
23
perceptions, enriched by James’s lifelong concern for the human
subject and his “rage for connections,” make up the substance of
The American Scene. When repeatedly James discovered that his
vivid impressions had emerged out of elements insufficient to ac¬
count for them, he positively congratulated himself that he was
not a journalist dependent on items.
Again and again he found his subject so thin as to require more
of the imagination than it offered it. When he felt that the history
he encountered was neither very stout nor the rarities of nature
very rare, he confessed his need to be “shamelessly subjective”
about both. This involved him in a problem of notation, for he
found that a little of all his impressions was reflected in each of
them. To detach or reject one was to mutilate or falsify the others,
for the history of a given impression often resided in those which
led up to it or accompanied it. This explains the density of James’s
notation, which for years was held to make The American Scene a
curiosity of literature.
The American scene was for him primarily the American social
scene. The “great lonely land” actually depressed him with its vast¬
ness. Nature in America seemed to him unfinished, as society was
as yet unformed. During a twilight journey on Lake Worth, where
palms silhouetted in the sunset made him think of the Nile, it
seemed to him that the American lake was the greater antiquity —
it was ''previous” to everything.^®
Even at best the historic impress on America appeared to James
slight, and he repeatedly felt the necessity of “reading into” his
American subjects before they could give out interest. He even
created interest out of the blankness itself, as when he visited
Richmond. That he felt justified in his method is evident from his
definition of history, made at a moment when the triviality of his
subject, though he made it the source of rich subjective experience,
tempted him almost to apologize. He restrained the impulse, and
drew courage from his reflection that “History is never, in any rich
sense, the immediate crudity of what ffiappens,’ but the much finer
complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection
with it.”^^
This is precisely the “shameless subjectivism” of James’s re¬
sponses turned to aspects of the past, though prompted by the in¬
dividual report of the immediate experience. Its interest lies in
the observer, who must indeed be ready to go to the stake for his
impressions, for he has almost nothing else. James felt, for ex-
^ The American Scene, ed. W. H. Auden (New York, 1946), p. 465. This passage
was omitted from the original American edition.
The American Scene (New York, 1907), p. 177.
24 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ample, that any report of Independence Hall which he might make
could be ^^news” only so far as it was news of himself ; in that char¬
acter it could pretend to freshness, even brilliance. He found that
“every fact was convertible into a fancy, and that trivial events
could again and again renew his appreciation of “the mystery and
marvel of experience’' by which small externals prompted an enor¬
mous inner enrichment. He felt nothing was more wonderful than
the quantity of significant character a well-guided imagination
could recognize in the scantest group of features, objects, or per-
sons.^2 There were subjects, however, to which it failed utterly to
respond; mere promiscuous encounter never alone evoked interest
for James where he felt none or where, as with Wall Street, he was
simply baffled.
James’s account of America has the weakness of its omissions,
but also the coherence of its consistent subjectivism. This was all,
James felt, that it could very well have, for even to the most rest¬
less of analysts conclusions were impossible. The “great inscrutable
answer to questions” hung in the vast American sky, to his imagi¬
nation, as “something fantastic and ahracadahrant'' which would
become legible only with time.^^ Meanwhile he noted the absence
of social forms, the terrible impermanence of things in the face of
money-making possibilities, the rampant commercialism, and the
childishness of a society confident of its safety in an absence alike
of doubts or convictions.
Though he spoke for himself in declaring that the unsatisfied
wants of the spirit must be met somehow, and revealed himself, in
his shameless subjectivism, busily knocking together substitutes,
he discovered at last that the country at large was also knocking
together, somehow, substitutes for an appetite very like his own,
. . . the human imagination absolutely declines everywhere to go to sleep
without -some apology at least for a supper. The collective consciousness,
in however empty an air, gasps for a relation, as intimate as possible, to
something superior, something as central as possible, from which it may
more or less have proceeded and round which its life may revolve — and
its dim desire is always, I think, to do it justice, that this object or pres¬
ence shall have had as much as possible of an heroic or romantic asso¬
ciation. But the difficulty is that in these later times . . . the heroic or
romantic elements . . . have been all too tragically obscure ... so that the
central something , . . has had to be extemporized rather pitifully after
the fact, and made to consist of the biggest hotel or the biggest common
school, the biggest factory, the biggest newspaper office, or, for climax of
desperation, the house of the biggest billionaire. These are the values re¬
sorted to in default of higher, for with some colored rag or other the gen¬
eral imagination, snatching its chance, must dress its doll.^
Ibid., pp. 277, 65, 380.
^Ibid., p. 118.
^Ibid., p. 279.
1963]
Emerson-Sentimental Tourist
25
Dressing its doll seemed to James also an explanation for the great
American artistic activity of ‘'faking.’’ The prevalence of it con¬
firmed his view of the childish explanation of American society,
for the public which could respond to the arts of fakery seemed to
him “quite incalculably young.”^^
The American Scene is James’s most coherent attempt to give an
account of a society. In becoming the restless analyst, the whilom
sentimental tourist approached his subject with a mature precep¬
tiveness more penetrating than his youthful enthusiasm. But really,
he did nothing but what he had always done. He lived by his im¬
agination and cultivated impressions. Sentimental or analytical,
James the tourist was consistent; his sentiments and his analysis
alike depended upon the responses of a powerful imagination which
ever, in its experiences, brought more than it took. The travel
essays thus complement James’s account of himself as a man of
imagination. They are even proof that he could be nothing else.
^lUd., p. 440.
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USE OF OTOLITHS TO DETERMINE LENGHTH AND WEIGHT
OF ANCIENT FRESHWATER DRUM IN THE
LAKE WINNEBAGO AREA
Gordon R. Priegel
The freshwater drum, Aplodinotus grunniens Rafinesque is an
abundant, native fish species found in Lake Winnebago. Al¬
though much information is available concerning the current
length-weight relationships of the drum, information is completely
lacking on the size of the drum during aboriginal times.
This study was initiated to determine if there was any difference
in drum length and weight during aboriginal times when the drum
population was relatively unexploited and during present times
when the drum population is exploited greatly by commercial
fishing (Priegel, 1961).
Otoliths from drum have been found in the middens or cooking
ruins of Indians who dwelled in the Winnebago area. Since there
is a proportionate relationship between fish size and otolith size,
as will be shown later, it was reasoned that aboriginal otoliths be¬
cause of their non-deteriorated structure could be used to recon¬
struct a comparative size structure value for aboriginal drum.
Witt (1960) demonstrated that there was a proportionate rela¬
tionship between drum length and otolith length for drum col¬
lected from the Mississippi River.
In the fishes the otoliths are called sagitta in the sacculus, aster-
iscus in the lagena, and lapillus in the utriculus. In nearly all fishes
the sagitta is the largest otolith and is the one used in this study.
Otoliths have enameled surfaces etched with markings and peculiar
grooves for passage of the fluids found in the inner ear. Because of
distinctive shapes and markings, otoliths can be used to identify
fish, and with their enamel surfaces, a skeletal structure is avail¬
able that is usually well preserved and intact making it an ideal
structure for comparison with similar structures of present-day
fishes.
Methods and Material
During the summer of 1959, freshwater drum otoliths were col¬
lected from Lake Winnebago. Otoliths were obtained from 983
27
28 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
drum which ranged in total length from 0.5-29.5 inches. The
otoliths were air dried for two months, weighed to the milligram,
and their length measured to the tenth of an millimeter.
Aboriginal otoliths were obtained from three Indian Sites in
Winnebago County, Wisconsin. The Oshkosh Public Museum and
the Illinois State Museum were the source of 28 otoliths from the
Bell Site which is located on the Bell farm along the south shore
of Big Lake Butte des Morts (Horton, pers. comm.). This site
was used between the early and mid-eighteenth century for ap¬
proximately 50 years. At the Bell Site, 100 peculiar bell-shaped
fire pits, 2 to 4 feet in diameter, were located. The otoliths from
this site considering their age, are extremely well preserved.
Fifty-three otoliths from the McCauley Campsite were obtained
at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The McCauley Site is located
on the Jennie McCauley property, Lake Drive, in the city of Osh¬
kosh, which is located on the west shore of Lake Winnebago (Kan-
nenberg, 1932). These otoliths are associated with the upper Mis¬
sissippi Culture and are estimated to date from 500-1750 A.D.
The otoliths were well preserved.
The Oshkosh Public Museum was also the source of 160 addi¬
tional otoliths from the Lesley Point Site which is located on the
east shore of Lake Winneconne, one mile north of the Village of
Winneconne. The site was used by the Winnebago aboriginals
around 1600 A.D. and represents a large village (Bullock, 1940
and 1942), These otoliths were also extremely well preserved.
Results
The recent drum collection was arranged into one-half inch
groups and corresponding average otolith lengths were determined
for all otoliths (right and left) in each group (Table 1). After
average body length in millimeters was determined for each group,
a curve was fitted to these data (Figure 1) and the relationship
between otolith length and body length of the drum can be de¬
scribed by the equation : BL = -—37.77 + 28.26 OL, where BL =
Body length in millimeters and OL — otolith length in millimeters.
This relationship can be used to estimate the length of aboriginal
drum when otolith length is known.
Witt (1960) obtained a relationship between otolith length and
body length of the drum from the Mississippi River and can be
described by the equation: BL = —70,3253 + 29.8974 OL.
Corresponding average otolith weights were determined for
each half-inch group and an empirical curve showing the rela¬
tionship between otolith weight and body length was plotted, but
no relationship was calculated due to the wide variation in otolith
1963]
Priegel — Use of Otoliths
29
weight of drum over 4 inches. This variation increased as body
length increased. A wide variation existed if average weights were
used for all otoliths in a given group or if only the average weights
of the right or left otoliths in a given group were used. A lack of
or excessive amounts of calcium deposits on the otoliths due to
faster or slower growing individuals is probably responsible for
the wide weight variation in the otoliths. Witt (1960) obtained a
body length and otolith weight relationship for drum collected
from the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri, and is described :
Log OW = —3.1286 + 2.3534 Log BL, where OW = otolith
weight and BL = body length, but he also found wide variation
in otolith weight for larger drum.
The body length-weight relationship (Figure 2) was calculated
for the recent drum from a sample of 923 drum taken on October
27-28, 1959, while trawling with a 12-foot bait trawl in pelagic
areas of Lake Winnebago, and is described as : Log W = — 5.17129
+ 3,10600 Log L, where Log W = weight in grams and Log L =
total length in millimeters (Priegel, 1961).
With the above relationship established, lengths of otoliths from
aboriginal drum can thus be substituted into the predetermined
otolith length-body length equation and the calculated length of ab¬
original drum can be obtained. This length can then be substituted
into the length-weight equation and the weight of aboriginal drum
can be estimated.
The size of recent and aboriginal drum was compared by the
calculated lengths and weights of the aboriginal drum and actual
lengths and weights of recent drum. Eroded aboriginal otoliths
were not used since this would lead to under-estimates of body
length and weight. Either the left or right otolith can be used in
the otolith length-body length equation since the average difference
in length for left and right side otoliths in each half-inch group
did not vary more than one-tenth of a millimeter until the 23.5-
23.9 inch-group where a difference of two-tenths of a millimeter
existed (Table 1).
Discussion
Aboriginal otoliths collected from known campfire sites should
only be used to determine length and weight of aboriginal drum
common to the area. Otoliths used in this study were obtained
from three different sites : Bell, McCauley, and Lasley Point Sites.
The Bell Site was a fire pit area while the McCauley and Lesley
Point Sites were village sites. Some of the otoliths from the Lasley
Point Site were dark blue to black in color and this indicates a pro¬
long stay in hot ashes which most likely means cooking fires. If ab-
30 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
original otoliths are obtained from sources other than known
campfire sites, this may indicate that the drum otoliths were used
for ornaments or money rather than only for their food value.
Niehoff (1952) describes five aboriginal otoliths found in Wis¬
consin that were perforated at two points, indicating that they
were strung, probably either for a necklace or a bracelet. Hubbs
(in litt.) related the occurrence of aboriginal drum otoliths found
in Utah in which region drum at the time were not native. These
otoliths must certainly have been carried as some sort of trinket
or wampum. If otoliths were sought only for ornaments or money,
the tendency would probably be to acquire larger size otoliths
which would be of more value, but would no doubt lead to an over¬
estimate of aboriginal drum size when comparing them to present
day drum.
The length frequency distribution of aboriginal otoliths from the
three sites are very similar (Figure 3) and their calculated body
length and weight ranges and means are very similar (Table 2).
This would indicate that the drum were primarily taken for the
same purpose (food), that similar selective fishing methods were
employed, or that similar environmental conditions existed.
The mean length of 13.9 inches for present day drum from Lake
Winnebago, is smaller than the mean lengths of drum from the ab¬
original sites: Bell Site, 18.3 inches, McCauley Site, 18.6 inches;
and Lasley Point Site, 18.1 inches. The drum length ranges indi¬
cate that the aboriginal Indians did not take many drum under
10 inches.
The fishing methods employed by the aboriginals during their
use of the Bell, McCauley, and Lasley Point Sites would certainly
allow the aboriginals to capture both large and small fish. Driver
(1961) wrote that the aboriginals captured fish by every method
known to modern commercial fishermen : weirs, traps, nets, spears,
hooks, poison, arrows, snares, and rakes. Kuhm (1926) stated
that much of the food supply of the early Wisconsin Indian con¬
sisted of fish so it seems likely that they would employ and develop
numerous methods of capturing fish.
The smaller size of recent drum in Lake Winnebago is probably
due to a combination of factors. Water pollution by industries and
municipalities, and runoff over fertile soils as agriculture became
important in the watershed, had much to do to increase the fer¬
tility of Lake Winnebago, thus making the lake a more favorable
environment for the drum, but at the same time, creating a situa¬
tion that led to a slow-growing population due to little or no ex¬
ploitation until 1954, when an intensive removal program began.
Hubbs and Lagler (1949) state that the drum occurs generally in
1963]
Priegel — Use of Otoliths
31
large rivers and lakes, usually in silty waters. Lake Winnebago,
because of its size (137,708 acres) and rectangular shape (28 miles
long and 10.5 miles wide at its widest point) is continuously af¬
fected by wave action that prohibits aquatic plant growth and
encourage turbid water. Profuse algal growth especially during
the summer, keeps the water turbid, a situation preferred by the
drum.
The sizes of fishes during aboriginal times are of value to
ichthyologists and fishery biologists, but their sizes are poorly
known. To estimate the size of fishes during aboriginal times, a
skeletal structure must be well preserved and it must be possible
to relate the size of this structure to the size of the same structure
and to the size of present day fishes. The otolith in this study was
well suited to estimate the size of aboriginal drum in the Lake
Winnebago area.
32 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Table 1. Average Lengths and Ranges in Millimeters of Otoliths From
983 Freshwater Drum Taken From Lake Winnebago, 1959
Body Length (mm)
1963]
Priegel — Use of Otoliths
Figure 1. Relationship between otolith length and fish length. Broken line
equals empirical variation of otolith length.
Otolith Length (in,)
0«0 0,2 0,U 0,6 0.8 1.0 1.1
Bo<fy Length (in.)
'weight (pounds)
34 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 2. Length-weight relation of freshwater drum. The smooth curve
represents the calculated weights and the dots represent the empirical weights.
Length (nrr.)
ICO
200-
300
400
Weight (gr.)
Priegel — -Use of Otoliths
35
1963]
Figure 3. Length-frequency distribution of ancient otoliths from freshwater
drum.
McCauley Site (53)
n
lb 12 111 i6 18 20 22
Bell Site (28)
lasley Point Site (l60)
1
Hi 16 18 20 22
Otolith Length (MM)
10 12 111 16 18 20 22
Table 2. Calculated Total Length in Millimeters (inches) and Weight
IN Grams (pounds) of Ancient Freshwater Drum. Actual
Lengths and Weight for Recent Drum.
Literature Cited
Bullock, H. R. 1940. Lasley Point Mounds. Wis. Archoel., New Series, Vol.
21, No. 2: pp. 28-33.
- . 1942. Laseley Point mound excavation. Wis. ArcheoL, New Series, Vol.
23, No. 2 : pp. 37-44.
Driver, H. E., 1961. Indians of North America. U. of Chicago Press, Chicago
37, Ill. (XI) + 281 pp.
Hubbs, C. L. and Lagler, K, F. 1949. Fishes of the Great Lakes Region.
Cranbrook Inst, of Sic. Bull. No. 26 (XI) -f- 109 pp., illus.
Kannenberg, Arthur P., 1932 Unpublished findings of the McCauley site
diggings. Oshkosh Public Museum, Oshkosh, Wis.
Kuhm, H. W., 1926. Wisconsin Indian fishing — Primitive and modern. Wis.
ArcheoL, New Series, Vol. 7 No. 2: pp. 61-118.
Niehoff, a., 1952. Otoliths as ornaments. Wis. ArcheoL, New Series, Vol. 33,
No. 4: pp. 223-224.
Priegel, G. R., 1961. Winnebago Studies annual progress report for 1960.
Unpublished report filed Wis. Cons. Dept., Oshkosh, Wis. (VIII) -f 35 pp.
Witt, Jr., A. 1960. Length and weight of Ancient Freshwater Drum, Aplodi-
notus grunniens, calculated from otoliths found in Indian middens, Copeia,
No. 3, pp. 181-185.
THE FISHES OF LAKE MENDOTA
Donald C. McNaught
Lake Mendota has a relatively rich fauna of fishes. Sixty-one
species belonging to 20 families are now present or have been re¬
ported in the past. Of these, 57 species in 19 families are well
documented, while the remainder are questionable.* This lake lies
in the valleys of the pre-glacial Middleton and Yahara Rivers,
which were dammed with glacial drift at least 9,000 years ago.
Geographically, the lake is part of the Mississippi drainage, al¬
though the fish fauna exhibits affinities to both the Mississippi and
Great Lakes drainages. Mendota, the “Upper Lake” in the Yahara
chain, drains into the Mississippi by way of the Yahara and
the lower lakes and thence to the Rock River, entering the Missis¬
sippi near Rock Island, Illinois, at least 195 river miles below the
lake.
Of the 61 species of fishes reported for Lake Mendota, 60 are
listed among the 173 species in 29 families (28 families if the
Coregonids are included with the Salmonids) found in the Great
Lakes drainage (Hubbs and Lagler, 1958). The shortnose gar,
Lepisosteus platostomus, not recorded by Hubbs and Lagler (1958),
has recently been shown to have made the transition into the Great
Lakes drainage by Priegel (1963). For zoogeographic purposes,
the affinities of the primary fishes of Mendota to those of the Mis¬
sissippi and Great Lakes drainages are more meaningful than a
comparison of the entire fauna; the primary fishes being those
which, with few exceptions, have been restricted to fresh-water
throughout their known history. Among the fishes of Mendota, we
find 43 primary species in 8 families, or about 16% of the pri¬
mary fauna of the Mississippi drainage (260 species in 13 families.
Miller 1958). All 43 fishes are included among the primary species
found in the Great Lakes (112 species in 12 families. Miller, op.
cit.). Thus while Mendota is a part of the Mississippi system, all
of her fishes are now common to the Great Lakes.
The families Cyprinidae, with 15 species, and Centrarchidae,
with a total of 9 species, contribute the largest number of species.
The Percidae, with 6 species, and the Ictaluridae with 5 species,
are also well represented.
* Taxonomy from Bailey et al. (1960).
37
38 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The Pelagic Fishes
The yellow perch, Perea flavescens, and the white bass, Roccus
chrysops, are numerically dominant among the larger pelagic fishes
and provide for an important sport fishery. Both have been studied
extensively, especially as concerns movement and feeding periodi¬
city (Easier and Bardach, 1949; Easier and Villemonte, 1953; Mc-
Naught and Easier, 1961), reproductive behavior (Eorrall, 1961),
and homing behavior as related to sun orientation (Easier et al,
1958). The perch population has been variously estimated at from
4 to 8 million (Bardach, 1949) to 15 million individuals (Pearse
and Achtenberg, 1920), however, the fact that an estimated li/4
million perch were taken through the ice by anglers during the
winter of 1956-57 makes the larger estimate more likely. The large
population of white bass provides for a unique type of fishing.
These fish feed actively at the surface at dawn and dusk, and may
be taken in large numbers by stalking the schools by boat.
Table 1. Catches of Cisco, Coregonus artedii, in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin,
Between 1867 and 1962
*Mr. C, J. Telford, 221 Kendall Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin.
1963]
McNaught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
39
The cisco, Cor eg onus artedii, formerly an important component
of the pelagic fishery, has undergone catastrophic die-offs in re¬
cent years and is now a rare species, John (1954) concluded that
fishing with gillnets in 1949 was five times poorer than in 1931
and at least ten times poorer than it had been in 1892. Catch
records provided by Mr. C. J. Telford of Madison document the
ciscoes’ recent demise. Whereas during the late 1800’s a single man
could dip-net 300 to 400 fish per night, by the early 1940’s 100 to
200 fish per night constituted a good catch. Mr. Telford has taken
as many as 7 fish per season only once in the last 8 years (Table 1) .
The Minnows
A general lack of information concerning the species of Notropis
present, as well as both their ecological role and ethology, repre¬
sents one of the largest gaps in our knowledge of Mendota’s fishes.
In their recent catalogue of the fishes of the United States and
Canada, Bailey et al., (1960) list 97 species of Notropis, thus the
9 species reported from Mendota represent only about 9% of the
species belonging to this diverse and interesting genus.
The spottail shiner, Notropis hudsonius, was first reported from
Lake Mendota in 1944 (Black, 1945), although earlier surveys
failed to list this easily recognized species. The spottail may have
entered Mendota early through the Mississippi drainage or more
recently from the Great Lakes via the Chicago Sanitary and Ship
Canal, the Illinois River and the Mississippi. The behavior of this
most interesting fish merits future attention. Adults have been
observed schooling with yearling white bass (McNaught and Eas¬
ier, 1961). Large aggregations of the shiner have been observed on
the spawning grounds of the white bass, although it is not known
if the shiner is likewise spawning (Horrall, 1961). A study of
possible relationships between the spottail and the white bass
seems desirable. Other members of this and related genera have
been demonstrated to have certain close relationships with larger
species of Centrarchids. The northern redfin shiner, Notropis um-
hratilis, is a nesting associate of the green sunfish, Lepomis cyanel-
lus (Hunter, 1962). Similarly, the golden shiner, Notemigonus
crysoleucas, has been described as utilizing the nests of the large-
mouth bass, Micropterus salmoides (Kramer and Smith, 1960).
Introduced Fishes
Species introduced to Lake Mendota during early stocking pro¬
grams are most important in any consideration of the extant
fauna. Certain fishes have become a nuisance. Carp were supplied
40 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
to individuals in the Madison area beginning in 1887, although a
carp was taken from Mendota on 24 November 1877 (Wisconsin
State Journal, 27 November 1877, cited by Neuensch wander, 1946).
Less than 600 fish were distributed to Madison residents between
1887 and 1893, yet in 1962 approximately 13,000 pounds of carp
were removed by the State Conservation Department in an effort to
control the population (personal communication, N. Miller), A
close relative, the goldfish, Carassius auratus, was stocked in 1885
by Gov. Farwell and likely many times since by one-time aquarists
or fishermen. Large specimens are infrequently taken (Footnote
#13), however, and the goldfish is certainly not a problem at the
present.
The white bass, Roccus chrysops, was abundant in Mendota as
early as 1867 (Wisconsin Union, 15 December 1867, cited by Neu-
enschwander, 1946). Any influence on the population from those
fish stocked in Lake Monona in 1891 or in Mendota in 1940 and
1943 would be difficult to assess. Yet the transfer of a few yellow
bass, Roccus mississippiensis, a close relative of the white bass,
may eventually alter the over-all population structure in Lake
Mendota. The yellow bass was stocked in Lake Wingra sometime
in the 1930's, likely during a rescue transfer from the Mississippi
(Noland, 1951; Helm, 1958), and has since spread to the upper
lakes. Previous to 1960, only one specimen had been collected dur¬
ing yearly fyke-netting operations at Governor’s Island and Maple
Bluff. In 1960, Horrall (1961) captured well over 100 yellow bass.
He speculated that the 1960 invasion of Mendota may have re¬
sulted from an extremely large hatch in Lake Monona in 1957. The
yellow bass was possibly aided in the expansion of its range dur¬
ing the construction of a new dam and lock at Tenney Park.
Although large numbers of muskellunge fry as well as finger-
lings were stocked between 1933 and 1941, this favorite game fish
has rarely been reported in the catch. The one substantiated re¬
port was that verified by Prof. J. C. Neess in 1946 (Footnote
#11), quite possibly a return from the efforts of the 1930’s. Like¬
wise, the hook-and-line success for brook, brown and rainbow
trout is insignificant. The majority of trout are stocked in tribu¬
tary streams, although a few may spend the colder months in the
lake (Footnote #7).
Approximately 109 million walleye fry and fingerlings were
stocked in the lake between 1883 and 1958, making this game fish
the most heavily stocked (Footnote #38). Other species fre¬
quently added to the lake include the northern pike, bluegill, small-
mouth bass, largemouth bass, crappie, yellow perch, bullhead, and
the cisco (Footnotes #23-38).
1963]
McN aught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
41
Unusual Fishes
Public interest is easily aroused by publicized catches or sight¬
ings of unusually large or uncommon fishes, whether native or
exotic. The lake sturgeon was likely native to the Madison lakes.
A Mr. Hamden took a sturgeon from Lake Monona sometime prior
to 1876 (Wisconsin State Journal, 11 August 1876, cited by Neuen-
schwander, 1946). Attempts were made by the Conservation De¬
partment in 1934 and 1936 to bolster the population by stocking a
limited number of adults from the Wolf River (Footnote #23).
The recent capture of an apparently healthy specimen (Footnote
#6) was unusual in that it was the first sturgeon taken by a mem¬
ber of the Laboratory since intensive fyke-netting operations be¬
gan 9 years ago. Its age of 29 to 31 years makes it unlikely that it
was one of those stocked in either 1934 or 1936; whether or not
it was the result of a successful spawning in one of the tributary
streams is purely speculative.
Before the white man succeeded the Winnebago on Mendota’s
shore, the American eel had access to the lakes via the Mississippi
and Rock Rivers. An article in the Wisconsin. Union for 15 Decem¬
ber 1867 indicated that eels had not ascended into Lake Monona.
However, the Wisconsin State Journal for 20 August 1880 (cited
by Neuenschwander, 1946) reported the capture of an eel 2 feet in
length in Lake Monona, thought to be the third or fourth eel
captured in the lakes since Madison was first settled. By 1935 eels
were becoming rare in the upper Mississippi due to the construc¬
tion of dams (Greene, 1935). Obviously they were to die if pre¬
vented from reaching their presumed spawning ground in the Sar¬
gasso Sea, a journey of approximately 2900 miles from Mendota.
Many of the more recent records in other areas of the state and
especially the Mississippi were the result of stocking (Greene,
op. cit,).
The channel catfish may have been transferred into Lake Wingra
during rescue operations from the Mississippi (Noland, 1951).
Just over 100 years ago a 40 lb. catfish 31/2 feet in length was
caught in Mendota (Wisconsin State Journal, 15 July 1862, cited
by Neuenschwander, 1946) . Certainly this beautiful fish must then
be considered native to Mendota. AlUiough now a rarity, a few
specimens are taken in the annual netting operations of the Labo¬
ratory at Maple Bluff and Governor's Island.
Fishes of Other Lakes of the Upper Yahara Basin
The larger fishes of Lake Wingra were listed by Noland (1951).
Lake Wingra lies west of Lake Monona and connects to it by Mur-
42 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
phy Creek, whose channel was first dredged in 1905. Of those
fishes reported for Wingra, only the muskellunge x northern pike
cross, Esox masquinongy x E. Indus, the spotted sucker, Minytrema
melanops, and the satinfin shiner, Notropis analostanus (Helm,
1958), have not been observed in Lake Mendota. The spotted
sucker, along with a redhorse, channel catfish, white crappie and
yellow bass were likely introduced into Lake Wingra from the
Mississippi (Noland, op. cit.). Recently (10 September 1963) the
northern hog sucker, Hypentelium nigricans (LeSueur), was taken
while seining in Lake Wingra by T. Wright of this Laboratory.
The redfin shiner, Notropis umhratilis, was introduced into one
of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum Gardner Ponds in 1954
(Hunter and Wisby, 1961). Now well established, it has access to
Lake Mendota, Monona and Wingra and the Lower Lakes via Mur¬
phy Creek when the Ponds overflow during times of high water.
The golden redhorse, Moxostoma erythrurum, has been collected
in Lake Waubesa (Footnote #48) ; likewise, the quillback, Carp-
iodes cyprinus, has been reported from Lake Kegonsa (Footnote
#40). Neither species has been observed in Lake Mendota, al¬
though both must have ready access.
List of Fishes
Despite the interest in Lake Mendota among biologists, a de¬
tailed study of the fish fauna does not exist. Students of the fishes
at the Laboratory have often felt a need for a check-list of its
fishes. An effort was made in this direction by Dr. Roger Davis in
1955. His list was based upon the work of Pearse (1918), with
additional species confirmed through interview with Laboratory
personnel. In addition, Davis included an unconfirmed group whose
probability of occurrence he felt to be reasonable, based on reports
of fishermen. As of this writing, only four species mentioned by
Davis have not been confirmed; also, a number have been added.
The list presented here includes the species encountered by
Pearse (1915, 1918) in his studies of the foods of local fishes;
those listed, and in most cases examined by Greene (1935) from
Lake Mendota; those captured by Horrall (1961) over a period of
9 years of fyke-netting in the area of Maple Bluff and Governor’s
Island ; and those catalogued in the Museum of the Department of
Zoology. Additional valuable information was gained through ac¬
cess to the stocking records of the Wisconsin Conservation De¬
partment.
The taxonomy used by the earlier workers has been revised ac¬
cording to Bailey et at. (1960). The various species are all within
the range of distribution indicated for them by Trautman (1957),
1963]
McN aught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
43
List of Fishes
Scientific Name
(Family, Genus and Species) Common Name
Petromyzontidae — lampreys
Lampetra lamottei (LeSueur) . American brook lamprey
Acipenseridae — sturgeons
Acipenser fulvescens Rafinesque . Lake sturgeon .
Lepisosteidae — gars
Lepisosteus osseus (Linnaeus) . Longnose gar .
Lepisosteus platostomus Rafinesque . Shortnose gar .
Amiidae — bowfins
Amia calva Linnaeus . Bowfin .
Salmonidae — trouts, whitefishes, and graylings
Coregonus artedii LeSueur . Cisco or lake herring. . . .
Salmo gairdneri Richardson . Rainbow trout .
Salmo trutta l^innaeus . Brown trout .
Salvelinus fontinalis (Mitchill) . Brook trout .
Umbridae — mudminnows
Umbra limi (Kirtland) . Central mudminnow. . . .
Esocidae — pikes
Esox americanus vermicuLatus LeSueur . Grass pickerel .
Esox Indus Linnaeus . Northern pike .
Esox masquinongy Mitchill . Muskellunge .
Cyprinidae — minnows and carps
Carassius auratus (Linnaeus) . Goldfish .
Cyprinus carpio Linnaeus . Carp .
Notemigonus crysoleucas (Mitchill) . Golden shiner .
Notropis anogenus Forbes . Pugnose shiner. . . .
Notropis other inoides Rafinesque . Emerald shiner. . . .
Notropis blennius (Girard) . River shiner .
Notropis cornutus (Mitchill) . Common shiner. . .
Notropis heterodon (Cope) . Blackchin shiner. .
Notropis heterolepis Eigenmann and Eigenmann . . . . Blacknose shiner. .
Notropis hudsonius (Clinton) . Spottail shiner. . . .
Notropis spilopterus (Cope) . Spotfin shiner .
Notropis umbratilis (Girard) . Redfin shiner .
Pimephales notatus (Rafinesque) . Bluntnose minnow
Pimephales promelas Rafinesque . Fathead minnow. .
Semotilus atromaculatus (Mitchill) . Creek chub .
Catostomidae — suckers
Catostomus commersoni (Lac^pede) . White sucker .
Ictiobus cyprinellus (Valenciennes) . Bigmouth buffalo.
Moxostoma macrolepidotum (LeSueur)
= M. aureolum (LeSueur) . Northern redhorse,
Ictaluridae — freshwater cat fishes
Ictalurus melas (Rafinesque) . Black bullhead. . .
Ictalurus natalis (LeSueur) . Yellow bullhead. .
Ictalurus nebulosus (LeSueur) . Brown bullhead . .
Ictalurus punctatus (Rafinesque) . Channel catfish . . .
Noturus gyrinus (Mitchill)
= Schilbeodes mollis (Herman) or S. gyrinus . Tadpole madtom. ,
Anguillidea — freshwater eels
Anguilla rostrata (LeSueur)
= A. bostoniensis) . American eel .
Cyprinodontidae — -killifishes
Fundulus diaphanus (LeSueur) . Banded killifish .
Fundulus notatus (Rafinesque) . Blackstripe topminnow
Gadidae — codfishes and hakes
Lota lota (Linnaeus) . Burbot .
Gasterosteidae — sticklebacks
Eucalia inconstans (Kirtland) . Brook stickleback
Serranidae- — sea basses
Roccus chrysops (Rafinesque) . White bass .
Roccus mississippiensis (Jordan and Eigenmann) . . . Yellow bass.
Authority
4
(i, 23
1, 2, 3, lO
2, 8
I, 2, 3
2, 9, lO, 26
27
7, 28
29
I, 2
39
I, 2, 3, lO, 24
II, 25
13
I, 2, 3, 30
I, 2, 3, 41
1
2
2
2
1, 2, 42
2, 43
3, 12, 44
5
14
1, 2
1, 2
5
1, 2, 3
3, 45
5, 47
1, 2, 3, 31
2, 3, 31
1, 2, 3, 10, 31
3, 15
1, 2, 50
16
1, 2
2
2, 1 7, 49
1, 2
2, 3, 10, 32
3
44 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Scientific Name
(Family, Genus and Species) Common Name
Centrarchidae — sunfishes
Ambloplites rupestris (Rafinesque) . Rock bass .
Chaenobrytlus gulosus (Cuvier) . Warmouth .
Lepomis cyanellus Rafinesque . Green sunfish . . .
Lepomis gibbosus (Linnaeus) . Pumpkinseed. . .
Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque . Bluegill .
Micropterus dolomieui Lac6pede . Smallmouth bass.
Micropterus salmoides (Lac^pede) . Largemouth bass
Pomoxis annularis Rafinesque . White crappie. . .
Pomoxis nigromaculatus (LeSueur) . Black crappie. . .
Percidae — perches
Etheostoma exile (Girard) . Iowa darter .
Etheostoma Jlabellare Rafinesque . Fantail darter. . .
Etheostoma nigrum Rafinesque . Johnny darter. . .
Perea flavescens (Mitchill) . Yellow perch. . . .
Percina caprodes (Rafinesque) . Logperch .
Stizostedion vitreum vitreum (Mitchill) . Walleye .
Sciaenidae — drums
Aplodinotus grunniens Rafinesque . Freshwater drum
Cottidae — sculpins
Cottus bairdi Girard . Mottled sculpin . .
Atherinidae — silversides
Labidesthes sicculus (Cope) . Brook silverside. .
Authority
1, 2, 3
21
3
L 2, 3
1, 2, 3, 33
1, 2, 3, 10, 34
1, 2, 3, 35
3, 10, 36
1, 2, 3, 10, 36
1, 2
1, 2
1, 2
1, 2, 3, 10, 37
2, 18
3, 38
3, 10
1, 2
L 2
AUTHORITY
1 . Pearse (1918).
2. Greene (1935).
3. Horrall (1961).
4. Davis (1955) considered the American brook lamprey, Lampetra lamottei, as unconfirmed but probable,
based on reasonably reliable reports of fishermen.
5. Davis (1955) confirmed as present the spotfin shiner, Notropis spiloplerus, the northern redhorse,
Moxostoma macrolepidotum, and the creek chub, Semotilus atromaculatus, through discussion with
members of the Laboratory, although they have not been mentioned in the literature.
6. A lake sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, was captured, tagged (UW #825) and released by H. F. Hender¬
son from a fyke-net located off Governor's Island on 22 May 1963. (Length 156.6 cm or 61^ inches,
age of 29-31 years).
7. Brown trout, Salmo trutta, caputred in a fyke-net at Maple Bluff by H. F. Henderson on 28 May 1963.
(Length 51.7 cm).
8. Shortnose gar, Lepisosteus platostomus, examined and verified by Prof. John C. Neess from a sample
taken from carp-holding pens in the Catfish Bay-Yahara River area. Lake Mendota is close to the
northern limit of the shortnose gar according to Trautman (1957).
9. John (1954).
10. Tibbies (1956).
11. Muskellunge, Esox masquinongy, caught and taken to a local butcher shop; identified there by Prof.
Neess (personal diary, 1946).
12. Published accounts: Black (1945), McNaught and Hasler (1961), Horrall (1961).
13. Goldfish, Carassius auratus, stocked in 1855 by Gov. Farwell; captured in a gill-net by R. M. Horrall
about 1960.
14. Redfin shiner, Notropis umbratilis, introduced into one of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum
Ponds in 1954 (Hunter and Wisby 1961). Now established, with access to the Madison lakes via
Murphy Creek.
15. Channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, captured in Mendota in 1862 (Neuenschwander 1946).
16. American eel, Anguilla rostrata, captured in Lake Monona in 1880 (Neuenschwander, 1946); Greene
(1935) noted presence in the Mississippi River, Crawford Co., Wis.
17. Burbot, Lota lota, examined from Lake Mendota, as indicated by map on pg. 217, by Greene (1935);
this was possibly the specimen collected by Wagner (Footnote #49).
18. Logperch, Percina caprodes, observed in what was possibly a spawning aggregation of approximately
500 individuals below the Sherman Ave. Bridge at the Yahara River outlet to Lake Mendota, during
the first week of May 1963, by C. W. Voigtlander.
19. Bluntnose minnow, Pimephales notatus, collected along the shore at Maple Bluff with cast-net by
G. Hergenrader, 22 May 1963.
20. The banded killifish, Fundulus diaphanus, is especially abundant in the area of Spring Harbor.
21. The warmouth, Chaenobrytlus gulosus, is infrequently taken by fishermen (Warden A. Koppenhaver,
May 1963).
22. Black (1945) noticed that many perch taken during winter ice-fishing regurgitated one or more emerald
shiners, Notropis atherinoides, although suggesting that the species was not usually considered com¬
mon in Mendota.
These additional notes (23-38) have been compiled from stocking records on file with the Wisconsin
Conservation Department (*indicates stage of development uncertain, fig. = fingerling, ad. = adult).
23. Lake sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, 20 individuals from the Wolf River were stocked in Lake Mendota
during Sept. -Oct., 1934; an additional 51 adults were planted in 1936.
1963]
McNaught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
45
24. Northern pike, Esox lucius,
1922
1929
1935
1936
1937-39
1940-44
1948-49
1958
1961
1962
340,000 fry'
65,000 fry
30,000 fry
3,750 fgl.'
2,500 fgl.'
19,250 fgl.
5,942 fgl.
300* (from Mississippi)
35 ylg.
32 ad.
334 ad.*
36 ad.*
25. Muskellunge, Esox masquinongy,
26. Cisco, Coregonus artedii,
1852-55 (Stocked by Gov. Farwell)
1880 75,000 fry
1886 180,000 fry
1946 6,282,086 fry*
27. Rainbow trout, Salmo gairdneri, first stocked in Door Creek tributary to Monona in 1889, and in
Token Creek tributary to Mendota in 1908.
28. Brown trout, Salmo trutta, stocked in Token Creek beginning in 1927 and later in the Pheasant Branch.
29. Brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, stocked in Six Mile and Token Creeks beginning in 1877 and fre¬
quently thereafter.
30. Carp, Cyprinus carpio, first supplied to individuals in the Madison area in 1887 and continued until
at least 1893.
Bullheads (species not indicated),
1939 25,000 ylg.
1942 25,000 fgl. 500 ad.
1943 1,800 ylg. 200 ad.
White bass, Roccus chrysops,
1891 2,000,000 fry* (Lake Monona)
1940 15,000 fgl.
1943
31.
32.
33. Bluegill, Lepomis macrochirus,
1937 10,000 fgl.
1941-44 18,500 fgl.
34. Smallmouth bass, Micropterus dolomieui,
1940-48 100,000 fgl.
35. Largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides,
3,000 ylg.
12,000 ylg.
12,500 fgl.
1,200 ad.
36.
37.
38.
Likely largemouth, but shown only as black bass.
500 ylg.
725 ylg.
Crappie (species not indicated),
1937 5,000 fgl.
1941
Yellow perch, Perea flavescens,
1936 352,000 fgl.*
1940 15,000 fgl.
1943 12,904,400 eggs
Walleye, Stizostedion vitreum vitreum.
192 ad.
20 ad.
1 50 ad.
1883-89
1890-99
1900-09
1910-19
1920-29
1935-36
1937-39
1940-49
1958
10,850,000
3,400,000 fry*
16,310,000 fry*
26,445,000 fry*
8,025,000 fry*
5,476,000 fry*
10,938,000 fry*
27,375,000 fry
(Mendota, Madison Lakes and Six Mile Cr.)
42,045 fgl.
1,500 fgl.
The following notes (39-50) have been compiled from records in the fish collection in the Museum of
the Department of Zoology, The University of Wisconsin.
39. Grass pickerel, Esox americanus vermiculatus,
Lake Mendota K. Ackley Dec. 1961 #15628
40. Quillback, Carpiodes cyprinus,
L. Kegonsa J. D. Black 2 May 1944 #382
41. Golden shiner, Notemigonus crysoleucas,
L. Mendota A. S. Pearse 13 April 1915 #364
46 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
42.
43.
46. Spotted sucker, M inytrema melanops,
L. Wingra J. D. Black 26 Oct. 1944
47. Northern redhorse, Moxostoma macrolepidolum,
L. Waubesa J. D. Black 12 May
L. Wingra J. D. Black 17 June
L. Kegonsa J. D. Black 18 June
48. Golden redhorse, Moxostoma erythrurum,
L. Waube.sa J. D. Black 12 May
49. Burbot, Lota lota,
L. Mendota G. Wagner no date
50. Tadpole madtom, Noturus gyrinus,
L. Mendota G. Wagner 6 Aug.
1945
1945
1945
1945
1914
#814
#118
#907
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment is made to Prof. Arthur D. Hasler, Director
of the Laboratory of Limnology. His support of this project, com¬
ments concerning the fishes of the Madison area, and his critical
reading of this manuscript are especially appreciated. Mr. H. E.
Neuenschwander, a former student of Prof. Hasler, spent many
hours searching through newspaper files in order to document the
history of the cisco and other fishes in Lake Mendota.
Permission for the use of the original drawings by Mr. Douglas
Tibbitts is gratefully acknowledged. The originals, made directly
from specimens taken from Mendota, are on permanent display at
the Laboratory of Limnology. These drawings were made possible
by a grant from the Research Committee of the Graduate School.
The stocking records of the Wisconsin Conservation Department
for 1877 through 1937 are located at the Nevin Fish Hatchery, and
were made available through the cooperation of Mr. Thomas Wirth.
Those for the period 1937 to the present are located at the Pennsyl¬
vania Avenue office of the Department and were examined with
the permission of Mr. Harold H. Kernan.
Mr. C. J. Telford of Madison, through many years of fishing the
cisco on Lake Mendota, has accumulated a valuable reservoir of
knowledge on this species. His long-term records document the de¬
cline of the cisco better than a short-term scientific study could
possibly do.
This work was supported by a research grant from the Wiscon¬
sin Conservation Department as well as through funds of the Wis¬
consin Alumni Research Foundation administered by the Research
Committee of the Graduate School.
1963]
McN aught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
Figure 1. Northern Pike, Esox lucius Linnaeus. From an original drawing
by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 2. Golden shiner, Notemigonus crysoleucas (Mitchill). From an orig¬
inal drawing by Douglas Tibbits.
48 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 3. Common Shiner, Notropis cornutus (Mitchill). From an original
drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 4. Spottail shiner, Notropis hudsonius (Clinton). From an original
cli'awing by Douglas Tibbitts.
1963]
McNaught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
49
Figure 5. Bluntnose minnow, Pimephales notatus (Rafinesque) . From an orig¬
inal drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 6. Brown bullhead, Ictalurus nehulosus (LeSueur). From an original
drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
50 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 7. White bass, Roccus chrysops (Rafinesque). From an original draw¬
ing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 8. Green sunfish, Lepomis cyanellus Rafinesque. From an original draw¬
ing by Douglas Tibbitts.
1963]
McNaught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
Figure 9. Pumpkinseed, Lepomis gibbosus (Linnaeus). From an original draw¬
ing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 10. Bluegill, Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque. From an original draw¬
ing by Douglas Tibbitts.
52 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 11. Smallmouth bass, Micropterus dolomieui Lacepede. From an orig¬
inal drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
" -
Figure 12. Largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides (Lacepede). From an
original drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
1963]
McNaught—Fishes of Lake Mendota
53
Figure 13. Black crappie, Pomoxis nigromaculatus (LeSueur). From an orig¬
inal drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Figure 14. Yellow perch, Perea flavescens (Mitchill). From an original draw¬
ing by Douglas Tibbitts.
54 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 15. Freshwater drum, Aplodinotus grunniens Rafinesque. From an
original drawing by Douglas Tibbitts.
Literature Cited
Bailey, R. M., E. A. Lachner, C. C. Lindsey, C. R. Robins, P. M, Roedel,
W. B. Scott, and L. P. Woods. 1960. A list of common and scientific
names of fishes from the United States and Canada (Second Edition).
American Fisheries Society, Special Publ. No. 2, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
102 pp.
Bardach, John E. 1949. Contribution to the ecology of the yellow perch
(Perea, flavescens Mitchill) in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. Ph.D. Thesis,
Univ. Wisconsin, Madison.
Black, J. D. 1945. Winter habits of northern lake minnows. Copeia, 1945
(No. 2) :114.
Davis, Roger, 1955. Fishes of Lake Mendota. Unpub. list (ms.).
Greene, C. Willard, 1935. The distribution of Wisconsin fishes. Conservation
Commission, State of Wisconsin, Madison, 235 pp.
Hasler, a. D., and J. E. Bardach. 1949. Daily migrations of perch in Lake
Mendota, Wisconsin. J. Wildl, Mgmt., 13:40-51.
Hasler, A. D., R. M, Horrall, W. J. Wisby, and Wolfgang Braemer. 1958.
Sun orientation and homing in fishes. Limnol. Oceanogr., 3:353-361.
Hasler, A. D., and J. R. Villemonte. 1953. Observations on the daily move¬
ments of fishes. Science, 118:321-322.
Helm, W. T. 1958. Some notes on the ecology of panfish in Lake Wingra with
special reference to the yellow bass. Ph.D. Thesis, Univ, Wisconsin, Madi¬
son.
1963]
McNaught — Fishes of Lake Mendota
55
Horrall, Ross M. 1961, A comparative study of two spawning- populations of
the white bass, Roccus chrysops (Rafinesque), in Lake Mendota, Wiscon¬
sin, with special reference to homing behavior, Ph.D. Thesis, Univ. Wis¬
consin, Madison.
Hubbs, C, L., and K. F, Lagler. 1958. Fishes of the Great Lakes region.
Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bull. No. 26. xi-1-213 pp.
Hunter, J. R., and W, J. Wisby. 1961. Utilization of the nests of green sun-
fish (Lepomis cyanellus) by the redfin shiner (Notropis umbratilis cyano-
cephalus). Copeia, 1961 (No. 1) : 113-115.
Hunter, J. R. 1962. The utilization of the nests of Lepomis cyanellus by
Notropis umbratilis, Ph.D. Thesis, Univ. Wisconsin, Madison.
John, K. R. 1954. An ecological study of the cisco, Leucichthys artedi (Le-
Sueur), in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. Ph.D. Thesis, Univ. Wisconsin,
Madison.
Kramer, R. H., and Smith, L. L. 1960. Utilization of nests of largemouth
bass, Micropterus salmoides, by golden shiners, Notemigonus crysoleucas.
Copeia, 1960 (1) : 73-74.
McNaught, D. C., and A. D. Hasler. 1961. Surface schooling and feeding be¬
havior in the white bass, Roccus chrysops (Rafinesque), in Lake Mendota.
Limnol. Oceanogr., 6(1) : 53-60.
Miller, Robert R. 1958. Origin and affinities of the fresh-water fish fauna
of western North America. Ch. 9 in Zoogeography, ed. by C. L. Hubbs.
Publ. No. 51 AAAS, pp. 187-222.
Neuenschwander, H. E. 1946. History and biology of the cisco in Lake Men¬
dota. Unpub. ms.. Library of the Laboratory of Limnology, Univ. Wiscon¬
sin, Madison.
Noland, W. E. 1951. The hydrography, fish, and turtle population of Lake
Wingra. Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci., 40(2) :5-58.
Pearse, a. S. 1915, On the food of the small fishes in the waters near Madi¬
son, Wisconsin. Bull. Wis, Nat. Hist. Soc., 13(1) :7-22.
Pearse, A. S. 1918. The food of the shore fishes of certain Wisconsin Lakes.
Bull. U. S. Bur. Fish., 35(1915-16) :245-292,
Pearse, A. S. and Henrietta Achtenberg. 1920. Habits of yellow perch in
Wisconsin lakes. Bull. U. S. Bur, Fish., 36 (1917-18) :293-366.
Priegel, Gordon R, 1963. Dispersal of the shortnose gar, Lepisosteus plato-
stomus, into the Great Lakes drainage. Trans. Amer. Fish Soc., 92(2) :178.
Tibbles, j. j. G. 1956. A study of the movements and depth distribution of the
pelagic fishes in Lake Mendota. Ph.D. Thesis, Univ, Wisconsin, Madison.
Trautman, Milton B. 1957. The fishes of Ohio. Ohio State Univ. Press, xvii
-f683 pp.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF WISCONSIN’S TROUT STREAMS
C. W. Threinen and Ronald Poff
Trout of the brook, brown and rainbow species are a highly
valued and relatively scarce fish resource largely restricted to cold-
water streams. The location of those cold-water streams capable
of supporting trout, therefore, becomes a matter of interest for
management of the fish and habitat protection purposes, because
of the tenuous character of these limited habitat conditions. In
order to show locations, all known trout streams are noted on a
hydrographic map of the state. The circumstances leading to their
origin are then interpreted.
Certain environmental requirements which become limited to
trout formed the basis for this interpretation. Cool water in sum¬
mer is the primary requirement. Trout of all three species (brook,
brown, and rainbow) have thermal tolerances which can be ex¬
ceeded by summer temperatures. This temperature is generally
recognized to be 77.5° F. for brook trout under prolonged expo¬
sure (Brett, 1956) and somewhat higher for the other species
(Needham, 1938). Brett (1956) noted the optimum temperature
for growth and feeding for brook trout was 19° C (66.2° F).
Since brook and brown trout spawn during fall and rainbow
trout spawn during fall or spring, water conditions have to be
suitable for spawning and development of eggs and young. Trout
usually spawn in October and November at which time the females
seek out water of suitable temperatures and conditions, dig redds
in gravel riffles and, following fertilization, bury their eggs. As a
reflection of these conditions, concentrations of spawning trout
(especially brook trout) occur near springs. The eggs are depend¬
ent upon steady percolation of water through the gravel for
aeration, and development of the egg proceeds most rapidly and
successfully with steady and moderate water temperatures. Mor¬
talities of eggs are known to be high where the water temperatures
are low (near freezing).^ Ground water springs are, therefore,
essential to produce these conditions.
1 Unpublished research of the Wisconsin Conservation Department.
57
58 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 1. State hydographic map with trout streams darkened.
Another possible limiting factor cited by other workers in the
mountain states is the formation of anchor ice (Maciolek and
Needham, 1952). Under very cold conditions in the northern part
of the state, anchor ice can form over the rocks and riffles and
result in the movement or displacement of the stony bottom mate¬
rials and destruction of redds and food resources. Obviously warm
waters would not allow the formation of anchor ice. A usual char¬
acteristic of good trout waters is that they are seldom covered by
ice because of the warmer temperatures of the ground water
springs feeding trout streams with temperatures between 48° and
1963] Threinen and Puff — Wisconsin’s Trout Streams 59
50° F, These are streams fed by significant amounts of ground
water. Benson (1953) called streams free of ice on cold days
‘‘good^^ trout streams and those ice covered '^poor^h
Climate Conditions and the Hydrological Cycle
Rain falling on the ground either soaks in to become part of
the ground water, becomes absorbed by the surface soils or runs
off on the surface. If it percolates into the ground to become part
of the ground water, it will flow downhill later to reach surface
drainage. The capability for percolation into the ground and move¬
ment underground will obviously be best when soils are light and
where sufficient hydraulic gradient prevails, and it will be poorest
with heavy soils and poor gradient. With trout streams heavily
dependent upon cool water, the ground water flow, circumstances
providing slope and surface infiltration will be the conditions most
productive of trout streams. All streams are dependent upon
ground water for their base flow but to have importance for
trout during critical periods, a high portion of the base flow must
be recently .expressed ground water which has not yet warmed or
cooled to surrounding temperatures.
Water absorbed by surface soils is of no immediate value to
trout streams. It either evaporates or is transpired by plants. The
heavy soils will hold more water and infiltrate less than light soils
and therefore make a lesser contribution, to ground water and
make more available to evaporation and transpiration. Similarly
surface runoff is of limited value to trout streams because it closely
reflects surrounding temperatures, and it lacks permanence be¬
cause of the intermittency of rainfall.
Wisconsin has a northern climate typical of the continental land
mass. It is characterized by hot summers (July average, 66 °-
72° F) and cold winters (January average, 10°™-22 F), Daytime
summer temperatures are hot enough to warm surface waters
above the maximum tolerated by trout. Winter temperatures are
sufficiently cold to freeze surface waters and to cause moisture
storage in the form of snow from December through March, Al¬
though there are intermittent thaws which make contributions to
the surface water, this weather cycle causes some of the lowest
runoff of the year to occur in the winter. Streams or portions of
streams without strong ground water sources, therefore, tend to
fluctuate in both volume and temperatures more than those with
and, therefore, provide a less stable habitat for fish. Another low
period in stream discharge usually occurs in the summer when
vegetation is actively transpiring water and evaporation rates are
high. Drescher (1956) described rapid rises in ground water levels
60 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
in the spring, and discharge exceeding recharge during the grow¬
ing season.
Rainfall averages about 30 inches a year in Wisconsin divided as
follows : 17,2 per cent falls in the winter months of December,
January, February, and March; 22.5 per cent falls during the
nongrowing season of April, October and November; and 60.3 per
5. SANDY LOAMS
Gantly rolling, hilly or jtocp.
7. GRAYISH-BROWN GLACIATED SILT LOAMS
Noorly level or rolling.
6. GRAYISH-BROWN UNGLACIATiD SILT LOAMS 8. PINK LOAMS
Hilly or $teep. Nearly level or rolling.
Figure 2. Trout stream complexes superimposed on a soils and topographic
map of Wisconsin.
1963] Threinen and Puff — Wisconsin's Trout Streams 61
cent falls during the growing season (USDA, 1941). The humid
climate of Wisconsin has ground water within 100 feet of the sur¬
face except beneath high, steep-sided hills (Drescher, 1956).
Wojta's (1949) summary reported 6 per cent runoff on the sur¬
face, 15 per cent went to subsurface runnoff, 70 per cent went to
evaporation and transpiration and 9 per cent went to ground
water. It must be recognized, however, that great variation can
occur. Ground water levels closely correspond to precipitation,
so changes in spring flow can be expected to result from changes
in precipitation (Drescher, 1956). The term “spring” as used in
this report is defined as surface expression of ground water.
Distribution and Character of Trout Streams
Designation of streams as “trout streams” is the product of
many years of surveys and creel observations gathered by the field
personnel of the Wisconsin Conservation Department. This desig¬
nation means that a stream has shown consistent ability to sup¬
port trout without excessive natural mortalities. It is recognized
that stream habitat conditions change and could affect this designa¬
tion. This is particularly true where impoundments have been con¬
structed. Such structures frequently change a cold-water environ¬
ment to a warm-water environment.
Although there are individual and partial losses of trout water
which have been reported, these have not been great enough to
alter seriously the general geography of Wisconsin's trout streams.
In our opinion, most of the alterations have occurred within the
present complexes of trout streams. Perhaps the greatest change
has occurred in the cranberry and duck mash areas of central
Wisconsin in the bed of glacial Lake Wisconsin.
We have several complexes of trout streams plus some scattered
streams. The largest and most important complex occupies an arc
beginning in Adams and Marquette Counties and extending north
and northeast into Florence and Marinette Counties. Within this
belt are some of the best-known trout streams in the state and
almost without exception there is substantial natural reproduction
of trout in them. The complex second in size and trout concentra¬
tion lies in the northern tier of counties most of whose drainage
flows into Lake Superior. This includes some of the more spectac¬
ular streams with high gradients such as the Brule. The third
major complex occupies the unglaciated southwestern part of the
state. There are minor complexes centered in Lincoln County and
portions of adjoining counties, and in Rusk, Barron, Dunn, Pierce,
and St. Croix Counties.
62 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Regions conspicuously lacking trout streams or lightly repre¬
sented are the lake regions of the north, the heavy soil regions of
Marathon, Taylor, Clark and Wood Counties, much of the bed of
old glacial Lake Wisconsin, and most of southeastern Wisconsin.
Further inspection of the hydrography will show that the trout
streams are not unique to particular drainages, but that they do
have regional distribution. The largest complex has streams flow¬
ing into both the Lake Michigan drainage and the Wisconsin River.
The gradient characteristics of trout streams vary greatly. They
include everything from white water to spring ponds, and from
ditches and tiny feeders to rivers. Some examples of the extremes
follow : The Little Brule in Florence County has much white water ;
the Nine Mile in Langlade County is a slow, meandered stream
flowing through a swamp; Trout Springs is a spring pond in
Vilas County; Ten Mile Creek is a ditch through a former marsh in
Portage County; the Wolf River in Langlade County is a substan¬
tial river at least 50 feet in width. In many cases only a part of
the stream will be trout water, with summer water too warm both
above and below, an example of which is Rocky Run Creek, Colum¬
bia County. Most have this in common : They are generally the
headwaters of river systems, and the big river trout stream is
the exception rather than the rule.
Relationship to Topography
The major complexes of trout streams have been superimposed
on a combination soils and relief map adapted from Whiteson,
(1927) and Martin (1932) (Fig. 2). In the absence of an elaborate
topographic map with contours, the topography of the state is evi¬
dent in the hydrographic map (Fig. 1) by noting the drainage
divides. State elevations begin at 1,650 feet in the northern high¬
lands and drop to 595 feet in the Mississippi, 581 feet in Lake
Michigan and 602 feet in Lake Superior. Wisconsin is fundamen¬
tally a sculptured plain which slopes gradually from the northern
highlands to the south, east, and west and more abruptly to the
north. Major water courses originate in the highlands and flow in
these directions. The hills of the terminal moraines generally are
some of the highest features on the landscape, and they often form
the drainage divides. In the southwest, erosion has cut through the
level plain of the upland with elevations of 1000-1200 feet to form
deep valleys or coulees leading to the major water courses with ele¬
vations approximately 600-700 feet.
Almost all the trout stream complexes are associated with some
hilly topography but not all hilly topography has trout streams.
1963] Threinen and Puff— Wisconsin's Trout Streams 63
Uoiversily of Wiscofisio
Wisconsin Geological and Natural Historf Survey
Figure 3. Trout stream complexes superimposed on a g-lacial deposit map of
Wisconsin.
The largest complex has as its center the terminal moraines of
the Green Bay lobe of the last Wisconsin glacial period and streams
flow in both directions. Although many of the trout streams are
associated with hilly moraine areas^ this feature is not always pro¬
ductive of trout streams as will be noted by the scarcity of trout
64 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
streams in the extensive Kettle Moraine hills. Surface topography
is important in this regard: The ground water moves from re¬
charge areas, which are usually divides and hills, toward discharge
points of lower elevation, and springs occur where the ground
water table coincides with the surface. Thus, the hills provide hy¬
draulic gradient toward points of discharge. Also, where the
stream cutting exposes an aquifer endowed with water, or the
ground water itself, a spring can originate. Surface cutting and
erosion has not been great in the younger surface of the glaciated
regions, but it has been extremely important in the unglaciated
portion of southwestern Wisconsin. Sharply cut and deeply eroded
valleys which have carved the plateau are characteristic of this
region.
Another factor can be the stream gradient. A sluggish stream
does not have the water exchange of a stream with large gradient,
and thus is less likely to retain the cool summer and warm winter
temperatures required of a trout stream. As noted, however, some
trout streams are sluggish. The typical drainage sytem in the un¬
glaciated portions of Wisconsin has small feeder streams of high
gradient and a sluggish main stream of lower gradient.
Aside from the unglaciated region, we note that the hilly topog¬
raphy of the Lake Superior drainage and the Barron Hills has a
high incidence of trout streams, but the hilly western portion of
Marathon County, eastern Clark County and southern Taylor
County has relatively few trout streams. It is a well-known fact
that streams in this region have seasonal flows comprised mainly
of surface runoff. There are relatively few springs feeding these
streams and they may become intermittent. Although having suffi¬
cient gradient, ground water storage is limited because of the thin
ground water reservoir.
Evidently sharp topography is not always necessary for the
presence of trout streams. There is a group of them that flows
through part of the extremely flat bed of old glacial Lake Wiscon¬
sin and in the sand and gravel deposits in the central sand plain in
Adams and western Portage Counties. One group consists of the
drainage ditches that drained the old Buena Vista Marsh, a very
flat piece of landscape. These streams owe their existence to excep¬
tionally favorable ground water conditions. On the other hand
the bed of old glacial Lake Oshkosh has not a single trout stream
in it. This area is generally the lower part of the major drainages
and is impregnated with numerous shallow lakes and marshes.
Few springs occur in this region.
1963] Threinen and Puff-— Wisconsin's Trout Streams
65
Glacial Geology
The glaciers had a profound influence on all the Wisconsin land¬
scape except parts of the driftless area. For an evaluation of the
contribution of glacial geology, the trout stream complexes have
been superimposed on the glacial map of Thwaites (1956) (Fig. 3).
Basically the repeated glaciers filled the valleys with sediments,
leveling the landscape, giving much of Wisconsin a gently rolling
character alternately consisting of low hills and lowlands of the
ground moraine with its poor drainage, produced outwash plains
of sandy soils, some pitted, some not and gave rise to steep hilly
topography in the terminal moraines. Pitted outwash plains of
the glaciers gave rise to most of the lake regions (Thwaites, 1959).
Unpitted outwash consists of the well-drained sandy till which has
such excellent water-bearing and transmission qualities. Such
streams as the Chippewa, Black, Wisconsin, and Mississippi Rivers
were major drainages to the south, which carried the load of melt
water.
The gently rolling hills and lowland of southeastern Wisconsin,
with drainage to the south, has few trout streams except on its
western edges. The western-most streams have cut through the
higher elevation of the plateau of the driftless area and terminal
moraine to join the lower main stream. The streams of south¬
eastern Wisconsin aside from these are geologically young with
less elevation and have not eroded down into deep valleys as com¬
pared with those of southwestern Wisconsin. Almost nowhere is
bedrock exposed by their erosive action and the clay till of south¬
eastern Wisconsin has poor waterbearing characteristics. Almost
all the streams in southeastern Wisconsin have low gradients (ex¬
cept when they originate in the hills of a moraine) and low runoff
(Table 1). Here and there among the gravel hills of the Kettle
Moraine, there are large deposits of sand and gravel furnishing
a good ground water reservoir. The local steep gradient of the
ground water table produces springs of sufficient magnitude to
permit the existence of a trout stream. Trout streams are, how¬
ever, conspicuously absent all along the shore of Lake Michigan
where there is usually quite a fall. Almost all the smaller streams
up and down the Michigan shore are intermittent also because of
the poor water-bearing qualities of the soil, although subterranean
drainage is naturally toward the lake as is the surface drainage.
Artesian conditions prevail along much of the shore because of
impermeable rock and soil conditions along the shore.
66 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Table 1. Comparison of Yearly Runoff of 5 Trout Streams and
5 Nontrout Streams^
^Source; USGS water supply papers 1307 and 1308.
-Only streams not having any trout streams as tributaries were utilized.
The flat bed of old glacial Lake Oshkosh in the Green Bay lobe
has no trout streams in it. It is significant that much of this basin
is covered with reddish clay loam, a soil not well adapted to water
infiltration or lateral movement. Marshes and shallow lakes are
characteristic of this region and in many places artesian water con¬
ditions prevail.
Moraines appear to have a high incidence of trout streams, espe¬
cially the moraine that marks the edge of the Green Bay lobe of
the glacier. A high incidence also occurs in the moraine of glacial
Lake Duluth. This is, however, not always the picture. Trout
streams are relatively scarce in most of the Kettle Moraine and
scarce in the moraine stretching across Taylor County. As a whole
trout streams are notably scarce in the unsorted glacial till but
well represented in the alluvium, with some exceptions. These
exceptions are the important lake districts such as the highlands
of Vilas and Oneida Counties; the northwest lake district of Polk,
Burnett, Washburn, Sawyer and southern Bayfield and Douglas
Counties ; and the small, concentrated lake district occupying
northern Chippewa County and southern Rusk County. The lakes
act as impoundments and cause the water to become too warm for
trout in the summer time. Only a few short streams occur in this
region. Elsewhere lakes are not so concentrated that they influence
the location of trout streams.
The coarse, well-sorted sandy alluvium such as found in central
and northwestern Wisconsin makes an excellent infiltration bed for
1963] Threinen and Puff —Wisconsin's Trout Streams
67
Figure 4, Trout stream complexes superimposed on a map of bedrock geology.
the recharge of ground water, the source of springs. Comparatively
less water will be held by the sands in these surface layers and
remain available for evapotranspiration. The imsorted till, on the
other hand, contains the poorly sorted soil mixtures and pockets
strong on the silts and clays which inhibit free percolation and
lateral movement of ground water and yet hold a great deal of it.
68 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The fractions of the soil particles of various sizes are reproduced
from Weidman and Schultz (1915) to illustrate this point (Table 2).
Soil Types
The location of trout streams in relation to soil types is pre-
sented by imposing the trout stream complexes upon a soils map of
the state. The conventional soils map of Whitson (1927) was
adapted for this purpose (Fig. 2) .
This map is indicative of the infiltration capabilities of the vari¬
ous soils. There is a good correlation between trout stream location
and certain soil types, with some exceptions which of course are
what would be expected from our review of the glacial geology. In
most areas, the trout streams do not occur in the clay and glaci¬
ated clay loams and silt loams which include the red clay region of
glacial Lake Oshkosh, the grayish-brown glaciated silt loams of
the southeast, and the grayish-yellow silt loams of the north central
region. Some local exceptions occur. Many of the streams flowing
into Lake Superior pass through the red clay belt along the shore.
Most, however, originate in the lighter sandy soils to the south.
Streams in the southwest originate from lands covered with
soils originating from sandstones and dolomite. In recognition of
the greater presence of springs in the southwest than the southeast,
it must be concluded that unglaciated silt loam is capable of con¬
tributing to ground water through percolation and porous rock
formations capable of taking it up. Thus, other conditions being
favorable, it will give rise to springs and trout streams. Evidently,
the gradient or topography and bedrock formations determine
whether or not a soil region gives rise to springs. In the southwest
there is a soil mantle of variable thickness which in many places is
eroded right down to or into the bedrock. Erosion of the surface
soils and rock has nowhere proceeded to this extent in the south¬
east.
Bedrock Geology
The circumstances which produce springs most commonly are:
(1) a ground water table which reaches the surface or, in other
words is exposed by the surface elevations, and (2) less permeable
stratum that restricts the downward movement of water and al¬
lows it to move laterally to discharge as a spring. We have seen
how this would readily occur in the southwestern part of the state
with its eroded stream courses which cut deeply into the soil and
rock mantle (Fig. 7). The question is, how does the bedrock geol¬
ogy affect spring development elsewhere? The trout stream com-
69
1963] Threinen and Puff — Wisconsin's Trout Streams
plexes have been superimposed on the geologic map of the state
(Bean, 1947) for an illustration (Fig. 4).
The greatest concentration of trout streams is located over the
impervious Canadian Shield or near its edge with some notable
gaps. One of these gaps occurs in the silt loams of north central
Wisconsin — a heavy soil region where poor percolation, poor
lateral subsurface movement and little storage would be expected.
Of special interest is the fact that the line of streams coinciding
with the Green Bay lateral moraine also lies right on the edge of
the Canadian Shield. The topography overlying the Shield has its
highest point in the northeastern highlands of Vilas County and
slopes off toward the various water courses. It is the edge of this
slope with a high gradient where subsurface water movement is
readily intersected by the surface drainage. A cross-sectional dia¬
gram of this scheme adapted from Weidman and Schultz (1915)
appears in Fig. 5.
The ground water level of the sandy soils of this region is main¬
tained by the impervious rock substrate. The existence of this slope
and movement of ground water can be illustrated by the Wolf
River. Most of its feeders known to be trout water are on the west
side. This does not, however, explain the southern extension of
this group of streams, which occur in Waushara, Marquette and
Adams Counties, all underlain by Upper Cambrian sandstone. In
this general area there is still a hydraulic gradient arising from
the moraine hills and adequately recharged through the sandy soils.
It is perhaps significant that the Pre-Cambrian granite, comes to
the surface in some localities in Marquette County and may con¬
tribute to this slope.
Many streams flowing over trap rock or the Lake Superior sand¬
stones have rich spring sources from overlying alluvium. A high
Figure 5. Geology, soils and trout stream distribution across an east-west
section of Wisconsin at the latitude of Wausau. Adapted from Wiedman and
Schultz (1915) and Whitson (1926).
70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ground water level is maintained by the impervious cemented sand¬
stone of the trap rock, and the high elevation of this region gives
the ground water ample hydraulic gradient to flow downhill
through the sandy till to emerge as springs. Most of the springs
supplying the Brule and other south shore streams have their
origin above the lacustrine clay belt that marks the bottom of
glacial Lake Duluth and their infiltration bed is the Brule sand
barrens. Bean (1944) diagrammed this picture in detail.
Figure 6. An east-west geologic section from Madison to Milwaukee with
areas of trout stream occurrence noted. Recopied from Thomas (1952) who
adapted work of Wiedman and Schultz (1918).
Figure 7. A north-south geological cross-section of the terrain that creates
spring sources and trout streams in southwestern Wisconsin (Wiedman and
Schultz, 1915).
The southeastern part of the state does not have many large
springs nor much gradient to its streams. The deep layer of poorly -
sorted drift over porous bedrock in many places is not conducive
to development of numerous and consistent spring sources. The
clay loams have poor recharge properties and, should water reach
the rock aquifers, it would flow toward areas of discharge
(streams, lakes, wells, etc.) to the east or south. Eock aquifers in¬
clude the porous St. Peter sandstone, Cambrian sandstone, the
1963] Threinen and Puff — Wisconsin’s Trout Streams 71
less porous Prairie du Chien dolomite, and the Galena dolomite.
Cities digging wells in this region usually seek either the St. Peter
sandstone or the Cambrian sandstone. Even the Niagara limestone
which underlies all the lake shore counties is reasonably permeable
due to the numerous fractures and joints. A simplified diagram
of the system has been reproduced from the report of Thomas
(1952) (Fig. 6).
There is much to be gained by observing the runoff of important
streams which lie within these regions. It is low for the streams
in the southeast and much higher for the streams which originate
on the Canadian Shield and streams that originate in the South¬
west. This is further evidence that precipitation enters the ground
to be expressed at distant points and does not become an immediate
part of surface discharge; is retained by the clayey soils to enter
the evapotranspiration cycle; or is impounded in marshes or lakes.
The streams with good spring sources on the other hand have a
high base flow with little fluctuation which is well distributed
through the year (Table 1).
Discussion
Wisconsin has abundant rainfall amounting to 27-34 inches per
year— enough to make contributions to the ground water, surface
runoff, evaporation and vegetation growth. The fraction that en¬
ters the ground and becomes expressed as springs and seeps in
what interests us the most because of the trout's dependence on
the cool ground water. This amounts to 5.0 inches per year for
southern Wisconsin according to Wojta's (1949) review and much
higher in sandy regions, reaching 80-90 per cent (Drescher, 1955).
Most of this recharge takes place during the periods when vegeta¬
tion is not actively transpiring water, and it is very much greater
in porous materials than in semi- or nonporous materials. With
sufficient water for recharge, we can assume the potential for
trout stream development always exists provided other physical
conditions occur. An additional requirement is springs of sufficient
number and size to sustain desired water temperatures. The size of
streams inhabited by trout is suggestive of temperature require¬
ments. Large streams do not make good trout water except season¬
ally. They have too much of their water volume derived from dis¬
tant sources, which would have been subject to the tempering in¬
fluence of weather conditions and excessively warmed or cooled,
to have other than very local or seasonal value to trout. It will,
therefore, be only the small- and medium-sized waters which can be
sufficiently cooled or warmed by ground water springs — the head-
72
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
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1963] Threinen and Puff— Wisconsin's Trout Streams 73
waters for most streams. Usually the trout water will extend down
about a mile below the significant spring sources.
The circumstances which have produced significant springs are
multiple. First and most important, it takes a good porous soil
to make contributions to the ground water through infiltration.
This requirement has been well met by the glacial alluvium with
its sandy soils. Trout streams are abundantly represented in this
surface type or in conjunction with it. The second requirement is
ground water with sufficient hydraulic gradient to cause the
ground water to reach the surface such that interception by drain¬
age is possible. The slopes of the Canadian Shield, moraine hills
and coulees provide this requirement.
Thirdly, there must be free lateral underground movement of the
ground water so that it can reach the surface drainage systems
which have cut down into the surface deposits. Free movement is
permitted in the sorted alluvium with its predominantly sands and
gravels in the overlay, but it is not permitted in the unsorted till
or original lake clays with their higher fraction of clays or fre¬
quent pockets of clay and silt. Free movement of water is per¬
mitted in some of the sandstones which are exposed in the central
and the western parts of the state.
It is perhaps fortunate that sandy soils and hilly regions are
most productive of trout streams. Intensive agriculture will not
be so demanding of these waters for irrigation nor will there be
complete tillage of the soil with attendant erosion. The one crop
that thrives on the sandy silt loams of outwash flats is potatoes.
Since this crop gives the best yields when irrigated, competition
for surface water from spring sources in such areas can be ex¬
pected. The sandy soils and hillsides are more intensively dedicated
to forest enterprises, a land use that indirectly contributes to rain¬
fall infiltration, delayed runoff and utimate expression as ground
water springs.
The geography besides heavy soil types which is unproductive of
trout streams contains many lakes. Also, it is a well-known fact
that an impoundment will mark the lower limits of trout water.
Impounded waters whether in lakes of glacial or man-made origin
usually have surface outflow and become warmed beyond the toler¬
ances of trout. These circumstances suggest that if protection of
trout streams is to be achieved, impounding of trout waters should
be avoided. The trend toward construction of small impoundments
for farm pounds, private fish hatcheries and other recreational
and business enterprises is regarded as a serious threat to the
future of trout streams.
74 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Summary
Trout streams in Wisconsin have been located on a hydrographic
map of the state. In this manner the geography leading to the
existence of the streams can be seen. Since the trout require cold
waters in summer and warm waters in winter, they are dependent
upon ground water for these conditions. Trout streams occur abun¬
dantly in regions with good slope that provide a hydraulic gradient
for ground water, in regions that have permeable sandy soils which
permit ready infiltration and lateral movement of ground water.
Trout streams are lacking in regions of little slope and clay soil
types, and in regions containing abundant lakes. Impoundment of
trout streams is regarded as the greatest threat to the maintenance
of trout waters.
Acknowledgements
Presentation of these data would have been impossible without
the extensive surveys of field men in the Wisconsin Conservation
Department. The critical review of these data by Mr. Lee Holt, Dr.
John Ockerman and editing by Dr. Ruth Hine is gratefully
acknowledged.
References
Bean, E. F. 1949. Geologic map of Wisconsin. Wis. Geol and Nat. Hist. Surv.,
Madison, Wis.
Bean, E. F. and John W. Thompson. 1944. Topography and geology of the
Brule River Basin. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts, and Letters 36:7-17.
Benson, Norman G. 1953. The importance of ground water to trout popula¬
tions in the Pigeon River Michigan. Trans. N. Am. Wildl. Conf^ 18:269-
281.
Brett, J, R. 1956. Some principles in the thermal requirements of fishes.
Quart. Rev. Biol. 32(2) :75-87.
Dreschbr, William J, 1955. Some effects of precipitation on ground water in
Wisconsin. TJniv. of Wis. Geol. Surv. Inf, Circ. No. 1, 77 pp.
■ - , 1956. Ground water in Wisconsin. Univ. of Wis. Geol, Surv. Inf. Circ.
No. 3, 37 pp.
Maciolek, John R. and P. R. Needham, 1952. Ecological effects of winter con¬
ditions on trout and trout foods in Convict Creek in California, Trans.
Am. Fish. Soc. 81:202-217.
Martin, Lawrence. 1932. The physical geography of Wisconsin. Wis. Geol.
and Nat. Hist. Surv. Bull. 36, 608 pp.
Needham, Paul R. 1938. Trout streams. Comstock Publishing Company.
Ithaca, N. Y., 233 pp.
Thomas, Harold E. 1952. Ground water regions of the U. S. III. Their stor¬
age facilities. U. S. House of Representatives, Interior and Insular Affairs
Committee, 78 pp.
Thwaites, F, T. 1956. Wisconsin glacial deposits, Wi^. Geol and Nat. Hist,
Surv.
1963] Threinen and Puff — Wisconsin's Trout Streams
75
- . 1959. Outline of glacial geology. Published by the author, Madison,
143 pp.
U. S. Department of Agriculture. 1941. Climate and Man. The 1941 year¬
book of Agriculture. JJ. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington. 1,248
pp.
U. S. Geological Survey. 1958. Compilation of records of surface waters of
the U. S. through September 1950. Part 4. St. Lawrence River basin.
V. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 397 pp.
- . 1959. Compilation of records of surface waters of the U. S. through
September of 1950. Part 5. Hudson Bay and Upper Mississippi River
basin. U. S. Govt. Printing Office, Washington, 708 pp.
Whitson, A. R. 1927. Soils of Wisconsin. Wis. Geol .and Nat. Hist. Surv. Bull.
68, 270 pp.
WiEDMAN, Samuel and Alfred R. Schultz. 1915. The underground and sur¬
face water supplies of Wisconsin. Wis. Geol. and Nat. Hist. Surv. Bull.
35, 664 pp.
WoJTA, A. J. 1949. Agriculture’s role in a conservation program. Univ. of
Wis. Soils Dept., 6 pp. mimeo.
THE MILWAUKEE FORMATION ALONG
LAKE MICHIGAN’S SHORE
Katherine G. Nelson and Jeanette Roberts
The presence of Devonian rocks in southeastern Wisconsin was
recognized more than 100 years ago by Increase A. Lapham, who
reported their discovery in 1860 to the Milwaukee Geological Club,
and later to the St. Louis Academy of Sciences and in the American
Journal of Science.^ He made his correlation on the basis of fish
fossils. While relatively rare, where present these fossils are very
conspicuous and leave little doubt that they are representatives of
the '‘Age of Fishes’", as the Devonian is commonly called. About
this same time, James Hall was commissioned to make a geological
survey of Wisconsin, and in his report of 1862, he describes the
rock and correlates it with the Hamilton beds of New York. As
State Geologist of New York, he was the outstanding authority of
his time on the Devonian.
The name “Milwaukee Formation” was not applied formally
until 1906, when W. C. Alden’s Milwaukee Special Folio was pub¬
lished by the United States Geological Survey. The term “Milwau¬
kee Cement Rock”, however, had appeared in print as early as
1883 in T. C. Chamberlin’s Geology of Wisconsin, Volume I,^ and
had probably been in use considerably earlier. It was Lapham who
had pointed out the possibility of using the shaly dolomite to make
cement in 1874, and two years later the Milwaukee Cement Com¬
pany began operations in the vicinity of the type locality along
the Milwaukee River at Berthelet, north of what is now Capitol
Drive.
The cement industry became a booming one, not only at the Mil¬
waukee site, but at others where the hydraulic limestone could be
located. Outcrops were few, for two reasons: as the topmost of
the Paleozoic formations exposed in Wisconsin, most of it had been
removed by erosion during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras; and
most of what is left is buried under glacial drift. Since the
Paleozoic rocks in general dip away from north central Wisconsin,
1 Cleland, H. F., The Fossils and Stratigraphy of the Middle Devonic of Wisconsin,
Wisconsin Geological Survey, Bull. 21 (sc. s. 6), 1911. pp. 21-22.
3 Chamberlin, T. C., The Geology of Wisconsin, Vol. I, p. 201, Wis. G. S., 1883.
77
78 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
the rocks along the eastern border of the state have a general re¬
gional dip to the southeast. Thus, the area underlain by the
Devonian — ^^the youngest of the sequence of dipping beds — is con¬
fined to a narro^v strip, nowhere extending more than 3 to 4 miles
west of Lake Michigan, and stretching less than 50 miles in a
north-south direction. The gentle regional dip toward the lake is
generally obscured in the outcrop areas by local warping. The
warping, itself, is in part responsible for some of the outcrops,
causing them to arch toward the surface through the glacial drift.
Whether the strata are continuous under the drift is doubtful — it
is likely that pre-glacial erosion has cut through the Devonian to
the underlying Silurian beds in many places.
The two most prominent exposures of the Devonian are the type
area along the Milwaukee River, and the region along the shore of
Lake Michigan east of Lake Church, about 30 miles north of the
former. Both of these areas and their fossil content were de¬
scribed in some detail by Cleland in 1911.
One of the more obscure outcrops is located on the lake shore
in Fox Point, just north of Whitefish Bay, and this is the area with
which the present study is most concerned. Cleland gives only six
lines to this location :
“The Hamilton formation outcrops about two miles north of Whitefish
Bay station on the lake shore. It was here that Whitfield obtained some
of his specimens for Volume IV of the Geology of Wisconsin. The rock
here was formerly mined by tunneling by the Consolidated Cement Com¬
pany, but in 1907 no work was being done, and the rock was inaccessible
except on the shore of the lake.’’®
Alden, in 1906, stated that the Consolidated Cement company
did not begin production until 1900^ Why was this enterprise so
short-lived? Why was it located there in the first place? Appar¬
ently, for about six years, the company had an extensive layout
there, evidence of which can still be seen in concrete abutments
and rusting steel tracks along the shore. Probably the cessation of
operations was influenced by the same factor that has made it dif¬
ficult to locate this outcrop in recent years — the level of Lake Mich¬
igan. Alden stated that the exposure was at the foot of the bluff
on the shore of “Whitefish Bay, a few feet above the water’s
edge”.® The cement company’s operation was a mine, reached by
a shaft from the top of the bluff, which extended 22 feet below the
level of the beach. Several times during the 1940’s and early 1950’s
the senior author and others attempted to locate the outcrop along
3 Cleland, op. cit, p. 10.
^ Alden, W. C., Description of the Milwaukee Quadrangle, Wisconsin, U.S.G.S. Atlas,
Milwaukee Special Folio (No, 140), p. 10, 1906.
^ Ibid., p. 3 (The italics (above) are the present authors’.)
1963] Nelson and Roberts — The Milwaukee Formation 79
the shore in this vicinity, to no avail, and the conclusion was reached
that the slight area where bedrock had once been visible had been
buried either by beach sand or by creep of the glacial till at the base
of the bluff. During the summer of 1956, when the lake was lower
than it had been for several years, the authors looked for it again,
on a hot summer day, and discovered it under the water, a bit east
of the edge of the beach. It was accessible only by wading, but
obviously the slabs of rock were in place, and represented several
beds of the long-sought Milwaukee Formation, In the fall of 1962,
the junior author found that the lake level was even lower, and
that there was a good exposure of the Devonian rocks visible for
a distance of several hundred feet along the beach. Enough of it
was out of the water so that specimens could be collected.
When winter and the formation of massive ridges of ice along
the beach put a temporary stop to field studies, the junior author
delved into the records of what is now the city of Glendale to see if
she could learn more about the operations of the Consolidated Ce¬
ment Company that is described in the Milwaukee Folio. Alden
stated that the company had opened a shaft in the bluff several
years earlier, to supply its mill above, but that production did not
begin until 1900.® This is the year when the name of the Consoli¬
dated Cement Company first appears in the Personal Property As¬
sessment Poll, with a listing of ‘‘Wagons, Carriages and Sleighs —
1, Value $10^’ and “Personal Property, $18,000’\ By 1901, the
company had 4 wagons, with a value of $100, and the same entry
appears for 1902. The 1903 records list only the personal property
valuation of $18,000, but in 1904, two houses, with a value of $100
are listed, and the location of the plant in School District #5 (now
Green Tree District) is cited. This year must mark the end of
successful operation of the company, for on page 231, Volume 6
of the Town Clerk's Record, we find the following notations :
“July 13, 1904 — Mr. Griese of the Consolidated Cement Company who
has an $18,000 assessment on the personal property against the company
said the assessment was 50% too high. He stated that the identical plant
newly installed would cost but $12,000. His case was taken under advise¬
ment.’’
“July 14, 1904 — Messrs. Griese and Kiewert appeared again on behalf
of the Consolidated Cement Company and the board determined to place
the assessment on their personal property of $18,000 at $13,000, a reduc¬
tion of $5,000. They were satisfied with this reduction.”
The next year's assessment record shows the value of personal
property further reduced to $10,000, and in 1906 and thereafter,
the Consolidated Cement Company is no longer listed on the tax
rolls.
«Ibid., p. 10.
80 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
While harbor expediters and ships’ captains have worried about
the low level of Lake Michigan in 1963, it must be stated that this
spring’s near-record low level of the Great Lakes has been most
helpful to the authors in their research. With the level of Lake
Michigan 1.6' lower than the ten year average, and a foot lower
than it was just a year earlier, the Milwaukee Formation along
the shore of Whitefish Bay in Fox Point is better exposed that it has
been for many years. It is no longer necessary to wade to reach it.
Army engineers forecast a further drop of nearly a foot by July
and August. Although many shake their heads in dismay at this
prospect, there are at least two geologists who are looking forward
to walking out farther on the bedrock that is now submerged, in
the hope of finding fossils of interests
The character of the rock and its fossil content have been the
primary concern of the writers. Cephalopods characteristic of Zone
B of the Milwaukee Formation are present. These include several
specimens of Ovoceras, and several that appear to be Gyroceras.
It will take considerable study before an accurate and complete
listing can be made, because the fossils that are found in place are
almost all in the form of casts and molds, and rapid identification is
not often possible. Several typical brachiopods have been recog¬
nized, however— among them Stropheodonta, Atrypa, Cyrtina,
Spirifer, and Mucrospirifer. Pelecypods of the genera Palaeoneilo
and Nuculites have also been recognized, as well as an unidentified
coral, bryozoan molds, and gastropods. All of these have been found
in place in the rock at the water’s edge. Besides this brownish, rather
hard dolomite with some weak, shaly layers, there are numerous
fragments on the beach of a greyer, more fossiliferous rock. Most
of these are probably derived from the material thrown out of the
shaft, as noted in Alden’s description. This fine-grained, hydraulic
limestone, he noted, was characterized by abundant pyritized fos¬
sils, pyrite crystals and calcite, and traces of bitumen. Today grey
fragments of limestone with an abundance of crinoid stem frag¬
ments, Tentaculites, an occasional trilobite (Phacops rana), spiri-
fers and other brachiopods, and bryozoans can be picked up on the
beach. Sometimes they contain pyrite and calcite crystals, and vugs
lined with asphaltic material. Some of this bitumen has also been
found in the rocks cropping out at the water’s edge, by the authors,
In mid-July, 1963, the authors have found new exposures extending- a little to the
south, but the shifting- character of the beach sands and gravels has brought about
burial of some of the beds studied in March and April,
1963] Nelson and Roberts — The Milwaukee Formation 81
and this leads to speculation as to whether there might some day be
a strike of off-shore oil for Wisconsin to turn over to the Federal
government. Or how far out would the state’s rights extend?
We wonder whether this ticklish problem will ever be put to the
test.
Eeferences
1. Alden, W. C. Description of the Milwaukee Quadrangle, Wisconsin. U.S.
Geol. Surv. Atlas, Milwaukee Special Folio (No. 140). Washington, 1906.
2. Chamberlin, Thomas C. The Geology of Wisconsin, Vol. I. Wis. Geol. Surv,
1883.
3. Cleland, H. F. The Fossils and Stratigraphy of the Middle Devonic of
Wisconsin. Wis. Geol. Surv. Bull. 21 (sc. s, 6), 1911.
4. Whitfield, R. P. Paleontology, Geology of Wisconsin. Vol. 4, pp. 324-
340. 1882.
5. Glendale Tax Records. Personal Property Assessment Roll, 1900-1906.
PARASITES OF EASTERN WISCONSIN FISHES
James D. Anthony
Abstract
In a survey of fish parasites undertaken during the summer of
1960 from 17 lakes and pounds, 324 fishes representing 25 different
species were examined. Those infected with at least one species of
parasite totaled 300 and represented 93% of the total autopsied.
The number of fish infected with each parasite is presented. The
most common parasites found were monogenetic trematodes, of
the Order Gyrodactyloidea, on the gills, scales and fins of 15 species
of fish and Neascus spp. in 11 species of fish.
Introduction
This is the first of what is hoped to be a series of papers survey¬
ing the parasitic fauna of Wisconsin fishes. It is expected that
future papers will attempt to show a correlation between th para¬
sitic burden of lake and stream fishes with the chemical composi¬
tion of the waters.
Surveys of fish parasites in northern Wisconsin by Fischthal
(1947, 1950, 1952), and Bangham (1946) indicate that approxi¬
mately 93 % of the fishes collected were parasitized. This is, in gen¬
eral, higher than studies made in other parts of the United States
but compares favorably with the results of the present study.
Collections were made with hook and line and with an electric
shocker. The fish were examined as soon as possible after they
were caught. Since the electric shocking was usually done at night
the parasite examinations were conducted the next day after the
fish had been on ice over night. The acanthocephalans and tape¬
worms were allowed to relax in the refrigerator and were then
placed, along with the trematodes and other parasites, in Bouin’s
or formalin-alcohol-acetic acid fixative. Staining was done with
borax carmine or haematoxylin. Mountaing was in piccolyte.
Special appreciation is due Mr. Vernon Hacker of the Wisconsin
Conservation Department, the various district fish managers and
1 Supported in part by the Research Committee of the Graduate School from
funds supplied by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
83
84 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
the crew of the boat containing the shocker, without whom it would
have been impossible to conduct this survey. The identifications of
the fish were aided by the above persons. Thanks are also due Dr.
Ludwig Pauly for furnishing fish from Lake Beulah and Mr.
Robert Calentine for confirming the diagnosis of Khawia iowensis.
The fish names used are those in Hubbs and Lagler (1958).
Lakes and Ponds Surveyed
List of Fish
Amia calva Linnaeus — Bowfin
Coregonus artedii hirgei (Wagner) — Green Lake Cisco
Catostomus commersonnii commersonnii (LacepMe) — Common
White Sucker
Erimyzon sucetta kennerlii (Girard)— Western Lake Chubsucker
Cyprinus carpio Linnaeus — Carp
Semotihis atromaculatus atromaculatus (Mitchill) — Northern
Creek Chub
Notemigonus crysoleucas auratus (Rafinesque) — Western Golden
Shiner
Notropis cornutus frontalis (Agassiz) — Northern Common Shiner
Pimephales notatus (Rafinesque) — Bluntnose Minnow
Ictalurus melas melas (Rafinesque) — Northern Black Bullhead
1963] Anthony — Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes 85
Ictalurus nebulosus nebulosus (LeSueur) — Northern Brown Bull¬
head
Ictalurus natalis natalis (LeSueur) — Northern Yellow Bullhead
Schilbeodes gyrinus (Mitchill)- — Tadpole Madtom
Umbra limi (Kirtland)-— -Central Mudminnow
Esox lucius Linnaeus-— Northern Pike
Perea fiavescens (Mitchill)- — Yellow Perch
Stizostedion vitreum vitreum (Mitchill)— Yellow Walleye
Percina caprodes (Rafinesque) — Logperch
Micropterus dolomieui dolomieui Lacepede — Northern Smallmouth
Bass
Micropterus salmoides salmoides (Lacepede) — Northern Large-
mouth Bass
Lepomis cyanellus Rafinesque— Green Sunfish
Lepomis gibbosus (Linnaeus)— Pumpkinseed
Green Sunfish X Pumpkinseed
Lepomis macrochirus macrochirus Rafinesque— Common Bluegill
Ambloplites rupestris rupestris (Rafinesque) — Northern Rock Bass
Pomoxis nigromaculatus (LeSueur)— Black Crappie
Amia calva Linn. — Bowfin 5/5
Three fish from Lake Bernice and two fish from Lake Beulah
were examined and all were infected. Those from Lake Bernice had
Azygia augusticauda in two ; Contracaecum sp. in three ; Proteoce-
phalus sp. in two; Macroderoides parvus in three; Neoechinorhym
chus cylindratus in two; Spiroxys sp. in one and Haplobothrium
golbuliforme in one. The two fish from Lake Beulah had A. augusti¬
cauda in two ; Contracaecum sp. in two ; Proteocephalus sp in two ;
Macroderoides typicum in two ; N. cylindratus in one and H. globu-
liforme in one.
Coregonus artedii birgei (Wagner) — Green Lake Cisco 6/8
The five cisco from Little Green Lake and one of the three from
Green Lake were heavily infected with Cystidicola stigmatura in
the swim bladder. Two of the fish had over two hundred of these
large nematodes and the others averaged approximately seventy-
five per fish.
Catostomus commersonii commersonii (Table 1) 58/59
The suckers from Europe Lake were all heavily infected. All of
them had Diplostomulum sp. in the lens of the eye and in most
cases several hundred were present making the lens almost opaque.
There was undoubtedly some loss of vision. Many of these fish also
carried Octomacrum lanceatum on the gills ; Clinostomum margin¬
atum embedded in the flesh and Neoechinorhynchus crassus in the
intestine.
86 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Erimyzon sucetta kennerlii (Girard) — Western Lake Chubsucker
1/2
One of the two chubsuckers from lola Pond was infected with
one immature Camallanus oxycephalus and an immature Carophyl-
laeidae which appears to be Glaridacris catostomi but which can¬
not be positively identified.
Cyprinus carpio (Table 2) 38/45
Fourteen of the twenty carp from Alderly Pond were infected
with Khawia iowensis as were two of the fish from Lake Bernice.
This species was described by Calentine and Ulmer (1961) and
the identification has been confirmed by these authors. The other
caryophyllaeids were too immature to identify.
Semotilus atromaculatus atromaculatus (Mitchill) — Northern
Creek Chub 8/8
The eight specimens from Lake Nagawicka were all parasitized.
Gyrodactyloidea were found in seven; Contracaecum sp. in five;
Neascus sp. in four; Posthodiplostomum minimum in two; Proteo-
cephalus sp. in two and Allocreadium lobatum in two.
Notemigonus crysoleucas auratus (Rafinesque)-— Western Golden
Shiner 16/20
Four of the six fish from Lake Bernice had Gyrodactyloidea on
the gills and three had Neascus sp. Nine of the eleven fish from
Beech wood Lake had Gyrodactyloidea; five were infected with
Neascus sp and Plagiocirrus primus occurred on three. The three
fish from Random Lake all had Gyrodactyloidea. Two of the fish
from Lake Bernice and two from Beechwood Lake were negative.
Notropis cornutus frontalis (Agassiz)-— Northern Common Shiner
8/9
All of the common shiners were secured from Lake Bernice.
Gyrodactyloidea and Rhahdochona cascadilla were found in four;
Allocreadium lobatum was found in three and Neascus sp. in two.
Pimephales notatus (Rafinesque)— Bluntnose minnow 1/1
The one bluntnose minnow from Europe Lake had ten Neascus
sp. metacercaria on the scales, immature Contracaecum sp. ency¬
sted in the liver and larval Diplostomulum sp. in the lens of the
eye.
I ctahtrus melas melas (Table 3) 19/19
Most of the black bullheads carried a heavy infection of Aloglos-
sidium corti and Corallobothrium fimbriatum in the intestines as
well as numerous Gyrodoctyloidea on the gills.
1963]
Anthony — Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes
87
Ictalurus nebulosis nebulosis (Table 4) 30/30
Many of the brown bullheads had Proteocephalus sp. which was
not found in the black bullheads and a lighter load of Alloglos-
sidium sp. The infection of Corallobothrium fimbriatum and Gyro-
dactyloidea was about the same.
Ictalurus natalis natalis (LeSueur)— Northern Yellow Bullhead
3/4
Three of the four yellow bullheads from lola Pond had Gyro-
dactyloidea ; one had Contracaecum sp. and one had both Dichelyne
robusta and Phyllodistomum staff ordi.
Schilbeodes gyrinus (Mitchill)— Tadpole Madtom 1/1
This fish from McDill Pond was kept alive and autopsied a
week after capture. It was found to have a heavy infection of
Gyrodactyloidea and five Trichodina sp. on the gills. There were
also eight Spiroxys sp. encysted on the mesenteries.
Umbra limi (Kirtland)- — Central Mudminnow 5/7
Two of the three mudminnows from Jetzer’s Lake had Spiroxys
sp. and one had a single Bunoderina eucaliae. Three of the four from
lola Pond had B. eucaliae and three were single infections of
Proteocephalus sp., Clinostomum marginatum and Leptorhyn-
choides thecatus»
Esox lucius Linn.— Northern Pike 3/3
The one pike from JetzeNs Lake contained twenty-six Proteoce¬
phalus pinguis; the one from lola Pond had Neascus sp. and six
Leptorhynchoides thecatus; the one from Random Lake had several
hundred Neascus sp., three Protocephalus pinguis and four Crepi-
dostomum cooperi. The low number of these fish secured indicates
their ability to escape capture with an electric shocker.
Perea flavescens (Table 5) 16/16
The yellow perch in Lake Bernice and Europe Lake had rela¬
tively large numbers of Bunodera sacculata. The fish from Lake
Bernice and lola Pond had many Gyrodactyloidea on the gills.
Stizostedion vitreum vitreum (Mitchill)— Yellow Walleye 1/3
One of the three walleyes from Little Green Lake had an im¬
mature Proteocephalus sp. These were all young fish which had
been planted after the lake had been poisoned. This perhaps is one
method of controlling heavily parasitized lakes.
Percina caprodes (Rafinesque)— Logperch 1/1
The one logperch from Lake Bernice had three Illinobdella sp.,
one immature Proteocephalus sp. and one Phyllodistomum etheosto-
mae.
88 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Micropterus dolomieui dolomieui Lacepede — Northern Smallmouth
Bass 3/3
The three fish from Europe Lake were all infected with Neascus
sp., two of them had Proteocephalus amblopUtis, one had a light
infection of Diplostomulum sp. and Contracaecum sp, occurred in
two.
Micropterus salmoides salmoides (Table 6) 29/30
The largemouth bass were not heavily infected with any one
parasite but had more of a variety of parasites than the other
fish. Since these came from more different localities there seems to
be a correlation between the number of different parasites and the
variety of the habitats.
Lepomis cyanellus Rafinesque— Green Sunfish 5/5
The three fish from WeyeEs Lake had an average of eighteen
Gvrodactyloidea on the gills. The two fish from Random Lake had
large numbers of Diplostomulum sp, in the lens of the eyes; one
was infected with two immature Proteocephalus sp. and the same
fish had one Spinitectus sp.
Lepomis gibbosus (Table 7) 7/8
The pumpkinseeds carried light infections with the exception
of the Gyrodactyloidea on the gills, fins and scales.
Green Sunfish X Pumpkinseed 2/2
One of the two hybrids from Little Green Lake had one imma¬
ture Proteocephalus sp. while each of the two fish contained two
Crepidostomum cooperi,
Lepomis macrochirus macrochirus (Table 8) 26/26
The bluegills had almost the same parasitic infections as the
pumpkinseeds except that Bothriocephalus cuspidatus was found
in the former. Since these were from different lakes the occurrence
is probably not significant. Neascus sp. was not found in the blue-
gills in Random Lake but was found in the pumpkinseeds.
Ambloplites rupestris rupestris (Rafinesque) “-Northern Rock Bass
4/4
The rock bass were all collected from Europe Lake. All were
infected with Neascus sp., Capillaria catenata, Camallanus oxyce-
phalus, Proteocephalus ambloplites and Gyrodactyloidea. Three
also had Crepidostomum cooperi and Neoechinorhynchus cylim
dratus. Clinostomum marginatum and Spinitectus sp. were found
in two. One had a moderate infection of Diplostomulum scheuringi.
Pomoxis nigromaculatus (LeSueur) — Black Crappie 4/5
Two of the three crappies from Jetzer’s Lake were parasitized
with immature Proteocephalus sp. Both of the fish from Random
1963] Anthony— -Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes 89
Lake had heavy infections of Neascus sp. in the fins and scales.
Both also had light infections of Proteocephalus pearsei^ Crepido-
stomum cornutum and Spinitectus sp. in the intestines.
Check List of Parasites
TREMATODA
Allocreadium lobatum Wallin, 1909
Allogossidium corti (Lamont, ,1921)
Alloghssidium geminus (Mueller, 1930)
Azygia augustieauda (Stafford, 1904)
Bunodera sacculata Van Cleave and Mueller, 1932
Bunoderina eucaliae Miller, 1938
Clinostomum marginatum (Rudolphi, 1819)
Crepidostomum cooperi Hopkins, 1931
Crepidostomum cornutum Osborn, 1903
DiplostomuMm scheuringi Hughes, 1929
Diplostomulum spp.
Gyrodactyloidea
Macroderoides parvus (Hunter, 1932)
Neascus spp.
Octomaerum lanceatum Mueller, 1934
Phyllodistomum etheostomae Fischthal, 1942
Phyllodistomum staff ordi Pearse, 1924
Posthodiplostomum minimum (MacCallum, 1921)
Triganodistomum attenuatum Mueller and Van Cleave, 1932
CESTODA
Bothriocephalus cuspidatus Cooper, 1917
Caryophyllaeidae
Corallobothrium fimhriatum Essex, 1927
Glaridacris catostomi Cooper, 1920
Haplobothrium globuliforme Cooper, 1914
Khawia iowensis Calentine and Ulmer, 1961
Proteocephalus ambloplitis (Leidy, 1887)
Proteocephalus pearsei La Rue, 1919
Proteocephahis pinguis La Rue, 1911
Proteocephalus spp.
NEMATODA
Camallanus oxycephalus Ward and Magath, 1917
Capillaria catenata Van Cleave and Mueller, 1932
Contracaecum spp.
Cystidicola stigmatura (Leidy, 1886)
Dichelyne robusta (Van Cleave and Mueller, 1932)
Rhabdochona cascadilla Wigdor, 1918
90 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Spinitectus gracilis Ward and Magath, 1917
Spinitectus spp.
Spiroxys sp.
ACANTHOCEPHALA
Leptorhynchoides thecatus (Linton, 1891)
Neoechinorhynchus crassus Van Cleave, 1919
N eoechinorhynchus cylindratm (Van Cleave, 1913)
Octospinifer macilentus Van Cleave, 1919
Pomphorhynchus hulbocolli Linkins, 1919
PROTOZOA
Trichodina sp.
COPEPODA
Achtheres micropteri Wright, 1882
Argulus catostomi Dana and Herrick, 1837
Ergasilus caeruleus Wilson, 1911
HIRUDINEA
Illinohdella sp.
Table 1. Catostomus commersonii commersonii (Lacepede) —
Common White Sucker
1963]
Anthony — Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes
91
Table 2, Cyprinus carpio Linnaeus — Carp
Table 3. Ictalurus melas melas (Rafinesque) — Northern Black Bullhead
92 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Table 4. Ictalurus nebulosus nebulosus (Lesueur) — Northern
Brown Bullhead
Table 5. Perea flavescens (Mitchill) — Yellow Perch
Table 6. Micropterus salmoides salmoides (Lacepede) — Northern Largemouth Bass
1963]
Anthony — Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes 93
94 Wisconsin A:ademy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Table 7, Lepomis gihbosus (Linnaeus) — Pumpkinseed
Table 8. Lepomis macrochirus macrochirus Rafinesque — Common Bluegill
1963]
Anthony— Parasites of Wisconsin Fishes
95
Literature Cited
Bangham, R. V, 1946. Parasites of northern Wisconsin fish. Tr. Wis. Acad.
Sc., Arts and Let 36:291-325. 1944.
Calentine, R. L. and Ulmer, M. J. 1961. Khawia iowensis n. sp. (Cestoda:
Caryophyllaeidae) from Cyprinus carpio L. in Iowa. Jour. Parasitol. 47 :
795-805.
Fischthal, j. H. 1947. Parasites of northwest Wisconsin fishes. I. The 1944
survey. Tr. Wis. Acad. Sc., Arts and Let. 37:157-220. 1945.
— - . 1950. Parasites of northwest Wisconsin fishes. II. The 1945 survey.
Tr. Wisi Acad. Sc., Arts and Let. 40, Pt. 1:87-113.
- . 1952. Parasites of northwest Wisconsin fishes. III. The 1946 survey.
Tr. Wis. Acad. Sc., Arts and Let. 41:17-58.
Hubbs, C. L. and Lagler, K. F. 1958. Fishes of the Great Lakes Region. Bull.
Cranbrook Inst. Sci. No. 26, 213 pp., 44 col. pis., 50 text-fig.
ZUR KENNTNIS DER SCOLYTIDAE— UND
PLATYPODIDAE— FAUNA AUS COSTA RICA
; Marian Nunherg
I
Editors Note: The costs involved in publishing- this paper have been paid in
full from funds allocated to the Department of Entomology, University of
Wisconsin, for research on insects affecting- the cocoa tree. The studies are
supported in large part by the American Cocoa Research Institute, Washing¬
ton, D. C. and the Ambrosia Chocolate Company of Milwaukee (Schoenleber
Fund). Institutions and organizations cooperating in the research are the
Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Agriculture, University of Wis¬
consin; the Inter- American Institute of Agricultural Sciences of the O.A.S.
located at Turrialba, Costa Rica; the Inter- American Cacao Center, Turrialba,
Costa Rica; and the United Fruit Company through the Compania Bananera
de Costa Rica.
It is interesting to observe that entomologists from Wisconsin are working
in Costa Rica, that the insects involved in this paper were named by an author¬
ity on bark beetles in Poland and that the article is written in German. This
illustrates well the cooperation occurring among organizations and individuals
in the scientific field.
Im J. 1962 erhielt ich vom Herrn Prof. R. D. Shenefelt, Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin, U.S.A., eine Sendung von 497 Kafern aus oben
erwahnten Familien zum Bearbeiten.
Alle Kafer stammen aus Costa Rica, Ortschaft LaLola ; sie waren
an das Licht gefangen. Aus diesem Grunde darf man annehmen,
dass alle Kafer schon ausgefarbt, ja die pilzziichtende Holzbriiter
selbst im ausgereiften Zustande waren.
Fiir das Ermdglichen dieser Arbeit mochte ich an dieser Stelle
Herrn Professor R. D. Shenefelt meinen besten Dank aussprechen.
FAMILIE: SCOLYTIDAE
Bekannte Arten
1. Pagiocerus frontalis (F.)
26.VII.61~1 Ex. (Weibchen) ; 24.VIII.61-1 Ex. (Mannchen).
2. Neodryocoetes hymenaeae Egg.
lO.VII.61-2 Ex. ; 17.VII.61-2 Ex. ; 28.VIL61~1 Ex.
So weit nach Norden wurde diese Art noch nicht gef unden. Bis
jetzt gemeldet aus Brasilien, Fr. Guay ana und Hoi. Guayana.
97
98 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
3. Pityophthorus giiadeloupensis Nunb. (== denticulatus Egg.)
8.VIIL61--1 Ex,
Diese Art wurde bis jetzt nur aus der Insel Guadeloupe be-
kannt.
4. Pterocyclon plaumanni Schedl
12.VIL61-1 Ex, ; 23.VIIL61-™! Ex.
Bis jetzt bekannt nur aus Brasilien.
5. Xylehorus affinis Eichh.
12. VII.61-1 Ex, ; 17.VIL61-1 Ex. ; 21.VII.61-1 Ex. ; 25.VII.61-2
Ex.; 26.VIL61-2 Ex.; 30,VII.61-1 Ex.; 8.VIII.61-2 Ex.; 23.
VIII.61-2 Ex.; 24.VIII.61-5 Ex,
6. Xylehorus ferrugineus (F.).
13. V.58-4 Ex.; lO.VII.61-3 Ex., in cacao plantation; ll.VII.
61-1 Ex.; 15.VIII.61-1 Ex.; 23.VIII.61-7 Ex.; 24.VIIL61-10
25.VII.62-1 Ex.; 26.VII.61-1 Ex.; 28.VII.61-4 Ex.; 29.VIL
61-1 Ex.; 30.VII.61-2 Ex.; 31.VII.61-2 Ex.; 4.VIIL61-12 Ex.;
8.VIII.61-6 Ex.; lO.VIII.61-1 Ex.; ll.VIII.61-1. Ex.; 13.VIII.
61-2 Ex.; 15.VIII.61-1 Ex.; 23.VII.61-7 Ex.; 24.VIIL61-10
Ex. ; 26 :VIII.61-1 Ex.
7. Xylehorus macer Bldf.
23.VIIL61-1 Ex.
8. Xylehorus perforans (WolL).
13.V.58-1 Ex. ; 17.VIL61-3 Ex. ; 18.VII.61-2 Ex. ; 19.VII.61-1
Ex.; 20.VII.61-2 Ex.; 21.VII.61-2 Ex.; 26,VII.61-1 Ex.; 28.
VII. 61-1 Ex.; 30.VII.61-1 Ex.; 4.VIII.61-1 Ex,; 8.VIII.61-1
Ex.; 10,VIII.61-1 Ex.; ll.VIII.61-1 Ex.; 13.VIIL61-2 Ex.;
15.VIIL61-2 Ex.; 23.VIII.61-7 Ex.; 24.VIII.61-4 Ex.; 26.
VIII. 61-2 Ex.
9. Xylehorus spinulosus Bldf.
23. VIIL61-1 Ex.
Weit verbreitet in Slid- und Mittelamerika (Antillen eingerech-
net) aber in Costa Rica noch nicht gef unden.
10. Xylehorus volvulus (F.)
10. VII.61-1 Ex.; 12.VII.61-1 Ex.; 17.VIL61-3 Ex.; 18.VII.
61-5 Ex.; 19.VIL61-13 Ex.; 20.VII.61-10 Ex.; 21.VII.61-3
Ex. ; 25.VII.61-9 Ex. ; 26.VII.61-10 Ex. ; 28.VII.61-4 Ex. ; 29.
VII.61-7 Ex. ; 30.VII.61-5 Ex. ; 31.VIL61-4 Ex. ; 4.VIIL61-13
Ex.; 8.VIII.61-12 Ex.; 15.VIII.61-1 Ex.; 23.VIII.61-35 Ex.;
24. VIII.61-25 Ex. ; 28.VIII.61-3 Ex.
Neue Arten
11. Pityophthorus semiermis sp. n.
Mannchen (Taf. I. Fig. 1-4).
Lange: 1,7 mm.
1963]
Nunh erg— Fauna Aus Costa Rica
99
Hellbraun, auf dem Absturze und dem Halsschilde etwas dun-
skier. Behaarung sparlich; im unteren Teile der Stirn und auf
der vorderen Halfte des Halsschildes im Bereiche der Schup-
penkornchen ziemlich dicht aber kurz behaart ; in der hinteren
Halfte der Fliigeldecken sind einzelne aufrechte Haare zu
bemerken,
Stirn im unteren Teile zwischen den Augen auf einer
halbbkreisformigen Flache 'schwach eingedriickt und fein
punktiert, am oberen Rande des Eindruckes mit einem undeut-
lichen Hockerchen. Augen sehr gross, vorne tief ausgerandet.
Fuhlerkeule eiformig, mit zwei Einkerbungen im Umriss und
zwei bogig gekriimmten und unvollkommen septierten Nahten;
die dritte Naht nur durch Borsten angedeutet. Die Keule etwas
langer als die Geissel und ebenso lang wie der Schaft.
Halsschild kaum langer als breit, an der Basis fast gerade,
Seiten in der basalen Halfte parallel dann schwach eingeengt,
der Vorderrand ziemlich schmal gerundet, Seitenrand deutlich
aber nicht scharf. Halsschild ohne deutlichen Buckel und gleich
dahinter leicht eingedriickt. Die erste Hockerreihe lauft ent-
lang des Vorderrandes und ist aus kleinen gleichgrossen Hoc-
kern gebildet; oberhalb der ersten liegt ein breiter glatter fein
punktierter Streifen; die zwei weiteren Hockerreihen liegen
in gleicher Entfernung voneinander und in der Mitte zeigen
sie eine unregelmassige Anordnung der Hocker; gleich vor
dem Summit sind keine Hocker mehr nur quere feine Runzeln.
In der basalen Halfte fein punktiert und eine ziemlich breite
Mittellinie freilassend,
Schildchen breit dreieckig.
Fliigeldecken 1, 6 mal so lang wie der Halsschild, an der
Basis kaum schmaler als dieser, hinter der Schulterbeule
schwach ausgebaucht, von da an allmahlich convergierend und
am Ende ziemlich schmal abgerundet. Oben in der Lange flach,
im ersten Drittel schwach eingedriickt; Absturz beginnt im
letzten Drittel und ist sanft abgewolbt. Fliigeldecken in un-
regelmassigen Reihen punktiert, speziell an der Basis stehen
die Punkte in grosser Unordnung. Zwischenraume fein quer
gerunzelt und mit einzelnen feinen Piinktchen. Die Naht in
nicht grosser Entfernung hinter dem Schildchen erhoht, star¬
ker auf dem Absturze, hier glatt, ohne Kdrnchen; die Furche
auf dem Absturze lauft im Bereiche des zweiten Zwischen-
raumes (Nahtzwischenraum eingerechnet) , ziemlich tief; die
Seitenwiilste kaum hoher als die Naht, mit drei kleinen spitzen,
borstentragenden Kornchen.
100 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52 1^
1963]
Nunberg — Fauna Aus Costa Rica
101
FIGURENERKLAUNG DER TAFELN I, II
Tafel I
Figure 1. Pityophthorus semiermis sp. nov., von oben.
Figure 2. Pityophthorus semiermis sp. nov., von der Seite.
Figure 3. Pityophthorus semiermis sp. nov., Kopf von vorne.
Figure 4, Pityophthorus semiermis sp. nov., Fiihler, Vergr. 115 x.
Figure 5, Sampsonius costaricensis sp, nov., Fuhler, Vergr. 115 x.
Figure 6. Sampsonius costaricensis sp nov., Fiihlerkeule, die Ruskseite, Vergr.
115 X.
Figure 7. Sampsonius costaricensis sp. nov., Vordertibie.
Figure 8. Sampsonius costaricensis sp. nov., Hintertibie und Tarsus.
Figure 9. Sampsonius costaricensis sp. nov. Weibchen, von oben.
Figure 10. Sampsonius costaricensis sp. nov., Weibchen, von der Seite.
102 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
1963]
Nunberg- — Fauna Aus Costa Rica
103
Tafel II
Figure 1, Cenocephalus lalolaensis sp. nov., Weibchen, von oben.
Figure 2. Cenocephalus lalolaensis sp nov., Weibchen^ von der Seite.
Figure 3. Cenocephalus lalolaensis sp. nov., Ftihler^ Vergr. 115 x.
Figure 4. Costaroplotus shenefelti sp. nov,, Weibchen, von oben.
Figure 5. Costaroplatus shenefelti sp. nov., Kopf und Halsschild, von der Seite.
Figure 6. Costaroplatus shenefelti sp, nov,, Maxille, Vergr. 115 x.
Figure 7. Costaroplatus shenefelti sp. nov., Unterlippe, Vergr. 115 x.
Figure 8. Costaroplatus shenefelti sp nov., Fiihler, Vergr. 42 x.
104 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Unterseite heller as die Oberseite. Die Vorder -und Mittel-
tibien aussen mit drei Zahnchen; neben den Vorderhiiften,
etwas seitlich, befindet sich ein ovaler Schlitz (?). Die Vorder-
hiiften stossen zusammen, die beiden anderen Paare sind
getrennt. Die Mittelfurche an der Hinterbrust sehr fein,
zieht sich nach vorne bis zu % der Brustlange. Die Bauchringe
an den Seiten breiter, die zwei ersten schwach bogig, andere
starker; Pygidium von unten sichtbar als halb kreisformige
Platte.
Type in Sammlung der Universitat Wisconsin.
Nach dem Bau des Kopfes und Halsschildes dem P. elegans
Schedl ahnlich, aber die Hoker auf dem Halschilde stehen bei
der letztger nannten Art mehr locker; auf dem Absturze des
P. elegans befinden sich auf der Naht feine Kornchen, wahrend
bei semiermis die Naht glatt ist.
Die Fiihler sind sehr ahnlich denselben bei vielen Arten z. B.
Pit. regularis Blkm. Nach dem Absturze erinnert die neue Art
an Pit. sambuci Blkm. bei welchem aber auf dem breit abger-
undetem Absturze die Punktstreifen 1. und 2. gut sichtbar sind.
12. Sampsonius costaricensis sp. n.
Weibchen (anatomisch festgestellt) (Taf. I. Fig. 5-10).
Lange: 3,4 mm.
Dem Sampsonius dampfi Schedl sehr ahnlich und am nach-
sten verwandt, aber verschieden durch andere Proportionen
der Korperabschnitte, die Kornelung des Absturzes und Aus-
bildung des Fortsatzes auf dem Absturze.
Beim S. dampfi ist der Kafer 3,7 mal so lang wie breit, beim
costaricensis m, 4,4 mal; die Ursache liegt in der Lange des
Halsschildes, welcher beim dampfi Schedl 1,25 langer als breit
ist, bei der neuen Art aber 1,66 mal. Die Fliigeldecken sind bei
der neuen Art verhaltnismassig kiirzer: beim dampfi Schedl
sie sind ‘‘nahezu doppelt so lang wie der Halsschild” — beim
costaricensis nur 1,5 mal.
Beim dampfi Schedl stehen auf dem Absturze die Kornchen
nur auf den Zwischenraumen 3,4 und 5 und sind einreihig
geordnet. Bei costaricensis m, sind die Kornchen auf den
Zwischenraumen 1-5; die Kornchen des 1-n (Nahtzwischen-
raumes) und 2-n verschwinden auf der Hohe der Fortsatz-
basis, auf dem dritten, welcher bis zum Apikalrande zieht,
stehen sie in der oberen Absturzhalfte einreihig in der unteren
mindestens zweireihig (kurz vor dem Apikalrande auch drei-
rehig) ; auf dem 4-n sind nur etwa 4-5 Kornchen, auf dem 5-n
zieht sich die Kornchenreihe etwas weiter nach hinten, auf
dem 6-n steht nur am oberen Absturzrande ein starkeres Zahn-
1963]
Nunherg — Fauna Aus Costa Rica
105
chen; der 7-e bildet wie beim dampfi Schedl den Absturzseiten-
rand. Die Punktreihen sind auf dem Absturze zwischen den
Kornchenreihen nicht ‘‘grob quergerun zelP’ — sondern fein
chagriniert, matt. Die Absturzflache ist leicht gewolbt, der 2-3
Zwischenraum leicht vertieft, wodurch die Naht und der dritte
Zwischenraum gehoben erscheinen; der letzte ist im apikalen
Drittel etwas verbreitet. Die Zwischenraume 4-6 fallen gegen
den Seitenrand allmahlich ab. Beide Fortsatze an der Naht
bilden beim dampfi Schedl “ein gemeinschaftliches stumpfes
Horn’k Beim costaricensis m. bilden sie (bei geschlossenen
Fliigeldecken) ein loffelartiges Gebilde, welches oben tief aus-
gehohlt ist.
Die Fiihlerkeule tragt auf der Aussenseite, kurz vor der
Mitte, eine volkkommene Naht; die zweite mehr weniger parah
lele Naht verliert sich zwischen den dicht stehenden Punkten
neben dem Rande ; es sind noch Spuren von Weiteren zwei Nahte,
welche nur durch mehrreihige Punktstreifen markiert sind.
Das erste Keulenglied tragt einige steife Borsten. Auf der
Riickseite sind drei bogige Borstenreihen, welche fast auf der-
selben Hohe laufen, wie die Nahte der Vorderseite.
Die Tibien des ersten Beinpaares sind schmal, aussen nur
schwach bogenformig erweitert und hier auf ganzer Lange
mit etwa 5-6 Zahnchen. Der Endhaken ist stark und nach
aussen gekriimmt. Die Tibien des zweiten und dritten Bein¬
paares sind allmahlich erweitert und im apikalen Viertel
schrag abgeschnitten,
Drei Exemplare gefangen am 20. VII. 61, 24.VIII.61 und
23.VIII.61. Eine Paratype befindet sich in meiner Sammlung.
BESTIMMUNGSTABELLE DER SAMPSONIUS-AETEN
1(2). Seitenrand des Absturzes nicht ausgepraagt. Am Beginn
des Absturzes auf dem dritten Zwischenraume steht sen-
krecht ein dicker konischer Zapfen, auf dem vierten in der
Mitte und kurz vor dem Ende ebenfalls ein doppelt so
langer nach innen und vorn gebogener stumpfer Zahn.
Korperlange 8 mm _ Sampsonius sexdentatus Eggers
2(1). Seitenrand ausgepragt. Die Bezahnung der Absturzflache
ist andere,
3(8), Auf dem Absturze jeder Fliigeldecke unmittelbar vor dem
Apikalrande befindet sich nur auf dem Nahtzwischenraume
ein Zahn.
4(5). Der Zahn ist spitz, nach hinten und aussen gerichtet. Kor¬
perlange 5,3 mm , - . — . - Sampsonius huculus Schedl
106 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
5(4). Der Zahn ist als plattenformiger stumpier Fortsatz ausge-
bildet.
6(7). Die FirtsMze der geschlossenen Fliigeldecken bilden ein
gemeinschaftliches stumpfes Horn. Kleine Kornchen be-
finden sich nur auf Zwischenraumen 3,4,5. Korperlange 3,2
mm _ Sampsonius dampfi Schedl
7(6). Beide Fortsatze der geschlossenen Fliigeldecken stossen
nicht zusammen zum gemeinschaftlichen Horn, sondern
oben tief klaffen, Kleine Kornchen auf dem Absturze be-
finden sich auf Zwischenraumen 1-5. Am Anfange des
sechsten Zwischenraumes am Beginne des Absturzes ein
spitzes kleines Zahnchen. Korperlange 3,4 mm _
_ Sampsonius costaricensis sp. nov.
8(3). Die Zahne auf dem Absturze befinden sich nur auf dem
zweiten Zwischenraume, zwei bis drei an der Zahl.
9(10). Auf dem zweiten Zwischenraume stehen drei gleichgrosse,
kegelformige Zahne. Korperlange 5,5 mm _
_ Sampsonius conifer (Hagedorn)
10(9). Auf dem zweiten Zwischenraume stehen zwei Zahne; der
obere ist ein spitzer Kegelzahn, der untere ist stumpf. Kor¬
perlange 5,3 mm. _ Sampsonius quadrispinosis Eggers
FAMILIE: PLATYPODIDAE
Bekannte Arten
13. Platypus dejeani Chap.
13. V. 58-12 Ex (9 Mannchen, 3 Weibchen) ; 2. VII. 61-10 Ex.
(6 M., 4 W.) ; lO.VH. 61-10 Ex (8 M., 2 W.) in cocoa planta¬
tion; lO.VII.61-2 Ex. (1 M., 1 W.) ; ll.VII.61-10 Ex. (5 M.,
5 W.) ; 12.VII.61-14 Ex. (5 M., 9 W.) ; 18.VIL61-7 Ex. (3 M,,
4 W.) ; 20.VIL61-1 Ex, (1 M.) ; 21.VII.61-4 Ex, (3 M., 1 W.) ;
25.VIL61-1 Ex. (M.) ; 26.VII.61-7 Ex. (5 M., 2 W.) ; 28.VIL
61-5 Ex. (2 M., 3 W.) ; 29.VIL61-6 Ex. (4 M., 2 W.) ; 30.VII.
61-15 Ex. (7 M., 8 W.) ; 31, VIL61-11 Ex, (9 M., 2 W.) ; 4.
VIIL61-19 Ex. (13 M., 6 W.) ; 8.VIII.61-1 Ex. (W.) ; lO.VIIL
61-4 Ex. (M.) ; ll.VIII. 61-2 Ex. (M.) ; 13.VIIL61-2 Ex. (1
M., 1 W.) ; 15.VIII.61-5 Ex. (3 M., 2 W.) ; 23.VIII.61-1 Ex.
(M.) ; 24.VIIL61-4 Ex., (2 M., 2 W.) ; 26.VIII. 61-3 Ex. (1 M.,
2 W.) ; 28.VIIL61-3 Ex. (M.).
14. Platypus discicoUis Dej,
24.VIIL61-1 Ex. (W.).
Gemeldet aus Brasilien, Columbien, Bolivien, Guatemala und
Fr. Guayana,
1963]
Nunherg — Fauna Aus Costa Rica
107
Das Exemplar hat Flugeldecken fein gleichmassig chargrin-
iert und dadurch seidenglanzend. Die Borsten auf dem Hals-
schilde zwischen der Mittelfurche und dem Seitenrande stehen
mehr weniger an der Grenzlinie der braunen und blassgelben
Farbe.
15. Platypus obtusus Chap.
lO.VII.61-1 Mannchen. in cocoa plantation.
LaLola ist der nordlichste Fundort. Bis jetzt gemeldet aus
Brasilien, Fr. Guayana und Columbien.
16. Platypus perpusillus Chap.
2.VII.61~2 Ex. (M.) ; lO.VII.61-1 Ex. (M.) ; in cocoa planta¬
tion,
Bekannt aus Brasilien, Venezuela und Fr. Guayana.
17. Platypus pulchellus Chap,
lO.VII.61-1 Weibchen, in cocoa plantation; 12.VIL61-2 Weib-
chen; 17.VIL61-3 Ex. (1 M., 2 W.) ; 18.VIL61~1 M.; 20.VII.
61-1 M.; 29.VII.61-2 Ex. (1 M., 1 W.) ; 30.VII.61-1 M.; 31.
VII.61-3 W.; 4. VIIL61-2 Ex. (1 M., 1 W.) ; 8.VIII.61-1 W. ;
13.VIII.61-1 W.; 15.VIII.61-1 M.; 24.VIII.61-1 M.; 28.VIII.
61-1 W.
18. Platypus rudifrons Chap.
2.VIL61-1 Weibchen.
Bis jetzt bekannt aus Mexico und Argentinien.
19. Platypus suhitarius Schedl
lO.VII.61-1 Weibchen, in cocoa plantation; 24.VIII.61-1 Mann¬
chen.
Bekannt nur aus Brasilien.
20. Tesserocerus dewalquei Chap.
2.VIL61-1 Weibchen.
Bis jetzt bekannt nur aus Siidamerika (Brasilien, Argentinien,
Fr. Guayana, Bolivien und Peru) .
Neue Arten und Gattungen
21. Cenocephalus lalolaensis sp. nov.
Weibchen (Taf. II. Fig. 1-3).
Lange 3,3 mm.
Langzylindrisch, Flugeldecken nach hinten kaum divergierend ;
rostbraun, auf dem Absturze angedunkelt; nur am Kopfe und
auf dem Absturze deutlich behaart.
Kopf mit ziemlich stark eingedruckter Stirn, die Flache des
Eindruckes glanzend, nicht punktiert; beide Seiten des Ein-
druckes bis zur halben Augenhohe mit dichter Haarfranse, die
Haare am Ende leicht nach innen gebogen. Ubriger Seitenrand
kiirzer behaart, ahnlich wie der zerstreut aber ziemlich stark
punktierte Scheitel. Ubergang von der Stirn zum Scheitel nicht
108 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
stark hervortretend. Die dunkle Scheitellinie zieht sich nach
unten bis zur Mitte des Stirneindruckes. Augen unregelmassig
rundlich. Fiihler mit dreigliederigen Geissel (nicht vierglied-
erig!) und langeiformigen Keule.
Halsschild viel langer als breit, glanzend, in der Lange flach
gewolbt, Seiten (von oben betrachtet) in der Mitte deutlich
eingebuchtet, die basale Halfte kaum breiter als die vordere,
Basalrand angerundet, zweibuchtig. Die Pleuren mit doppelter
Grube zur Aufnahme der Schenkel und Schienen ; der Rand der
Grube bogig ausgeschweift, ohne eckige Vorsprtinge. Auf der
Scheibe, beiderseits der Mittellinie ein grosser mehr weniger
dreieckiger Fleck aus ziemlich grossen Punkten, die Ecken des
Fleckes abgerundet, die Basis eingebuchtet. Restliche Flache
fein punktuliert und ausserdem ziemlich zerstreut grob punk-
tiert: die Punkte an der Halsschildbasis und an den Seiten
starker.
Fliigeldecken (von der Seite gesehen) oben flach, der Ab-
sturz beginnt im letzten Viertel, die Flache des Absturzes oben
sanft abgewolbt, unten fast senkrecht. Basalrand im Bereiche
der Zwischenraume 1-5 gekantet. Der dritte an der Basis
starker gewolbt und hier mit etwa 5 Querrunzeln welche weiter
nach hinten in Kornchen iibergehen; der fiinfte mit 1-2 un-
deutlichen Querrunzeln. Die drei ersten Puntreihen schwach
streifig vertieft, den Seiten zu werden die Punkte der Streifen
immer schwacher, nur der neunte ist wiederum streifig vertieft.
Zwischenraume der Scheibe schwach gewolbt, die seitlichen
flach, alle hie und da mit einzelnen sehr feinen Piinktchen. Alle
Zwischenraume kurz vor dem Absturze deutlich gekielt und
weiter hinten gekornt, auf den ungeraden Zwischenraumen
gehen die Kornchen in Zahnchen iiber, auf dem dritten, sie-
benten und neunten sind sie am starksten entwickelt: nach
hinten nehmen die Zahnchen an Starke zu. Auf dem steilen
Abschnitte des Absturzes ist die Flache glanzend, zertreut
punktiert und gekornt, im unteren Teile, beiderseits der Naht
flach eingedriickt; der mittlere Teil des Hinterrandes glatt. In
der Verlangerung des dritten Zwischenraumes zieht sich ein
schwach gewolbter Streifen in der Richtung des grossten
Zahnes am Hinterrande. Die Zahnchen und Kornchen auf dem
Absturze tragen kurze, gekrummte Haare.
Die Vorderschieben tragen auf der Aussenseite drei quere
Leisten, die mittleren zwei und die hinteren nur eine Leiste.
Zwei Exemplare gefangen am 4.VIIL61, Die Paratype be-
flndet sich in meiner Sammlung.
1963]
Nunberg — Fauna Aus Costa Rica
109
BESTIMMUNGSTABELLE DER CENOCEPHALUS-
WEIBCHEN
1(4). Auf der Scheibe des Halsschildes beiderseits der Mittel-
furche befindet sich ein Fleck aus zahlreichen Punkten
gebildet.
2(3). Der Fleck ist rundlich. Korperlange 5,3 mm Brasilien -
_ Cenocephalus thoracicus Chap.
3(2). Der Fleck ist dreieckig. Korperlange 3,3 mm. Costa Rica —
_ Cenocephalus lalolaensis sp. nov.
4(1). Auf der Scheibe des Halsschildes, beiderseits der Mittel-
furche, befindet sich kein Fleck aus zahlreichen Punkten.
5(6), In der Mitte der concaven Stirnflache befindet sich eine quere
kurze Leiste. Korperlange 4,4 mm. Fr. Guayana _
_ Cenocephalus pusillus Schedl
6(5). Die concave Stirnflache ist glatt. Korperlange 4 mm.
Guayana _ Cenocephalus pulchellus Schedl
Costaroplatus gen. nov,
Eine Gattung, welche wegen des Baues der Unterlippe und der
Fiihler schwer in das System einzureihen ist, Vielleicht nach
dem Finden des anderen Geschlechtes (Mannchens) wird es
erst moglich sein. Die Gattung wird auf Grund des einzigen
weiblichen Exemplares gegriindet.
Kopf ohne Bruch zwischen Stirn und Scheitel, dem Kopfe
des Tesseroccms-Weibchens ahnlich; Augen unregelmassig
rundlich, Fiihler mit grossem Schafte, welcher sehr stark
abgeplattet und schwach loffelartig ausgehohlt ist; auf der
Vorderseite und an den Randern ist er ziemlich lang behaart.
Beide Schafte bedecken die Stirn bis zur Halfte der Augem
hohe, ahnlich wie bei Tesserocranulus Schedl, aber im klein-
eren Masse (die erwahnte Gattung hat lange, unten genaherte
Augen!). Geissel viergliederig, Glied 1 kurz kegelformig, das
2. verkehrt kegelformig, um die H^fte kiirzer als Glied 1., das
dritte und vierte kurz, etwas breiter. Die Keule solid, unregeh
massig langlich oval, nicht viel grosser als der Schaft.
Maxillen mit gesonderten Laden, die Tasterglieder stark abge-
plattet, membranenartig. In der Unterlippe sind sowohl die
Tastertrager wie auch die beiden ersten Glieder verwachsen,
weshalb separat nur die letzten Glieder ausgebildet sind. Eine
faltenartige Zunge ist auch zu bemerken. Durch diesem Bau
wohl am meisten der Crossotarsus-Gaitung genahert, bei
welcher aber nur die Tastertrager zusammengewachsen sind,
fehlt aber das zweite Stuck, welches durch Zusammenwachseb
der beiden ersten Glieder entstanden ist.
110 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
Halsschild Platypodiden-artig, ohne Poren oder Punktfleck,
mit feiner Furche. Der Rand der Schenkelgruben nur hinten
eckig, und hier mit einer fast halbkugeligen, tiefen Ein-
dellung (ahnlich aber starker als bei manchen Crossotarsus-
Weibchen, z.B. Cross nipponicus Bldf.). Fliigeldecken wie beim
Platypus-W eibchen.
Die Vordertibien mit 6 Querleisten, die mittleren mit drei,
die Hintertibien ohne derselben. Tarsen wie beim Platypus.
22. Genus-Type: Costaroplatus shenefelti sp. nov.
Weibchen (Taf, II. Fig. 4-8).
Lange: 4,4 mm.
Hell graubraun, Scheibe der Fliigeldecken und die Unterseite
etwas heller. Wegen sehr feinen Grundchagrinierung seiden-
glanzend. Behaarung kaum nennenswert, sparlich, kurz.
Stirn liber dem schwarzen Clypeus beiderseits der Mitte
langlich schwach eingedriickt, auf der Hohe der Augen in der
Mitte starker gewolbt und hier mit einem feinen, schwarzem
Strich, welcher etwas liber die Halfte der Augenhohe zieht. Die
Scheitellinie sehr schmal. Stirn in der oberen HMfte fein
eingestochen punktiert, starkere Punkte sind in beiden lang-
lichen Vertief ungen iiber dem Clypeus.
Halsschild um 1/4 langer als breit, in der basalen Halfte etwas
breiter als vorne, mit gut von oben sichtbaren Einbuchtungen
der Schenkelgruben. Die Furche zart. Punktierung auf der
Scheibe sehr spMich und fein, starker gegen die Seiten und
Basis.
Fliigeldecken fast zweimal so lang wie der Halsschild, hinter
der Mitte kaum breiter als an der Basis, hinten fast quer breit
abgerundet. Punktstreifen sehr fein, Punkte klein; der Naht-
streifen etwas eingedriickt. Die Basis des dritten Zwischen-
raumes erweitert und mit einigen Querrunzeln und Kornchen.
Absturzflache zweimal so breit wie hoch, kurz behaart mit
Ausnahme eines schmalen Streifens unterhalb der Bruchlinie
des Absturzes.
Holotype in der Sammlung der Universitat Wisconsin.
CHANGING REGIONALIZATION OF SHEEP
HUSBANDRY IN WISCONSIN
Stephen L. Stover
The Wisconsin dairy cow has gained such prominence that the
state's other farm animals are often overlooked. This is under¬
standable, for dairy cattle in 1960 accounted for about 63% of the
income from livestock and livestock products in the state. In this
paper, however, the focus turns from dairying to sheep-raising,
at the present time not high in statistical importance. In 1960 it
accounted for 3i/^ million dollars, about .35% of farm income from
livestock.^
The procedure in this study in historical geography is to examine
the sheep-raising industry at selected intervals in time and thus
to develop a series of cross-sections centering on distribution maps
based on county units. Emphasis is on evolving patterns as a means
of understanding the place of sheep husbandry in the total picture.
The first sheep in Wisconsin apparently were the seven head pur¬
chased at Mackinac and shipped to Green Bay in a barge about
1790. In the southeastern part of the territory, sheep were brought
in— to Walworth County— around 1840, ‘'after the wolves were
mostly exterminated."^
Wisconsin's 3500 sheep in 1840 were concentrated in the south¬
east. Almost % (73%) of them were in the six counties bordering
Illinois. Milwaukee County, then including the area to become Wau¬
kesha County, reported the most, 798; no county averaged more
than about 1 per square mile.^ There was little emphasis on stock
raising. Wheat was and continued to be the main source of income
until about 1875 although in 1850 there were already reports of
poor winter wheat crops with blame being placed on continuous
cropping to wheat. The answer to the need for a change in empha¬
sis was seen in more animal husbandry. Interest in swine-raising
was growing, and a report from Jefferson county asserted: “The
iln 1960 the rest of Wisconsin farm income from livestock and livestock products
was derived approximately as follows: cattle and calves 17%; hog’s 12%; chickens
and eggs 7%; turkeys 2%. Calculated from: Wisconsin State Department of Agri¬
culture (WSDA), Wisconsin Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry, Special Bulletin 78 (Madi¬
son: 1961).
2 An exception to the generalization that sheep could not endure frontier conditions
was the wether reported to have strayed from Prairie du Chien in 1837 and to have
survived two winters on its own before being discovered, killed, and eaten in the
spring of 1839. Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (WSAS), Transactions (I: 1851)
146.
3 United States Census (1840), 342 ff. For the state the average was about 11 sheep
per hundred persons, the inhabitants numbering then about 31,000.
Ill
112
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
substitution of sheep husbandry for exclusive wheat-growing will
doubtless be found profitable on our best grass lands, if not in
every part of the county/’ From Kenosha another correspondent
wrote, “The wool-growing business seems to be the special order
of the day among our most enterprising farmers , .
Wisconsin farm animals, considered as animal units, were dis¬
tributed in 1850 as shown in figure 1, a pattern confirming the con-
4WSAS, Transactions, I, 177. He reported further that there were “some very re¬
spectable dairies in this county,” that their output was steadily increasing-, and
that he could see “no reason why Wisconsin should not become a cheese-export¬
ing instead of a cheese-importing State. . One of the reported drawbacks to
expansion of livestock raising and especially of dairying was the lack of cul¬
tivated grasses suitable for hay for fall and winter feeding. The answer, appear¬
ing in 1850, was clover and tim_othy. See Ibid., 213, 225.
1963] Stover — Changing Regionalization of Sheep
113
centration of agricultural settlement in the southeast.® Sheep,
numerically a poor third to cattle and swine, were relatively most
important in four southeastern counties, but even in these they
comprised less than 15% of the animal units (figure 2). Highest in
this regard was Walworth with 141/^ %, but 5-10% was more
5 The term, “animal units,” is used to equate different kinds of farm livestock
on the basis of their feed requirements. In this study one mature cow is con¬
sidered as the standard or one animal unit, and other livestock are equated to
this standard as follows: one horse, five swine, seven sheep, seven g-oats. The
general ratios employed in this study are those cited by Wellington D. Jones,
“Ratios and Isopleth Maps in Regional Investigation of Agricultural Land Oc-
cupance,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, XX (December, 1930),
177-195.
114 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
typical elsewhere south of the Fox-Wisconsin line. In 1850 sheep
were recorded on farms in 24 of the state’s 30 counties, but in gen¬
eral they were still few and far between (figure 3). Only in the ex¬
treme southeast did they appear in significant numbers on a county
level, Kenosha averaging 47 per square mile, followed by adjacent
Walworth with 41.
Wool provided the primary incentive for keeping sheep since
tastes then as now ran to beef and pork, and many people preferred
wild game to mutton as a supplement. Wool, however, filled a real
need for fibers, and as a cash crop it could easily be stored and
shipped. Spinning at home was the early practice, but by 1850
3
1963]
Stover — Changing Regionalization of Sheep
115
woolen factories had made their appearance.^ Merinos usually were
preferred though coarser-wooled breeds were also grown."^ By 1850
some farmers could boast of flocks improved by imports of pure
breds from Vermont, New York, or Ohio, even a few direct from
Europe.® Improved stock meant heavier fleeces, but judged from
the average yield per animal shorn (2.03# as compared to 8.3#
in 1959), improved breeding had just begun in 1850.®
Turning from the state pattern to the county having the highest
sheep density, we may direct our attention to Kenosha. Sheep there
were most numerous in Pike (later re-named Somers) township,
where the average was about 88 per square mile. Even here, how¬
ever, farmers with sheep were the exception — 61 of the town’s 85
farms reported none at all. Half the flocks were small, containing
fewer than 20 animals each, and the bulk of the town’s 3165 sheep
were kept in a few large flocks, of which there were seven over
200, the largest reporting 700. Kenosha’s lowest average density
was reported by the lakeshore town of Southport, where the 49
sheep were kept on three of the town’s 28 farms.
1870
During the next twenty years numbers of sheep along with
other livestock reflected the state’s growing population, which by
®WSAS, Wisconsin: Its Natural Resources and IndustHal Progress (Madison 1862),
45. See Wisconsin and Iowa Farmer and. Northwest 'Cultivator^ IV, No. 6 (1852). An
advertisement describes a mill as “larg-est and best establishment in the State. Will
make any kind of cloth desired for one half the product or at a charge of 25-38^- per
yard.” The proprietor warranted his ‘‘heavy, well-twisted cloths to do twice the
service of those bought in the Eastern market.” See also John G. Gregory, editor.
Southeast Wisconsin: A History of Old Milwaukee County, II (Chicago, 1932), 656 ff.
Reuel Bryan Frost, The Geography of the Distribution of Sheep in Wisconsin
(unpublished thesis, M. Ph. : Madison, 1928), 10. Frost describes southeast Wis¬
consin as a Merino stronghold as of 1855. Further indication of the preference
for fine-wooled sheep is given by the entries in the State Agricultural Society’s
First Annual Cattle Show and Pair in 1851. There were 7 long-wools, 3 medium-
wools, and 71 flne-wools, WSAS, Transactions, I, 54. Introduction of Merino sheep
hastened the decline in the use of linen in Wisconsin although of more importance
was the rapid growth of cotton culture and manufacturing. Methods were also de¬
vised to mix wool and cotton in a variety of fabrics. Fred L. Holmes, Wisconsin:
Stability, Progress, and Beauty, (Chicago ;1946 ) , I, 484,
® N. B. Clapp, a prominent livestock farmer of Kenosha, raised several varieties of
purebred sheep. He had bought Spanish Merino ewes in Vermont, and the original
stock for his flock of 500 Saxony Merinos had come from Dutchess County, New
York in 1844. WSAS, Transactions, I, 54. Joseph Schafer suggests that among Wiscon¬
sin farmers, sheep held the highest place among improved livestock at that time.
Joseph Schafer, A History of Agriculture in Wisconsin (State Historical Society of
Wisconsin: 1922), 115.
® Western Historical Association, History of Walioorth County, Wisconsin (Chicago:
1882), 158.
^0 United States Census, 1850: Schedule 4 Mss. The farm with the flock of 700 was
composed of approximately 1200 acres of which about 50% were unimproved. Its
production in 1850 was: wheat, 3000 bushels; oats, 1500 bushels; corn, 250 bushels.
Among farm livestock sheep were far and away the most important, but there were
also 30 hogs, 16 milch cows, 8 working oxen, and eleven horses. When not otherwise
specified, data on livestock numbers cited in following pages are from U.S. Census,
appropriate year.
116 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1870 reached 1.1 million. At that time there were 1.2 million ani¬
mal units (figure 4), an increase of some 60% over 1850; whereas
six counties were supporting 25 or more animal units per square
mile in 1850, 21 counties had reached that average twenty years
later. The pattern of distribution was basically unchanged although
the southeast-northwest gradient was much more marked.
When the proportion of sheep among total animal units is con¬
sidered, the change in distribution is more complex (figure 5). In
1870 the state had twelve counties with more than 15% of their
animal units in sheep and one (Kenosha) with 26%. Though farm
livestock were sparse beyond the Fox-Wisconsin line, a half-dozen
counties in 1870 were reporting enough sheep to comprise 10% or
1963] Stover— Changing Regionalization of Sheep
117
more of their animal units. Sheep numbers had reached their peak
at about 2 million in 1868.^^ The war-bolstered wool market had
weakened as southern cotton fields again became productive, and
the price of wool between 1864 and 1867 fell from $1.05 to .29
per pound.^^ Discouraged sheep farmers — especially those special¬
izing in fine wool— reduced their flocks, often by selling for ship¬
ment to western ranges. Mutton breeds (long and medium wools)
were substituted for the fine wools by some farmers, while others
^ Frost, 10. Wisconsin Crop and Livestock Reporting- Service, A Century of Wis-
consin Agriculture, 1848-1948 (Madison, 1948) estimates almost 1,600,000 head in
1867, implies it was a peak year. 61.
’2 Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (now Milwaukee Grain and Stock Exchange),
Report, 1867 (Milwaukee, 1868), 39.
118 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
turned from both wool and mutton to take up the more dependable
business of dairying^®
Figure 6 indicates the larger total sheep population in the state
as compared to 1850, and the continued prominence of the south¬
east, where the leading county now averaged 181 sheep per square
mile as opposed to 47 two decades before. In general, the average
density, as expected, still fell away toward the northwest, but the
appearance of a secondary center south and west of Lake Winne-
^ Schafer, 126. During- the war years cattle breeding- had received less stimulus
than had wool-growing- and crop-raising. In fact the number of cattle in the state
in 1866 had been approximatly 413,000, in the neighborhood of 25% as compared to
1860. WSAS, Transactions, VII (Madison, 1868), 41. See also Commissioner of Agri¬
culture, Report . . . for the Year 1869 (Washington, 1870), 537 ff.
1963] Stover — Changing Regionalization of Sheep 119
bago had complicated the pattern somewhat. Significant numbers
of sheep were beginning to appear north and west of the Wis¬
consin River, growing in importance somewhat faster than farm
livestock as a group. At this time in Wisconsin quality of breed¬
ing stock was considerably above the level of 1850. With reference
to Wisconsin the United States Commissioner of Agriculture re¬
ported in 1869: “Farmers hope to rival Vermont and Michigan in
breeding fine horses and sheep, Kentucky in cattle, and perhaps
New York in the dairy business . . . Cattle breeding has not re¬
ceived its proper share of attention, owing partly to the great
interest concentrated in wool-growing.”^*
As was true in 1850 the distribution pattern for the state in 1870
emphasizes the southeastern counties with Kenosha again heading
the list (181 sheep per square mile). The town (Pike) with the
highest average density in 1850 had fallen to last place in the
county while Bristol, one of the two lowest towns in 1850, reported
an average of almost 300 sheep for each of its 36 square miles.
The western and southwestern towns were prominent in both years.
Within Bristol Town % (74%) of the farmers were now keeping
sheep; only a small proportion belonged to large flocks. Thus the
absolute rise in sheep numbers is associated with a higher propor¬
tion of farms keeping sheep and also with a rise in the number of
medium-sized flocks. The most common flock size had now become
50-100 as opposed to 1-20 in 1850. For the state as a whole the
impressive rise in sheep numbers as compared with 1850 was the
result of a widespread shift into sheep-raising rather than merely
an expansion of flocks on those farms where sheep-raising had been
a specialty.
1900
The next cross section is that of 1900. At that time the number
of stock sheep (1.1 million) was about the same as it had been
thirty years before although the long-range downward trend was
already taking shape. There had been a temporary upturn in the
mid-1880’s and another in the mid-90’s, but each crest was some¬
what lower than the one before, in spite of the efforts of those who
insisted that sheep-raising was more profitable (both wool and
mutton being for sale), less confining, and more conducive to soil
fertility and weed destruction than was true for other types of
farm production.^®
■‘^Commissioner of Agriculture, Report, 537.
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Origins cmd Growth of Sheep
Husbandry in the United States (Washington; 1880), 10. It was suggested by William
F. Renk, among others, that dairymen might do well to raise small flocks of sheep
upon their farms. Wisconsin Live Stock Breeders Association, Directory (Madison:
1912), 58.
120 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The pattern in 1900 shows a pronounced shift to the westward
with the far southeast now overshadowed by two other areas — one
farther north centering on Fond du Lac and Green Lake counties,
and one north of the Wisconsin River in Richland county (figure
7). The center of gravity remained in south-central Wisconsin, but
an extension of sheep-raising toward Green Bay and the Door
the Mississippi. The northern part of the state together with the
central counties of Adams, Wood, and Portage retained character-
Peninsula was more than balanced by growth of the industry along
istic low density, but the area with a density below 15 was not
noticeably smaller than it had been in 1870. Thus, although the
1963] Stoner — Changing Regionalization of Sheep
121
number of sheep in 1900 was about the same as it had been three
decades before^ they were now more widespread with leading
counties not only farther northwest but also less densely populated
with sheep* This section was not heavily populated by other types
of farm livestock, as well, as figure 8 shows* The distribution pat¬
tern of animal units emphasizes the concentration of farm live¬
stock in southern Wisconsin with an extension of high density
counties to the northeast and a less impressive one to the northwest*
Comparison of figures 7 and 9 points up the fact that those coun¬
ties with highest average densities of sheep and those where sheep
rank highest in comparison to other livestock are not necessarily
one and the same* Fond du L.ac, for example, stands out in absolute
122 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
numbers of sheep, but it is not outstanding with reference to the
proportion of sheep among its total farm livestock. In general,
however, figure 9 reinforces the interpretation made from figure 7
and perhaps makes more noticeable the greater relative importance
of western counties in 1900 as compared to 1870 as well as the con¬
tinued low density in the north.^®
This low density in northern counties persisted despite efforts to interest potential
settlers in moving into that part of the state. They were assured of cheap land, a
drained soil, medium natural pasture, and a liberal supply of water with no wolves
and no dogs to plague their flocks. They were further told that disease would be no
problem since “Snuffles, internal worms, scab or foot rot are altogether unkown to
the sheep ; a condition that is highly indicative of the adaptation of the climate and
soil for sheep life.” John A. Craig, “Dairy and Sheep Farming at Superior,” Wis¬
consin Agricultural Experiment Station (WAES) Bulletin 43, Agricultural Horticultural
and Livestock Features of a Portion of Wisconsin Trihutary to Superior, (1895), 47.
1963]
Stover— Changing Regionalization of Sheep
123
In 1900 there was increasing preference for dual purpose ani¬
mals as opposed to fine wools. Arguments supporting this change
in emphasis were: the growing population, the high cost of beef,
the inferiority of pork, the demand for good mutton, and the in¬
crease in price of worsted wools as compared to fine wools."^^
USDA, OrigiThs, 9. As the relative importance of Merinos went down, so too did
interest in the Wisconsin Sheep Breeders and Wool Growers’ Association, started in
Whitewater, 1877; its last meeting- was held in 1900. Western Historical Association,
Cyclopedia of Wisconsin (Madison, 1906), 346. This was “the first breed association to
be active in the state. It was a successor to the Wool Growers’ Association which was
organized at Oshkosh in 1866. In 1889 the Southeast Wisconsin Sheep and Wool
Growers’ Association was organized. Milo Milton Quaife, Wisconsin, Its History and
Its People. (Chicago), 56. In 1904 the Wisconsin Sheep Breeders Association ap¬
peared. Its membership was largely breeders of Shropshires, a dual purpose breed
popular with Wisconsin farmers.
124 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The county leading in sheep density in 1900 was Richland with
146 per square mile. There the range was from 11 in Buena Vista
township in the southeastern part of the county to 174 in Marshall
in the northwest.
1930
In 1930 the total number of livestock units had reached 41/2
million, up about 28% from .1900. Their distribution in terms of
county averages per square mile (figure 10) was fairly similar to
what they were shown to be in the preceding geographical cross
section (figure 8). A northward extension of stock-raising was
evident, but it was not simply a later edition of the 1900 pattern,
for Adams county had now become the center of a low-density area
bounded on the north by a statistical ridge some two counties wide.
There were also changes farther to the south. Dodge county and
four contiguous ones to the northeast had joined Lafayette and
Green as the most outstanding in the state so that the “center of
growth” appears noticeably northeastward. At the same time in
the west and northwest increases were apparent also, especially in
Pierce and St. Croix counties.
In this general rise in the livestock population between 1900 and
1930, sheep were not keeping pace. In 1900 they had been suffi¬
ciently important to comprise 5% or more of the animal units in
43 counties, but in 1930 no county could qualify. The nearest was
Green Lake with 4.6%. It is not surprising then that the pattern
is rather a faint one (figure 11)
The leading county was again Richland, now one of five scattered
counties with a density of thirty or more. The map in general sug¬
gests a shift to the westward as eastern and southeastern counties
dropped below the threshhold for this study — i.e. below 15 head per
square mile. Richland’s 24,000 sheep in 1930 were less than 4% the
number in 1900 though distributed in a pattern roughly similar.
Medium-wool sheep had long since supplanted almost all of the
pure Merinos in Wisconsin. Nevertheless, the wool clip remained
consequential, and it was at this time that the Wisconsin Co-opera¬
tive Wool Growers Association came into being.^^
The practice of fattening lambs in feed lots was not new, but it
had assumed a greater importance than in 1900, especially in those
parts of southern Wisconsin where surpluses of corn and pea vines
IS On these maps northern Wisconsin still does not show much evidence of the
efforts directed toward stocking its vast acreage of cut-over land with sheep. During
World War I the College of Agriculture had been active in aiding in the introduction
of small flocks of breeding ewes into that part of the state. R. B. Pixley, Wisconsin
in the World War (Milwaukee, 1919), 359-360. See also WAES Bulletin 306, The Soils
of Northwest Wisconsin, (second edition, April, 1922).
19 Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture and Markets, Biennial Report, 1929-
30, 13.
1963]
Stover— Changing Regionalization of Sheep
125
facilitated the practice. On feed in 1930 were approximately
500,000 lambs, about 30% of them shipped in from the western
range. Few lambs on feed are included in the figures on which these
maps were based because of the late enumeration date (April 1),
but generally Wisconsin's western hills were prominent in the
feeder lamb picture. This suggests a utilization of pasture on slopes
difficult to crop while the more tillable surfaces were producing
the winter feed.^®
See Frank Kleinheintz, “The Sheep Industry in Wisconsin,’’ Directory of the Wis¬
consin Livestock Breeders Association, 1924-25 (Madison: 1925), 25 ; and WAES, Bulle¬
tin 306, 28.
126 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1959
In 1959 animal units numbered 4.7 million, an increase of about
41/2% over the figure for 1930. The distribution of these farm ani¬
mals (figure 12) was very little different from what it had been in
1930 (figure 10), but their concentration south and east of the
Fox-Wisconsin line was somewhat more noticeable. The low-density
area of northern counties was unchanged, but the paucity of live- i
stock in the central sand plain and in Milwaukee county was even
more pronounced. ‘
1963] Stover — Changing Regionalization of Sheep
127
The place occupied by sheep in this farm livestock picture had
become minimal (figure 13). For the state as a whole it averaged
about .9% and in only one county, Vilas, did it exceed 5%. Figure
14 shows three of the five leading counties to be in the south, one
in the west, and one in the south-central part of the state. Rock
county was the only one to exceed a density of 30. In 1930 it may
be recalled, five counties had reached this level of density. Rock,
however, not having been one of them.
This paper has concerned itself primarily with changing pat¬
terns of distribution of stock sheep in the state. The story of feeder
sheep is a separate one, mentioned only incidentally here, but in
128 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
connection with the present scene, it should be pointed out that
last year (1962) about 19,000 feeders were brought into Wisconsin,
most of them from Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illi¬
nois. This has been about average for at least the past three years.
Inshipments now account for about 37% of the total on feed.^^
Figure 15 differs from the others in this article not only in carto¬
graphic technique but also in the animals included. It is made from
data collected in eary 1962 by the State Division of Animal Health
21- Wisconsin Crop Reporting Service, Sheep and Lambs on Feed, Jamiary 1, 1963,
January 16, 1963.
1963] Stover— Changing Regionalization of Sheep
129
to determine the health status of all sheep in Wisconsin. The map
shows their distribution by town and suggests again the concentra¬
tion in the south, where feed gains are most likely to be available.
Summary
Wisconsin’s sheep husbandry began early and reached its peak
numerically and relative to other livestock during the Civil War
130 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
era. Since then, it has declined in both these respects. Its changing
distribution patterns since 1850 show first a concentration in the
southeast, followed by a spread northward and westward before re¬
trenchment left the highest density counties once more in the south.
Although these broad changes are a reflection of market conditions,
a more full explanation would depend upon a detailed evaluation of
a myriad human considerations along with terrain, climate, soils,
and vegetation. During the period from which these cross-sections
were taken, emphasis has changed from wool to fat-lamb produc¬
tion ; continued careful management has brought higher quality of
both meat and wool as well as greater yield per animal. Sheep hus¬
bandry is minor but still a going concern in Wisconsin agriculture.
References
Commissioner of Agriculture. Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for
the Year 1869. Washington. 1870.
Craig, John A. “Dairy and Sheep Farming at Superior.” Wisconsin Agricul¬
tural Experiment Station Bulletin 42. Agricultural, Horticultural, and
Livestock Features of a Portion of Wisconsin Tributary to Superior. Madi¬
son. 1895.
Frost, Reuel Bryan. “The Geography of the Distribution of Sheep in Wis¬
consin.” Unpublished thesis, M. Ph. Madison. 1928.
Gregory, John G., editor. Southeast Wisconsin: A History of Old Milwaukee
County. Chicago. 1932.
Holmes, Fred L. Wisconsin: Stability, Progress, and Beauty. 5 vols. Chicago.
1946.
Jones, Wellington D. “Ratios and Isopleth Maps in Regional Investigation
of Agricultural Land Occupance,” Annals of the Association of American
Georgraphers. Volume XX (December, 1930). 177-195.
Kleinheintz, Frank, “The Sheep Industry in Wisconsin.” Directory of the
Wisconsin Livestock Breeders Association, 192Jf-25. Madison. 1925.
Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (now Milwaukee Grain and Stock Ex¬
change). Report, 1867. (Milwaukee, 1868).
PiXLEY, R. B. Wisconsin in the World War. Milwaukee, 1919,
Quaife, Milo Milton. Wisconsin, Its History and Its People. Chicago. 1924.
Schafer, Joseph. A History of Agriculture in Wisconsin. State Historical So¬
ciety of Wisconsin, Madison. 1922.
United States Department of Agriculture. Farming on the Cut-over Lands of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Bulletin 425. October, 1916.
- . Origins and Growth of Sheep Husbandry in the United States. Wash¬
ington. 1880.
United States Census. 1840. 1850, 1860. 1870. 1900. 1930.
Western Historical Association. Cyclopedia of Wisconsin. Madison. 1906.
- , History of Walworth County, Wisconsin. Chicago. 1882.
Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station. The Soils of Northwest Wiscon¬
sin. Bulletin 306. Second Edition. April, 1922.
Wisconsin and Iowa Farmer and Northwest Cultivator. Vol. IV, No. 6. 1852.
1963] Stover— -Changing Regionalization of Sheep
131
Wisconsin Crop Reporting Service. Sheep and Lambs on Feed, January 1,
1963. January 16, 1963.
Wisconsin Crop and Livestock Reporting Service. A Century of Wisconsin
Agriculture, 184-8-19^8. Bulletin 29'0. Madison. 1948.
Wisconsin Livestock Breeders’ Association. Directory. Madison. 1912.
Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Transactions. Volume I. 1851. Volume
VII, 1868. Madison.
- . Wisconsin: Its Natural Resources and Industrial Progress. Madison.
1862.
Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture. Wisconsin Livestock, Dairy, and
Poultry. Special Bulletin 78. Madison. 1961.
Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture and Markets. Biennial Report.
1929-30. Madison. 1930.
THE DOMESTIC TURKEY IN MEXICO AND CENTRAL
AMERICA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
<4 a A. S charger
The Spaniards used a number of names for the turkey (Meleagris
gallopavo) and there is uncertain identification in some cases. We
have pavo, guanajo, gallina, gallina de la tierm, gallina de papada,
gallo, gallipavo, and gallo de Indias. Only gallina de papada is suf¬
ficiently descriptive of the turkey. The display of the turkey was
so like that of the peafowl that the use of pavo was logical. Mexico
and Central America contained several species of large gallinace¬
ous birds sometimes called pavos. Oviedo^ definitely included the
CLirassow (Crax) among the pavos.
It is not certain when the turkey was first seen. Martir- states
that when Vincent Yanez Pinzon was at the Gulf of Paria, Vene¬
zuela, in 1500, the Indians gave him some fowls of the country
(pavos) which differed from the peafowl in color. There were
females to be taken to Spain for propagation and males to be eaten
at the time. If the birds could be raised in quantity it is probable
that they were turkeys. Eden assumes that they were turkeys for
he has the marginal note: ‘Teacockes which we caule Turkye
Cockes.'’^ It is entirely possible that Columbus received turkeys in
Honduras in 1502 during his fourth voyage. There being nothing
of importance on a group of islands which he called the Gunajas,
he landed at Point Caxinas (Cabo de Honduras) on August 14.
Here the natives brought him native fowls, gallinas de la tierray
which were more savory than those of Spain.^ It is believed that
the Cuban name for the turkey, guanajOy was derived from the
birds received by Columbus near the Guana jas. When Cortes ar¬
rived at Trujillo, Point Caxinas, in 1525, the natives gave him fish
a<nd turkeys, according to Diaz,^ who is consistent in using gal¬
linas for these fowls.
There is no doubt that the birds found by Cordoba, when he dis¬
covered Yucatan in 1517, were turkeys. Las Casas® came to Cuba
in 1511 and lived in the New World for thirty-six years. He states
that when members of the Cordoba expedition landed near Cape
Catoche, the natives gave them two roasted turkeys (gallinas) as
large as peafowls. At Campeche they received many fowls with a
dewlap, or throat wattle (gallinas de papada), just as large and
perhaps better than peafowls.
133
134 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The handsome ocellated turkey (Agriocharis ocellata) of the
Yucatan Peninsula does not appear to have received a distinguish¬
ing name by the early Spaniards. Landa^ came to Yucatan in 1549.
He states that the Mayas called Yucatan the land of the turkey and
the deer (Umil cu[t]z yetel ceh). The meaning is the same in
Espinoza’s^ orthography, Yetelzeh y Vnunuyz. According to Seler^
the Maya name of the ocellated turkey was cutz. Some modern
names for this bird are pavo de monte, and kuts,^^ guajalote de
Yucatan, guajalote brilliante, and cut.^^ The ocellated turkey is
represented frequently in the Mayan codices, the common turkey,
rarely. All of the numerous “turkey” bones found at archeological
sites in Yucatan have been referred to the ocellated turkey. Pol¬
lock and Ray^^ found 1268 bones of the ocellated turkey, none of
the common turkey, at the ruins of Mayapan, dating for the most
part from the 13th to the 15th century A.D. This suggests that the
Mayas did not have the domestic turkey until shortly before the
Conquest. Supporting evidence is to be found in the relatively
small numbers of turkeys reported by the discoverers. The ocel¬
lated turkey was not domesticated by the Mayas.
The expeditions of Cortes revealed that the domestic turkey was
widely distributed. On July 10, 1519, he^^ wrote that many gal-
Unas, like those of Ti'erra Firme and as large as peafowls, were
raised by the coastal people from Cozumel to Veracruz. Turkeys
were reported at nearly every town on his march to the city of
Mexico. The Anonymous Conqueror^® wrote that many turkeys
were raised by the Mexicans; and Diaz refers frequently to the
birds.
Some of the numbers of turkeys exacted as tribute are a strain
on credulity, IxtlilxochitP® states that about 1430, Netzahualcoyot-
zin. Lord of Texcoco, required 100 turkeys (cocqs) daily, or 36,500
yearly. Torquemada^^ reduces the number to 6,000 to 8,000 an¬
nually, According to Cook^® every inhabitant, “chicos y grandest'
of Mizquiahuala had to contribute a turkey every twenty days. He
estimated the population of the town to have been 7500 in 1519, so
that the annual contribution would have been 137,000 turkeys. If
we assume that only adults actually paid tribute and that they
formed two-hfths of the population the annual conrtibution would
still be 56,800 birds. It is difficult to believe that even this number
could have been supplied. According to Torquemada,^^ 1400 to 1600
turkeys were consumed daily during the fiesta for the Tlaxcalan
god, Camaxtli. The raptors and carnivores in Montezuma’s menag¬
eries required daily large numbers of turkeys. Salazar^® and Clavi-
gero^® state that 500 turkeys were required daily just to feed the
raptors. Gomara^^ gives the same number and adds that 300 men
were required to attend the aviary. Some turkeys were also fed to
1963] Schorger—The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 135
the camivores.^^ If we, in addition, allow for the turkeys consumed
by Montezuma’s large entourage, the daily consumption may have
been 1000 birds. In fulfilling the request of Cortes^^ for an estate,
Montezuma provided 1500 turkeys. Martir^ was informed that the
number was 1500, some of the birds being for propagation, others
for the table.
The domestic animals of the Aztecs were limited to dogs, tur¬
keys, ducks, and a few other birds. Turkeys formed the largest
source of meat. The markets of the city of Mexico have been de¬
scribed by several writers. Cortes in his letter of 1520 states:
‘There is a street for game in which are sold all kinds of native
birds such as turkeys, partridges, quails, wild ducks, . . Diaz®
mentions hen and cock turkeys, rabbits, hares, deer, and other
game. Eggs of turkeys, geese, and many other birds were also for
sale in large amounts.^^ ^11 transactions in the markets were by
barter. The closest approach to money was the cocoa bean.
Gomara^^ states that a turkey was exchanged for a bundle (haz)
of maize. I have been unable to find a quantitative definition of haz.
Motolinia^^ wrote that a turkey was worth three or four Spanish
chickens. In 1628 a turkey or a Spanish chicken sold for a real in
Yucatan.® According to Oviedo^ a yavo, in this case a curassow, was
worth a ducat, and sometimes a Castellano or gold peso, worth a
real in purchasing power in Spain. If he refers to the old gold
Castilian Castellano, which weighed 4.6 grams, a curassow was
worth $5.65 in present United States dollars.
Little is known about the methods used in raising turkeys.
Sahagun^^ states that the young were given maize in the form of
mash, cooked pigweed (hledo), and other plants. The mother fed
the poults worms and other things that she found. He has four
plates showing the “domestic life” of the birds. The breeding fe¬
male appears to have had a small coop provided for her.
The domestic turkey descended from the wild turkey of Mexico.
At the time of the Conquest the domestic bird was only about one-
half the size of the wild one. The degeneration may have been due
to improper feeding, or to failure to select the best birds for breed¬
ing. About 1580 it was stated that the wild turkeys in the state of
Puebla were much larger than the domestic ones.^® This was not
true of the turkeys kept in confinement by the Pueblos of New
Mexico. They resembled closely the wild bird in size and color. One
of the members of Coronado’s Expedition was impressed by their
size for he wrote that they were larger than those of Nevv^ Spain.
Many species of wild birds undergo changes in color of the plumage
by domestication. Sahagun^^ mentions that the Mexican turkeys
were of various colors, white, black, red, and brown. Salazar^®
states : “This bird is white and blackish and has no other color.” A
136 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Franciscan friar wrote about 1538-39 on the customs of the people
of Michoacan, and mentions that the Chichimecas made banners
of white turkey feathers.^^
The Aztec name for the turkey was huexolotl, or mexolotl.
Molina^® gives quetzaltototl as a synonym for pavo, but it is more
properly applied to one of the trogons. SalazaF^ called the turkey
cuzcacahtl. According to Sahagun,^^ the female, or the turkey in
general, was called totollin, the male, huexolotl. The latter was sub¬
sequently corrupted to guajalote, or guajolote, by which name the
turkey is commonly known in Mexico today.
Some of the Indian names for the turkey follow :
Cahita or Yaqui, cuvis.^^
Cocopa, urut.^^
Maya of Yucatan, tux, itux, female; idum, male.^
Opata, chique.^^
Papago, tova.^^
Tarahumara, tshlvi,^^ siivi.^^
Zapotec, pHe hualache, pete zaa, female; pete nigola, male.®
Mexicans of Durango, cocinoJ^^
Central America, guana jo, chumplpe, huehuecho.^^
Isthmus of Tehuantepec:^^
Zapotec, tou.
Nahuat, totoli.
Chontal, lapump, tulu.
Popoluca, tu'^ nuk
Mixe, tutk
Zoque, tunuk
Huave, tu:L
When the turkey was domesticated in the area under considera¬
tion is unknown. There are good archeological data on the turkey
in New Mexico. Here the bird was confined, if not domesticated,
shortly after the birth of Christ. Two bones of the turkey were
found at the ruins of Zaculeu, near Huehuetenango, Guatemala, in
the earlist phase, Atzan, c. 700 A.D.^® They were identified by Dr.
Alexander Wetmore as those of the common turkey (M. gallopavo).
Since this bird is not native to Guatemala, it must have been
brought in from the north where it was probably domesticated at
a considerably earlier time.
Food was of prime concern to the early Spanish explorers and
travelers so that domestic turkeys are mentioned frequently. The
cultivation of maize and the raising of turkeys went hand in hand.
Many of the settlements where these birds were found can not be
located due either to disappearance, change of name, or variation
1963] Schorger — The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 137
in spelling. No early reliable information on the occurrence of
domestic turkeys in Mexico north of latitude 25° was found. The
gap between this latitude and the United States boundary indi¬
cates that domestication took place independently in Mexico and
the Southwest. The places where turkeys were raised are shown in
Fig, 1. The latitudes and longitudes of existing towns have been
Figure 1. Localities where turkeys were raised in Mexico and Central Amer¬
ica in the sixteenth centuiy.
taken from the Gazetteers of the United States Board on Geo¬
graphic Names, A very useful map of the early pueblos of southern
Mexico is that of Barlow.^^ The position of many old places in cen¬
tral Mexico are given by Borah and Cook,^^ and the work of Lopez-
Portillo^^ was helpful in locating pueblos in westcentral Mexico.
The Suma de Visitas^^ is rich in references to turkeys paid as trib¬
ute in the middle of the sixteenth century. The distance in leagues,
often only approximate, of a small pueblo from a main town is fre¬
quently given. The Spanish league was 2.63 miles.
Campeche. When the Spaniards landed at the pueblo of Campe¬
che in 1517, the cacique entertained them at a feast in his palace
138 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
where turkeys and other birds were served. At the same time
many turkeys were seen at a farm at Champoton.® Dampier,^^ who
was in Campeche in 1676^ informs us that among the fowls of the
country are ''Quams (guans), Corresoes (curassows), Turkiesd'
The turkeys at which he shot unsuccessfully were the ocellated.
Chiapas, During the Cortes expedition to Honduras the natives
of a village near Chiapa brought turkeys and cherries. The caciques
at the town of Gueyacala (Acala, twenty- three miles southeast of
Tuxtla) sent twenty loads of Maize and some turkeys.® About 1625
turkeys were abundant at Chiapa.
Colima, In 1530, during the conquest of New Galicia, the cacique
of Contlan appeared at Chiametla with many mantles and tur-
keys.^^ Ystlahuacan (Ixtlahuacan) contributed to the Spaniards 8
turkeys every month; Coatlan, 5 leagues from Colima, and Escay-
amoqa, each contributed 24 turkeys annually; Malacatlan, 4 an¬
nually; Qui^ilapa (Quezalapa) and Tequepa, each 36 annually;
Tepacuneca (Petlazoneca) , 12 annually; Tecitlan (Tecuicitlan) , 48
annually; Tlacoloastla, 24 annually; Tecolapa, 30 annually; and
Xocotlan, 24 annually.
Costa Rica, Significant evidence for the raising of turkeys in
Costa Rica in pre-Columbian times is a turkey effigy jar shown by
Lothrop.^® The long frontal caruncle is clearly that of the common
turkey. The jar was found at Bolson and is considered to be of
local manufacture. There was a Mexican colony at the isthmus of
Nicoya. The Mexicans had an extensive trade along the Pacific
coast as far south as Panama where there was also a small colony.
It is probable that the Mexican colonists brought turkeys with
them but Lothrop^® does not believe that these birds were raised
south of the Nicoya peninsula,
Durango. Many turkeys were being raised at Nombre de Dios in
1608."^
Guanajuato, The middle of the 16th century, the inhabitants of
Acanbaro (Acambaro) had turkeys, chickens, and quails.^® Hardy^^
noted that turkeys were raised in abundance at San Francisco [del
Rinqon] in 1825. He purchased a fine one for fifty cents,
Guatemala. Four turkeys were supplied to the Cortes expedition
(1524-26) at Tayasal, located on an island in Lago Peten. At the
pueblo of Tayca, 30 turkeys were found in four houses, and the
following day the Spaniards came to a farm where there were
turkeys. Sailing up the Rio Duke, they came to Lago de Izabel
where the inhabitants had many turkeys.® These birds were plenti¬
ful about 1636 at the pueblos of Guatemala, Mixco, and Rabinall
(Rabinal).^^ For the campaign of 1694, Totonicapa (Totonicapan)
and Gueguetenango (Huehuetenango) were each to contribute 800
1963] Schorger — The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 139
turkeys. The Indians at Dolores killed turkeys and offered the blood
to their idols. There were many turkeys at Lacandon, near present
San Luis.®®
Guerrero. Ayutla and neighboring towns contributed to Monte¬
zuma one turkey daily.^^ Under the Spanish regime Ayutla also
provided one turkey daily; Acamistlauca (Acamixtlavaca) , 2 daily
and 15 in addition each month; Nochtepeque, 20 leagues from
Mexico and 3 from Tasco (Taxco), one turkey daily; and Tetela
[del Rio] , one every 80 days.^®
In 1579 chickens and turkeys were raised in abundance at Tzica-
putzalco (Ixcapuzalco) . The domestic animals at Alaustlan
(Alauiztlan, Alahuixtlan) were small dogs, chickens, and tur¬
keys. Ostuma (Oztoman) had an abundance of these fowls.
Quatepeque (Coatepec de Guerrero, Cuatepeque, Cuautepec),
Tlacotepeque (Tlacotepec de Guerrero), Utatlan (Utlatlan), Tetela,
Cuetzala (Quezala), and Teloloapa (Teloloapan) raised chickens
and turkeys in large numbers. The domestic birds at Tasco were
Castilian chickens, turkeys, and doves.®^ There were both wild and
tame turkeys at Asuchitlan (Ajuchitlan) .®2
Hidalgo. The contribution of turkeys to Montezuma by the pueblo
of Mizquiahuala (Mizquiyauallan) has been mentioned.^^ The price
of a turkey at Mizquiahuala in 1571 was two reals (1 peso = 8
reals).®® Epa^oyucan (10 miles southeast of Paucha) also contrib¬
uted turkeys to Montezuma.®^ Acatlan contributed to the Spaniards
4 turkeys and 4 quails (quatro gallinas y quatro codornizes) every
5 days; Tlacachique, 12 turkeys every 40 days; Tututepeque, one
on every meat day; and Vauagasco, 30 chickens and turkeys every
three months.^®
In 1579 there were tame turkeys and chickens at Zimapan; tur¬
keys, chickens, doves, and white geese at Axocupan (Axacuba) ;
chickens, turkeys, quails, and hawks at Yetecomac; doves, turkeys,
Castilian chickens, and quails at Tornacustla (Tulnacuchtla) ; tur¬
keys and chickens at Tezcatepec (Texcatepec) and Tecpatepec. The
inhabitants of Uexutla de Hidalgo (Huejutla, Huexotla, Huexutla)
had no other birds than gallinas, which grow wild ; and they raise
turkeys (gallinas de tierra) which are like peafowls. At Atitala-
quia, they ate the male turkeys which in Spain were called gal-
lopavos. The females were kept for propagation as it was consid¬
ered poor management to eat them.®^
Honduras. When Cortes arrived at Trujillo in 1525, the inhab¬
itants of the neighboring islands brought presents of fish and tur¬
keys. While at this town some natives of Olancho (Guayapa) came
to him complaining that the soldiers were stealing their turkeys.®
140 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Jalisco. The province in 1530, according to Guzman,®^ was well
supplied with turkeys. He states further that turkeys were abund¬
ant at the pueblo of Nuyano and at Chapala. Tello^^ informs us
that during the conquest of Nuevo Galicia, the cacique of Chola
appeared at Chiametla with mantles and turkeys; that the latter
were plentiful at Tonolan (Tonola) ; and that in 1536 the natives
of Purificacion were raising turkeys and other birds in quantity.
Lopez-Portillo^® cites the statement of Gonzalo Lopez that the val¬
ley at Cuitzeo was supplied with an abundance of provisions such
as turkeys, deer, hares, and some fruit. The inhabitants of Cuynan
has turkeys. The same statement is made by Samano^® for a valley
near Chapala. An unknown writer informs us : ‘‘At the end of two
days of travel we arrived at the province of Tonala and when we
came in sight there appeared certain peaceful Indians with turkeys
in hand saying that the lady (senora) of this province was peace¬
ful and in her house.’'®"^
Acatitlan contributed to the Spaniards 3 turkeys annually ;
Cuyseo (Cuitzeo) and Pogintlan (Poncitlan) together, 20 turkeys
every two months; Cuistlan, one every 5 days; Yztlan (Ixtlan), 5
annually; Mechinango, 20 annually; Cuyutan (Coyutlan), Miztlan
(Mixtlan), and Acatitlan, some turkeys; Mizquiticacan (Mextica-
can), 2 per week; Nuchistlan, 2 every two months; Ocotlan, one
every Sunday; Ocotique (Ocotic), one every week; Tetitlan, 5
every 4 months, Tequegistlan (Tesixtan), one every 5 days; Tlacot-
lan (Tlacotan), 2 every 5 days; and Tlaxomulco (Tlajomulco) , one
every week.^®
Mexico. According to Alvarado Tezozomoc,^® the Aztec nobleman,
600 turkeys were provided for the people from Huejotzingo, Cho-
lula, and Tlaxcala who came to Mexico to attend the funeral rites
of King Axayacatl, the middle of the 15th century. When mes¬
sengers came from King Ahuitzotl regarding a victory over
Cuextlan and other pueblos, the people of Chaleo, Xochimilco,
Tabuca, and Aculhuacan (Culuican), to celebrate the success,
brought especially birds, huexolome, i.e. turkeys (gallipavos) and '
cihuatototolin or peahens (pavas), wild turkeys (gallinas del ,
monte), and doves. It is difficult to determine if the names of the ;
birds have suffered from translation from the Aztec. Apparently
the people brought male and female domestic turkeys, and wild ,
ones.
Each Indian at Atenco contributed to Montezuma one turkey '
every 20 days.®^ According to Gamio,®® prior to the conquest, Teoti-
huacan contributed 62 turkeys annually, and 14 in addition from j
time to time. In 1543 Domingo Hernandez, a resident of Xochi¬
milco and judge for the Viceroy, fixed the tribute at turkeys daily. |
1963] Schorger- — The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 141
Due to a protest in 1552, Fray Diego Rengifo reduced the num¬
ber to 7 every 80 days.
In 1950, when Cortes neared Tecoco, the houses were found to be
filled with turkeys and dogs which the Tlaxcalans carried off^ The
Humboldt fragments record a sale of turkeys at Chaleo in 1564.
Plate XX of SeleF’^ shows the heads of 61 turkeys paid as tribute
at some unknown locality. Tomson, in 1555, found “Guiny-
cockes’’ cheap in the city of Mexico. When Hawks®^ was in the
city in 1572, he noted that there were “Guiny cocks and hennes,”
old English names for turkeys. A turkey cost $0.75 to $1.00 in
1822.«2
Tepechpa (Tepexpan) and Tecama each contributed to the
Spaniards 4 turkeys daily; Tequecistlan (Tequisistlan) , one daily;
Taxcaltitlan (Texcaltitlan) , 2 daily. Tepepulco raised turkeys in
quantity; and Cuauhquilpan, 3 leagues from Pachuca and about
10 from the city of Mexico, raised both chickens and turkeys. In
1580 turkeys were eaten in Tamazcaltepec.^®’
Michoacan. Guzman^^ wrote on July 8, 1530, that the inhabitants
of the province had an abundance of maize and turkeys (aves de
tierra). The unnamed Franciscan friar, writing of the customs
in Michoacan, mentions turkeys frequently. He states that the
Tarascans did not eat turkeys but raised them for their feathers
to decorate their gods. One of the caciques had 80 royal eagles and
smaller ones in cages which were sometimes fed turkeys. Before
the arrival of the Spaniards, one of the priests dreamed that people
came bringing horses. They slept in the temples and the many
turkeys that they brought made the buildings dirty. At a place
called Quangaceo, near Metalcingo, Cristoval de Oli requested and
received presents of rich mantles, turkeys, and eggs. The Spaniards
were in the town for six months during which time they were pro¬
vided with bread, turkeys, eggs, and fish. On account of fear of
the Spaniards, the inhabitants of Hiripan and Tangaxoan aban¬
doned their towns leaving the dogs, parrots, and turkeys. The
cacique of Yzipamuca ordered his people to kill and eat all the dogs,
parrots, and turkeys since they were to remain there only five days.
In the latter part of the 16th century, Aquila contributed 48
turkeys annually; Estopila (Estapilla), Teguatlan, and Yluistlan
((Yhuitlan), each, 24 annually. The latitudes and longitudes given
by Borah and Cook®® would place Estopila and Yluistlan in the
Pacific Ocean. Apapapalan contributed 36 turkeys annually; Co-
manja, 2 daily; Necotlan, 10 every 20 days; Pomaro, 28 annually.^®
Tarequato raised well turkeys and chickens, while Yurirapundaro
had chickens and a few turkeys. Chilchota, and Oran, subject to
Chilchota, raised chickens and turkeys in quantity. Tasaguararo
142 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
also raised turkeys. Chocandiran had both wild and domestic
turkeys.^®
Morelos. In 1579, Teputztlan, 12 leagues from the city of Mexico
had wild and domestic turkeys. The inhabitants of Ocopetlayuca
ate turkeys,®^
Nayarit. When Guzman passed through Jalisco, he found the
people on the side of a mountain. Eventually they came down and
gave him turkeys and other foods.®^ The province of Aztatlan had
an abundance of provisions, turkeys, and a multitude of all kinds
of fishes. The Spaniards often took the name of a pueblo for a
province. While Guzman was at Azatlan (Aztatlan) there came
lords of the province of Chiametla (Chametla), 20 leagues distant,
bringing many turkeys, chili, and fish.®"^ This would place Aztatlan
on or near the Acaponeta River. The map in Lopez-Portillo®^ lo¬
cates Aztatlan close to this stream. The Antonio Garcia y Cubas
map (1863) has Etzatlan south of Acaponeta on a branch of the
Acaponeta River. Regarding the Rio Hastatlan (Aztatlan, now
Acaponeta river) it was said: “Here they found so great a supply
of food, turkeys (gallinas de Mexico), maize, ducks, and other birds
that it was a strange thing to see.”
Five leagues from Chametla was a province called Cazala where
turkeys and maize were found.®® The inhabitants of Tepic had tur¬
keys in 1531. Tzenticpac (Teimoac) provided much maize and tur¬
keys. Honey and turkeys were also furnished by Tzapotzinco
(Izapotzinco) The latter part of the 16th century Apetatuca
contributed 16 turkeys every Easter; Cuyacan, 3 every four
months; Tepique (Tepic), 6 every 3 months; Camotlan, 5 every
week; Xalxocotlan (Jalcocotlan) , 10 yearly; and Xala (Jala), one
every week.^®
Nicaragua. Pedrarias Davila arrived at Darien in 1514 and or¬
ganized Tierra Firme, consisting of most of Panama, Costa Rica,
and part of Nicaragua. Andagoya®® states that there was no game
in the provinces except birds, consisting of two kinds of pavas,
pheasants (chachalacas), and doves. If his pavas were game birds,
they must have been curassows and not turkeys. Cordoba conquered
the Rivas area in 1524 and founded the towns of Leon and Grenada,
The inhabitants, according to Andagoya, had an abundance of
maize, grapes, turkeys (gallinas de aquella tierra), and small dogs
which they ate.
Gil Gonzalez Davila explored northward along the Pacific Coast
in 1522 and arrived in the Department of Rivas, between Lake
Nicaragua and the coast. The cacique Diriajen came to his camp
with 500 men each carrying one or two male or female turkeys
(pavo o’ pava). No other bird than the domestic turkey could have
1963] Schorger—The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 143
been supplied so abundantly. Here was a Mexican (Nahuatl) col¬
ony and it is to be expected that it would have turkeys. Oviedo®^
adds that in settling a marriage contract, the Indians killed large
turkeys (gallinas), which are like peafowls (pavos), but better
than those of Spain, The supplying of turkeys by the cacique
“Dirigen’' was first mentioned by Martir.^
Benzoni®® was in Central America from 1541--1556. He reported
that in Nicaragua there was to be found a kind of peacock that
had been brought to Europe and called Indian fowl. In the New
World it was to be found elsewhere only in Guatemala, Cape
Fonduri, Mexico, and on the shores of New Spain. The Mexican
language was the most important one in Nicaragua, and in this
tongue, he adds, fowls were totoli, the Mexican word for the tur¬
key hen being totolin. About 1635 Gage®^ found turkeys to be or¬
dinary meat in Nicaragua.
Oaxaca. There is little information on the turkey prior to the
middle of the 16th century when it was being raised in quantity.
Coquitlan contributed 3 turkeys weekly; Chiomesuchitl, 17 every
20 days; Camotlan, 12 yearly; Qini^tlan (Zimatlan) and Cuyutepe-
que (Coyotepec), one daily; Gueytepeque (Huitepec), 10 every 80
days; La Chichina, 20 annually; Necotepeque, 10 every 80 days;
Totolapa (Totolapan), 12 every 80 days and 2 every 10 days;
Xaltepeque (Tlazoltepec) , 40 every 100 days; Ticatepeque (Ticate-
pec), 40 yearly; Tlaquacintepeque (Tlacuatzintepec) , 20 every 80
days; and Vepanapa (Huapanapa), 120 yearly.^®
Iztepexi contributed turkeys to Montezuma and later raised both
chickens and turkeys. At Texupa (Tejupan), the chiefs ate turkeys
at their fiestas. Turkeys and chickens were raised at Chinantla, and
the people of Macuilsuchil (Macuilxochitl) and Treutitlan (Teo-
tilan) de Valle raised these fowls in their homes. The inhabitants
of Teticpac formerly paid tribute to Montezuma with turkeys,
hares, rabbits, deer, and honey, and subsequently raised turkeys
and chickens for commerce. Coatlan sacrificed dogs, turkeys, and
quails, and Tlacolula, dogs, turkeys, and Indians. Turkeys and
chickens were raised in quantity by Mitla and Taliztaca (Tlaliztaca,
Tlalixtac). Guaxilotitlan (Huajolotitlan, Huitzo) raised Castilian
chickens, turkeys, and pigs in large numbers. At Puerto de Gua-
tulco, there were bred many native birds called chachalacas which
are like Castilian chickens. One statement reads : “ay muchas
palomas torcazas y codornizes y ‘chachalacas,’ que son como gal-
linas de Castilla, y gallos e gallinas de la tierra ; codos estos generos
son aues monteses, y demas desto crian entrellos muchas aues de
Castilla e de la tierra domesticas.” Elsewhere are mentioned “cha¬
chalacas y gallos y gallinas que son de la generation de las domes-
144 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
ticas de la tierra/’®® Since chachalacas are mentioned specifically,
“gallos y gallinas” can refer only to turkeys, or possibly to the
curassow or crested guan; however neither of the latter species
would have been raised in numbers.
Puebla. During the conquest the caciques of Cholula sent tur¬
keys and bread. The pueblos of Tepeaca, Quacholae, and Tecamac-
halco (Tepemaxalco) had plenty of turkeys and little dogs. When
Guatomac was made king of Mexico, he sent his armies to raid the
pueblos of Guacachula (Huaquechula) and Ozucar where they
robbed the people of turkeys and other possessions.^
About 1580, the inhabitants of Guachinango (Huachinango)
contributed a turkey or its equivalent every five days.^® Xonotla
(Jonatla), as did Tetela, had a great quantity of domestic tur-
keys.2“
Quintana Roo. During the Cordoba expedition of 1517, the Spani¬
ards while near Cape Catoche, were given two turkeys.® Two years
later, on the island of Cozumel, turkeys were found in the houses
abandoned by the natives, and Pedro de Alvarado ordered that 40
of the birds be taken.®
Sinaloa. At Chametla, a pueblo and province on the Baluarte
River, the Spaniards during the Guzman expedition, found many
provisions and many turkeys which did not exist farther on. Never¬
theless it was subsequently stated that the provinces of Huxitipa
and Panuco abounded in fruits, deer and other animals, and that
there were many turkeys.®^ Lopez-Portillo®® shows the pueblo of
Chiametla on the Acoponeta River on one map, and on another map
on the Baluarte River, on which stream lies modern Chametla. Ac¬
cording to Obregon,^® the province of Chiametla had an abundance
of provisions consisting of maize, beans and turkeys, and many
cattle which had multiplied from those left by Coronado. The in¬
habitants presented many turkeys to Diego de Ibarra.
Regarding the pueblo of Actlan, province of Chiametla, it is
stated: ‘‘And gave a great quantity of turkeys and some fish, and
leaving in peace said province he returned bringing with him the
son of the lord with about 150 men all laden with turkeys from
which the [Spanish] people took no little consolation because there
had been many sick ones.”®®
The pueblo of Piastla (Piaxtha), according to Guzman,®® was
well supplied with all kinds of provisions except turkeys of which
were found only three or four males. Quinota, a short distance
northeast of modern Quila, had abundant provisions, but only a
few turkeys were found. Near Pascua there were many large tur¬
keys but nothing else. Regarding a pueblo near the mouth of the
Rio Culucan, he wrote: “There were not many turkeys there be-
1963] Schorger — The Domestic Turkey in Mexico 145
cause they ate them, knowing that we were coming, since there
was a pueblo where I found four turkeys dead and plucked.”
Some turkeys, many parrots, and some falcons in cages were
found at Pochotla, a pueblo above Piaxtla on the Piaxtla River.
There was much to eat in Culiacan, one item consisting of “a tur¬
key as large and tough as a he-goat.”®® In 1534 the inhabitants of
Culiacan, according to Tello,^^ had many turkeys and Castilian
chickens. Another writer states that the province of Culiacan had
only a few turkeys, but there was “no lack of mosquitos.”®^
Sonora. No early account of the keeping of turkeys in Sonora
was found. An unknown Jesuit, writing in 1763, stated that in
some places in Sonora there were domesticated turkeys.®"^ Sonora
was defined as the area north of the Yaqui River, west of the Sierra
Madre Mountains, and south of the Gila River in Arizona.
Tabasco. At the mouth of the Grijalva River in 1518 and 1519,
according to Diaz,® the Indians brought to the Spaniards cooked
fish and turkeys. He mentions several pueblos where turkeys were
obtained during the expedition of Cortes to Honduras, I have re¬
lied for the location of the towns on the map in Maudslay’s^^ trans¬
lation of Diaz. Turkeys were obtained at an unknown pueblo on
the Rio Usumacinta at approximately 17°40'N, 91°30'W. Cortes
built a bridge across the Rio San Pedro at approximately 17°20'N,
91°10'W. Here Diaz arrived with maize and 80 turkeys that the
soldiers appropriated. The following evening he went out and re¬
turned with 20 turkeys for Cortes. Evidently the source of supply
was not more than six miles from the bridge. The Indians at
Gueyacala, a pueblo up stream, brought maize and some turkeys.
In some of the houses they found many cooked cock and hen tur¬
keys (g alios de papada y gallinas).
The natives of the Rio Tabasco (Grijalva) brought to Cortes,
during his expedition of 1519, eight dark turkeys neither smaller
nor less tasty than peafowls.^ Cortes,^^ writing in the same year,
says that some Indians in a canoe brought certain gallinas and a
little maize. At the port of San Antonio, near the mouth of the
Rio Grijalva, Grijalva^^ informs us that in 1518 the Indians
brought cotton mantles and turkeys. These birds, according to
Dampier, were raised in 1676 in the towns along the Tabasco River,
Of one of them he wrote : “They feed abundance of Turkies, Ducks,
and Dunghill Fowls, of which the Padre has an exact account ; and
is very strict in gathering his Tithe rand they dare not kill any
except they have his Leave for it.”^^ Turkeys were also raised along
the Chiltepec and Dos Bocas Rivers.
Tlaxcala. According to Martir^ the city of Tlaxcala contained a
great number of fat birds Ike peafowls, which were raised in place
146 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
of Spanish chickens. Cortes^^ wrote that in 1520 the place was
well supplied with bread, turkeys, game, and fish.
Veracruz. The people of Cempoala (30 miles north of Veracruz)
gave turkeys as tribute to the predecessors of Montezuma.®^ When
Grijalva^^ jgj^^ jgg Sacrificios, near Veracruz, the
Indians brought cakes and turkey pies. Diaz,® who accompanied the
expedition, mentions that at the mouth of the Rio de Banderas
(Jamapa) the Indians brought turkeys and maize bread. Turkeys
were also supplied at the port of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz).
Alvarado raided the pueblos adjacent to Costastan (Cotaxtla) and
brought back turkeys. These birds were also sent by the cacique of
Cempoala. When the survivors of the DeSoto expendition arrived
at Panuco in 1543, they were well supplied with turkeys by the
inhabitants. All the way from Panuco to the great city of Mestitam,
when a turkey was requested of an Indian, he would give four.^^
About 1580 Nanaguautla (Nanahuatla) furnished 60 turkeys
yearly.^® Tlacotalpan had deer, and raised turkeys and chickens;
Xalapa (Jalapa), a great quantity of hens which are called turkeys
in Castile (gallinas, que en Castilla dizen gallibabos, also called
papagallos) ; Veracruz, numerous turkeys in many large flocks.^®
When Gage^^ landed at Veracruz, apparently in 1635, the inhab¬
itants gave a dinner for the fleet for which “Turkey-cocks and
Hens were prodigally lavished.” During the first two days of his
journey to Mexico City, turkeys were plentiful in the small towns
where he lodged.
Yucatan. The people of Zamailco (Samahil), in 1549, were re¬
quired to pay an annual tribute of 400 fowls, either turkeys or
Castilian chickens.^ Numerous occasions are mentioned by Ponce^^
when he was given turkeys. About 1635 Gage^^ found turkeys
abundant in Yucatan.
Zacetacas. In 1580 Suchipila (Juchipila) contributed five tur¬
keys monthly.®^
1963] Schorger—The Domestic Turkey in Mexico
147
Place Names
148 Wiscomin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Place Names— -Continued
1963] Schorger — The Domestic Turkey in Mexico
149
Place Names — Continued
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Tulane Univ., Dept. Middle Am. Res. 4:299-372.
THE ZENDA METEORITE
William F. Read
The Allyn Palmer family operates a 174-acre farm located half
a mile west of Zenda in Walworth County, Wisconsin. In the
spring of 1955, Mr. Palmer, while plowing, noticed an unusual¬
looking dark, heavy rock and brought it back to the house. Some
time later his eldest son Jon took the rock to school and gave it to
some boys who were members of the local astronomy club. The
boys showed it to Dr. G. P. Kuiper at Yerkes Observatory. Suspect¬
ing that it might be a meteorite. Dr. Kuiper bought the specimen
and forwarded it for positive identification to Dr. H. H. Nininger
of the American Meteorite Museum at Sedona, Arizona. Dr.
Nininger cut a small slice from one end, determined that this was
in fact an iron meteorite, and returned the main mass to Dr. Kuiper.
The writer purchased the main mass from Dr. Kuiper in March,
1960.
The original total weight was near 3.7 kg. As received by the
writer, the main mass weighed 3623 g. It has since been cut into
two pieces weighing 2791 g and 770 g. Dr. Nininger retained the
slice which he had cut off and later sold it, along with the bulk of
his collection, to Arizona State University. This slice weighs 60 g.
Figure 1. South half of Sect. 28, T 1 N, R 17 E. Stippled line is the Palmer
farm boundary. The meteorite is believed to have been found in the east half
of the area explored with a metal detector.
153
154 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Mr. Palmer does not recall exactly where on his property he
found the meteorite. Figure 1 shows the farm boundaries. Cer¬
tainly the specimen came from north of the railroad tracks, and
probably from east of the stream in the area which the writer later
explored (unsuccessfully) with a metal detector. If so, the coor¬
dinates of the fall are Lat. 42° 30' 48"; Long. 88° 29' 22". This is
gently rolling farm country on the south slope of the Darien
moraine of the Delavan ice lobe.
External Form
The Zenda meteorite evidently fell many years ago. A brilliant
fireball is reported to have burst over Zenda the evening of Febru¬
ary 5, 1917, (Frost, 1917) but is it doubtful that this was the
source of the present meteorite. Rusting has destroyed the original
fusion crust with its ablational detail. How much rust had ac¬
cumulated we cannot tell since much was doubtless dislodged by
farm machinery. The thickest remaining accumulation (Fig. 3)
is about inch.
The overall form at present is roughly wedge-shaped. The nar¬
row end (Fig. 2) tapers between fairly flat surfaces; the broad
end is more irregular. Shallow depressions, circular to irregular in
plan and up to 2 inches in diameter, occur equally on all sides. The
conspicuous notch which appears on the upper left margin of the
upper photograph in Figure 2 is caused by an unusually deep de¬
pression which has cut into the edge between two surfaces. Prob¬
ably these depressions are ablational in origin though they have
doubtless been modified by weathering.
A narrow, deep cleft may be seen parallel to the lower right
margin of the upper photograph, Figure 2. This marks the former
position of a thin, flat sheet of troilite, remnants of which are still
visible. The black spot in the upper right corner of the lower photo-
groph is a hole leading into the cleft.
Some evidences of human tampering are present. The squarish
projection shown on the upper right margin of the lower photo¬
graph, Figure 2, has been flattened off with a file. One inch, and
again four inches, to the left of the projection, shallow notches cut
with a hacksaw may be seen.
Composition and Structure
Two etched sections through the Zenda meteorite are shown in
Figure 3. Octahedral structure is immediately evident. The nar¬
rower kamacite bands have a width of about .6 mm., making this
a '‘medium'' octahedrite.
1963]
Read — The Zenda Meteorite
155
Figure 2. Two views of the Zenda meteorite. The upper photograph looks
down toward the top edge of the specimen as shown below. In the lower
photograph, the end piece belonging to Arizona State University has been
restored to its approximate original position. Short, heavy lines indicate the
location of the section cut by the writer.
On the larger surface, the right one third shows a different pat¬
tern of bands from the left two thirds. This is attributed to
twinning, the boundary between the two contrasting parts being
a composition surface. Since one set of kamacite bands (i.e., one of
the octahedral directions) is common to both parts, the twin is
assumed to be of the “spinel” type.
156 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The kamacite bands are somewhat swollen between intersections.
Many of them shown conspicuous Neumann lines. Also, many are
divided into rounded or polygonal grains separated by fine furrows
Figure 3. Etched sections through the Zenda meteorite. Left hand section cut
by H. H. Nininger. Light area at the top is a curved surface. Note limonite
“worms’’ due to presence of lawrencite. Right hand section cut by W. F. Read.
Figure 4. Tracings from photographs of etched surfaces shown in Figure 3 —
black: oxidation, white enclosed areas: schreibersite, dotted: troilite. Dashed
line indicates composition surface between two parts of twin. Radiant dia¬
grams show angles between kamacite bands limited to one part of twin and
those shared in common (longer line).
1963]
Read — The Zenda Meteorite
157
on the etched surface. Neumann lines cross these furrows without
deflection. Minute euhedral schreibersite crystals (rhabdites) are
abundant as inclusions, ‘‘Swathing'' kamacite surrounds the more
conspicuous patches of schreibersite and troilite (Fig. 4).
Taenite lamellae are fairly uniformly developed around the
kamacite plates. For some reason, they etched to a golden color on
the surface cut by the writer — hence appear dark in the photo¬
graph, Figure 3. They have the usual silvery appearance on the
surface cut by Dr. Nininger. Variations in width are pronounced.
In some places, the taenite is about one fifth as wide as adjoining
kamacite bands. Elsewhere it narrows down to a hair line or may
be entirely lacking. Some sections of the taenite lamellae are re¬
placed locally by schreibersite.
Plessite fields occupy perhaps 20 percent of the total area of a
cut surface. Most show a grilled structure, with pronounced varia¬
tion in the coarseness of the grill. Some are apparently structure¬
less. Small, irregular inclusions of schreibersite may be present. A
few plessite fields show partial replacement by a brittle, brownish-
metallic mineral which resembles troilite but leaves no mark on a
sulfur print.
The conspicuous included patches of schreibersite and troilite
shown in Figure 4 are of considerable interest. Dark speckles
which appear within and near them in the photographs. Figure 3,
are crystals of pyroxene (black), olivine (pale brown to greenish),
and graphite (grey) in approximately equal proportions. These
crystals tend to be clustered together, leaving certain portions of
the inclusion-most commonly the extremities — relatively clear.
From the fact that the silicates and graphite occur outside the
inclusions, though never very far outside, one gets the impression
that nickel-iron has encroached on (replaced) the schreibersite and
troilite, leaving less digestible silicates and graphite stranded be¬
yond their original matrix. Replacement is also suggested by the
presence of small spongy masses of kamacite inside the phosphide
and sulfide.
No crystals of silicate or graphite are seen in the wedge-shaped
mass of troilite which cuts into the upper edge of the smaller sur¬
face as shown in Figure 4. This is in line with the prominent cleft
mentioned in the description of external form; hence, the troilite
here belongs to a flat sheet, not an irregular patch. Unlike the
troilite of the patches it fractures along parallel planes (possibly
the 0001 parting) and may be a single crystal. The curved margin
adjoining to the right (Fig. 4) was apparently one wall of a second
mass of “sheet" troilite running at right angles to the first. The
edge of the specimen is here formed by a strip of swathing
kamacite.
158 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Dr. G. P. Kuiper for the main mass of the
meteorite, to Prof. Carleton B. Moore for the loan of the slice
belonging to Arizona State University, and to the Allyn Palmer
family for generous hospitality during the writer’s visits to their
farm. This study was supported financially by Research Grant
G-18669 from the National Science Foundation.
References Cited
Frost, E. B., 1917. The meteor of February 5, 1917. Popular Astronomy, 25:
253-255.
CHAUTAUQUA AND THE WISCONSIN IDEA
Melvin H. Miller
The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct America’s only uni¬
versity-conducted circuit Chautauqua. The University of Wiscon¬
sin operated such a Chautauqua from 1915 to 1917 and in so doing
demonstrated that bold leadership in adult education which was to
become known as '‘The Wisconsin Idea.”^
A Chautauqua conducted by a university is not only interesting
but significant. To understand that significance one must look
briefly at the phenomenon known as the Chautauqua movement.
Circuit Chautauqua was a lusty child whose father was the
lyceum movement and whose mother was Lake Chautauqua. As
with most children this one was a fascinating composite of good
and bad, a child who grew up to have tremendous popularity for
a brief time and then to die suddenly — while its less spectacular
but hardier parents lived on.
Lyceum had grown up in New England in the early 1800’s. At
first it was a non-commercial community affair in which lectures
and talks were given by local members or by visitors from other
town lyceums. In 1868, James Redpath organized the first commer¬
cial lecture bureau to solve the difficulties of bringing professional
lecturer and audience together. The lecture bureau flourished and
thus provided two basic ingredients upon which circuit Chau¬
tauqua could eventually draw : organization and a pool of talent.
Mother Chautauqua grew up on the shores of Lake Chautauqua
at Fair Point, New York. Rooted deep in the religious revival of
the early nineteenth century, she was born of the Methodist camp
meeting and the American Sunday School movement. Starting in
1874, Lake Chautauqua became a full-fledged summer school, one
of the first in the United States. By 1900 more than two hundred
courses were being offered in eight academic and special schools,
housed in permanent buildings. ^ She brought to circuit Chau¬
tauqua its essentially moral and religious flavor, its earnestness
and its bucolic nature.
’•It is unfortunate that this pioneer experiment is not chronicled even in the Uni¬
versity’s official records. The Biennial Reports of the University Regents during- this
period only mention Chautaqua. Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen’s The Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin; a History, 1845-1925, mentions it only briefly. Frederick M.
Rosentreter’s The Boundaries of the Campus, A History of the University of Wisconsin
Extension Division, 1885-1945, does not ment'on it at all. It has been necessary,
therefore, to turn to the contemporary press of the day and this, along- with bits and
pieces of scattered reports, makes it possible to reconstruct, at least in part, this
unique episode.
2 John S. Noffsing-er, Correspondence Schools, Lyceums and Chautauquas (New
York, 1926), p. 109.
159
160 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
There were several off-spring who helped to spread the Chau¬
tauqua idea. One of these was the Chautauqua Literary and Sci¬
entific Circle, usually known as the C.L.S.C., forerunner of the
correspondence course and dedicated to home study and consistent
and serious planned reading. A half-million earnest readers have
kept the idea alive to this day.
Still another child was the permanent Chautauqua Assembly,
patterned after Lake Chautauqua, two hundred of which sprang
up over the country.
In 1904, the last and most colorful member of the Chautauqua
family was born and the one most Americans remember-— the cir¬
cuit or traveling Chautauqua — an idea that was to carry the big
brown tents to every corner of the land and to bring an amalgam
of knowledge and entertainment to one out of every eleven men,
women and children in the United States sometime during every
calendar year."^
Since the Midwest was Chautauqua’s stronghold, we might ex¬
pect that Wisconsin played a role in its development and this is
true. Permanent Chautauqua Assemblies, such as the one at
Monona Bay, were active as early as the 1880’s.^ The C.L.S.C. had
chapters at Appleton, Darlington, Dartford (now Green Lake),
Elkhorn, Milwaukee, Waupun, Eau Claire, Sparta and Cheboygan
as well as many individual enrollees.® There is little doubt that
attics all over Wisconsin hold dusty copies of George B. Adams’
Growth of the French Nation or J. P. McGaffey’s A Survey of
Greek Civilization.
Finally, the tents of the commercial circuit Chautauqua dotted
the landscape of Wisconsin for more than twenty years yet no Wis¬
consin historian has done more than glance in that direction.®
II
Our concern in this paper is with Chautauqua as it was con¬
ducted by the University of Wisconsin. What makes a university-
run Chautauqua significant lies in the relationship of education to
Chautauqua — a relationship which has always puzzled critics and
historians. Was Chautauqua, as Sinclair Lewis once stated, “noth-
® F. C. Bray, “Chautauqua Fifty Years Young,” Revieio of Revieivs, LXX (July,
1924), 71-76.
^ The cash book for the Monona Bay Assembly shows numerous entries for monies
paid to lecturers in the 1880’s. An entry for July 25, 1893, shows the sum of $200.00
paid to Russell H. Conwell, author of the Classic “Acres of Diamonds” speech. State
Historical Library MSS 34BX.
® Harrison John Thornton, “Chautauqua and the Midwest,” Wisconsin Magazine of
History, XXXHI (December, 1949), 155.
^ The subject bibliography of Wisconsin history published by the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin lists no items on the subject. Thornton’s article, which only
indirectly involves Wisconsin Chautauqua, is the only such article in the Wisconsin
Magazine of History.
1963]
Miller — -Chautauqua and. Wisconsin Idea
161
ing but wind and chaff and the heavy laughter of yokels or was
it an embodiment of the original idea defined by Bishop John H.
Vincent : “Self-improvement in all our faculties, for all, through all
time, a people's idea, a progressive idea, a millenial idea?”® With
its talent ranging from Billy Sunday to Herbert Hoover and from
the Swiss Bell Ringers to Galli-Curci, was it truly a “People's Uni¬
versity” or was it a kind of sanctioned circus ?
Wisconsin's answer was clear. Both lyceum and Chautauqua
offered great educational opportunity and the University set about
to demonstrate that potential in its extension offerings.
There was precedent for the development of a university-spon¬
sored Chautauqua at Wisconsin. Gould's recent book demonstrates
the relationship between Lake Chautauqua and the universities.
This relationship was strongest first at the newly-formed Univer¬
sity of Chicago under William Rainey Harper, but with his death
in 1906, leadership in adult education passed to the University of
Wisconsin.^ Says Creese : “If one were thoroughly acquainted with
the experience of these two universities he would know almost the
whole story of university extension in this country.''^®
As with the commercial agencies, the foundation for Chautauqua
was laid by the lyceum movement. Wisconsin was one of four state
universities to carry on a university-sponsored lyceum program
sharing its lyceum talent with Minnesota and North Dakota.^^
By 1909, John J. Pettijohn was reporting to Dean Reber of the
Wisconsin Extension Division that, “these commercial lecture and
entertainment courses usually called lyceum courses will provide
an avenue through which the University may bring its valuable in¬
formation, its culture, and its inspiration to the people of the state
and furthermore I believe these lyceum courses are in themselves
of sufficient educational, recreational and spiritual value to he
worthy of institutionalizing by public taxation” [Italics in the
original] Pettijohn stated a few years later that upon this 1909 re¬
port was built the beginnings of the University lyceum.^^
Georg-e S. Dalgrety, “Chautauqua’s Contribution to American Life,’’ Current History
XXXIV (April, 1931), 59.
® Gregory Mason, “Chautauqua, its Technique,’’ American Mercury, I (March, 1924),
274.
® Joseph E. Gould, The Chautauqua Movement (State University of New York,
1961).
^ James Creese, The Extension of University Teaching (New York, 1941) p. 40.
Creese noted that four prominent Lake Chautauqua members moved on to the univer¬
sities and were responsible for much of extension development there. Those moving
to Chicago, besides Harper, included Frederick Starr, (Chautauqua Registrar, who
became Professor of Anthropology ; and George Vincent, Vice President of Lake Chau¬
tauqua and Manager of the Chautauqua Press, who was made Professor of Sociology.
To Wisconsin in 1892 went Richard T. Ely as Professor of Political Economy. His
strong leadership was to continue there until 1925.
iiNoffsinger, p. 133.
^As reported by Pettijohn in a speech “University Extension Lyceum” delivered
before the International Lyceum Association Convention in Chicago, September 17,
1913. The speech was published in pamphlet form.
162 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
By 1913 Pettijohn could report in an address before the Inter¬
national Lyceum Convention, that the University of Wisconsin had
provided in the past year over four hundred lyceum lectures and
over two hundred dates filled by concert companies. Said he : “When
education is the guiding motive, instead of dividends, the lyceum
and Chautauqua will step up in line with libraries, art galleries and
museums. It will form part of our great expanding educational
system.’'^®
Pettijohn resigned that same year and was replaced by Paul H.
Voelker. Voelker not only expanded the lyceum service by using
non-university talent, but saw the opportunity for a university-
conducted Chautauqua. After all, the administrative structure was
already in existence. The lyceum programs were being scheduled
by six extension districts throughout the state. If lyceum was
successful in the winter, wasn’t Chautauqua, as someone once
said, merely lyceum in the light pongee of summer?
So the Chautauqua began. Its aim, according to the Report of the
Board of Regents was “to satisfy the growing demand among all
classes in America for education in connection with recreational
opportunities.”^^ The first circuit, in the summer of 1915, was to
include twenty towns.
The district representatives had done a good job of promotion
and the local newspapers looked forward eagerly to what was
called, “Wisconsin Week.” Said an editorial in the Evansville Re-
vieiv for May 20, 1915 : “We in Wisconsin ought to be glad that our
great University has entered the Chautauqua field. It is one of the
best things it ever did.” In Bayfield the Bayfield Progress looked
forward to a “feast of good things” and proclaimed itself “The
Chautauqua City of Chequamegon Bay.”^® In Ripon the editor of
the Weekly Press after complaining that a great many had nearly
choked trying to pronounce the name Chautauqua, proclaimed it
“good for the blues and will drive away any grouch.”^^ And said
the editor of the Bloomer Advance in the wonderful prose of the
small town editor: “Most of the towns and cities in the better parts
of Wisconsin will this year have Chautauqua, the people’s univer¬
sity and recreation period, combined in one great jollification.”^®
The newspapers stressed over and over again that University
Chautauqua was a non-profit operation and thus it could bring
Ibid.
1^ “With the opening’ of the year 1912-1913, the placing of lecture and entertainment
courses was transferred to the districts.” Biennial Report of the University Regents,
1914-1916. The districts included Milwaukee, Oshkosh, La Crosse, Superior, Wausau
and Eau Claire.
Bienriial Report, 1914-1916, p. 191.
Bay field Progress, December 17, 1914 ; July 22, 1915.
Ripon Weekly Py'ess, July 1, 1915,
Bloomer Advance, June 10, 1915.
1963] Miller — Chautauqua and Wisconsin Idea 163
better talent at lower cost than had been possible with the com¬
mercial kind.
The arrangements were similar for all the communities. Each
town paid the University one thousand dollars for the program.
For this payment the University sent a large-sized tent seating
1200, with platform, chairs and electric lamps, a smaller tent to
enclose the two; a corps of four workers who remained in the
community for six days and gave platform talks, conducted round
table discussions, lead in community singing, displayed educa¬
tional motion pictures and told the children stories and taught
them games.
In addition, the University provided two popular programs
every day for six days, each program preceded by a musical or
literary prelude. Each community was amply supplied with adver¬
tising matter. It was originally estimated that it would require 26
days to 'give the six-day program in 21 towns. (One town later
dropped out.)
This arrangement meant that seven tents and similar sets of
equipment were required since it took one day to transport and set
up the gear. Thus the Chautauqua would leap-frog its way around
the state for as one community ended its program each day, a new
Chautauqua opened someplace else. This was the basic principle of
the commercial circuit Chautauqua, of course, and it was this cir¬
cuit idea which made the peripatetic university economically
possible.
A look at the program for that 1915 Chautauqua reveals that its
talent was almost identical with one of the better six-day commer¬
cial circuits.
One is surprised to find only one University of Wisconsin lecturer
featured although certainly an outstanding one. While Chautauqua
programs were not given to the use of litotes, in the brochures sent
out by the Extension Division, William H. Kiekhoefer, then As¬
sistant Professor of Political Economy, was billed as “A typical
American.” One other Madisonian was on the list of lecturers. He,
too, was well-known for his speaking. This was Reverend Father
H. C. Hengell, the Irish pastor of University St. Paul’s Chapel in
Madison. Other lecturers were standard attractions on the commer¬
cial circuits. One of these was Dr, William Forbush, organizer of
the Knights of King Arthur, called the largest boy fraternity in
the world. Forbush’s topic was 'The Boy Problem.”^®
Other speakers included Congressman James Manahan of Min¬
nesota, who had served during the preceding term in the U. S.
The Boy Scout movement was incorporated in this country, February 9, 1910, and
received much of its imputus from the Chautauqua movement. See my article “The
Chautauqua in Lansing-,’’ Michigan History, XL (September, 1956), 268.
164 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
House of Representatives ; William Bruce Leffingwell, a travel lec¬
turer, who showed slides and talked about “Seeing America First”
and Edwin W. Lanham, billed as “sometimes a historian, some¬
times a poet, sometimes a scientist, often a humorist, but always
an orator.” Finally there was Lincoln Wirt, the former Territorial
Superintendent of Public Instruction in Alaska, and a long time
Chautauqua and lyceum lecturer.
These speakers were supplemented, for parts of the tour, by
Congressman William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma
speaking on “The Philosophy of the Plow” and on several occa¬
sions by Wisconsin’s Robert LaFollette giving his famous lecture
on popular government. In addition Dean Louis Reber and Paul
Voelker from the Extension Division would visit the Chautauqua
from time to time.
Providing entertainment was Thatcher’s Symphony Orchestra
of twenty pieces.^® Others included a dramatic company of five
members, a male quartet complete with readings and the inevitable
Swiss bells, and the Tuskegee Institute Singers, a group of eight
students from that institution and billed as the best Negro singers
in the world. (It was worth the cost of a season ticket, said the ad¬
vertising copy, to hear them singing, “The Watermelon Hanging on
the Vine.”)
Two reels of motion pictures were shown after the lecture each
night. The Evansville Revietv said of these : “It is quite a relief to
see no one pushed off a cliff or something.” Instead, reported that
newspaper somewhat vaguely: “Scenes of birds — various and un¬
usual birds of all sorts, doing all sorts of things.
The circuit began in Madison on July 1, the first Chautauqua
Madison had had since the days of the Monona Assembly. The big
tent was set up in front of the Historical Society library. President
Van Hise came down to tell the audience, “I shall never be content
until the University becomes a beneficient influence to every family
in the state.” George Vincent, President of the University of Minne¬
sota, also spoke. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray told this audience, “Pre¬
paredness is the surest protection against war.” Even with these
famous names, though, bad weather and the great number of at¬
tractions going on in the University community put attendance far
below expectations.^-
The first week had its share of troubles. In La Crosse, where
the Chautauqua opened on July 4th, wind and rain collapsed the
big tent just an hour before the afternoon performance was to
begin. The program moved over to the smaller exhibition tent and
CO “The bigg-est that has ever come to Bloomer.” Bloomer Advance, July 22, 1915.
-^Evansville Review, July 15, 1915.
-- Wisconsin State Journal, July 2, 1915.
1963]
Miller— Chautauqua and Wisconsin Idea^
165
the show went on. The first speaker noting the torrential down¬
pour going on outside said, 'T have been asked to make a dry
speech to offset the weather.” Professor Kiekhoefer hopped up on
a chair, which he noted was the smallest platform he had ever
spoken from, and opened his remarks like this : ‘T am going to lec¬
ture to you on “The Springs of Happiness” and Fll wager that
there is no place in Copeland Park where you would be happier
than you are right here.” And if the stringed instruments of the
orchestra sounded a little strange in the damp weather--=well, that
was Chautauqua- — university of otherwise.
And so the Chautauqua went—to such towns as Tomah and what
is now Wisconsin Rapids, to Stevens Point, Ripon and Antigo, to
Ladysmith and Bloomer and Rice Lake, to Bayfield and Superior,
and down again to Delevan and Racine and Evansville.
As with the commercial Chautauqua, it was best received in the
smaller, more isolated areas. Typical was Bayfield, a village on the
shores of. Lake Superior, where University Chautauqua played
from July 17 to July 22, 1915. Twenty citizens had underwritten
the thousand dollar cost and had set up a number of committees to
get ready. One hundred rooms had been made available and ar¬
rangements had been made to meet all trains and boats. Two hun¬
dred fifty children had registered for the morning games and or¬
ganized play. Catering systems had been set up in the court house
to handle the overflow crowds. The cost of the three meals was one
dollar per day.
The Chautauqua opened on Sunday morning with Union serv¬
ices, two speakers and a chorus of fifty voices including singers
from Ashland and Washburn.
Next day Professor Kiekhoefer told the packed tent that: “It is
not enough to say this will be the last great war ; to effect that end
some kind of international organization must be established.” In
another lecture entitled, “Crusades of Today” he suggested these
topics as being crusades he was for: Peace, Women's Suffrage,
Eugenics, Temperance and the Labor Movement, Those crusades he
was against included Commercialism, Progressivism and Socialism.
Paul F, Voelker, who had appeared the previous winter on Bay¬
field's lyceum program, came up from Madison to talk on “Joan
of Arc.” The Bayfield Progress reported that he held his audience
spellbound.^®
By week's end the Chautauqua was over and the local headline
on July 22 read: “First Chautauqua a Grand Success,” The editor
said the entertainment furnished was of sterling quality and re¬
ported plans to make Bayfield a permanent Chautauqua city.
Bayfield Progress, July 22, 1915,
166 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
The University Chautauqua returned to Bayfield in 1916 as it
did to twenty-one other towns in the state. The Mayor proclaimed
it Chautauqua Week and in spite of intense heat and a storm on
Saturday night (weather was always the bane of Chautauqua) the
thousand dollar guarantee was met. The Chief of Police kept tabs
on the number of autos parked in front of the main tent during
the week and reported with satisfaction that a total of 247 cars
brought passengers to the Chautauqua from the adjoining county
and from cities and villages to the south. The highest total for any
one performance was Sunday afternoon when thirty-five cars stood
outside the big tent all at the same time.^^
Featured on the 1916 University Chautauqua were twenty-five
members of the University of Wisconsin band. The band had spent
the previous summer at the San Francisco World’s Fair in what
the brochures referred to as “successful competition with Sousa
and other great bandsmen.” In Bayfield the band arrived late after
a harrowing and hungry ride from Superior but the results were
apparently worth it, for said the editor rather breathlessly: “It
[the concert] was just wonderfully fine, unsurpassably superb.”^®
Speakers for this year were drawn almost entirely from com¬
mercial talent. They included Herbert S. Bigelow, city reformer
from Cincinnati, Gabriel Maguire of Boston, who had spent many
years in Central Africa as a missionary, and Burt L. Newkirk of
the University of Minnesota, who lectured on the gyroscope. New¬
kirk was representative of the popular science type of lecturer be¬
ginning to appear on the circuits. The wife of the State Superin¬
tendent of Schools, Mrs. C. P. Cary, spoke on the exceptional child.
Besides the band other musical events included the Milton College
Glee Club and Professor and Mrs. Von Geltch on the violin and
piano.
Although successful in Bayfield, reception in the twenty-one
other towns of the 1916 season was uneven. Along with the usual
difficulties of heat and storms and equipment delays experienced by
all Chautauquas, new problems were beginning to appear. The
papers were full of war news. Typical was Tomah, where Company
“K” was ready to leave for Mexico. Those who stayed home were
finding other things to do. The Tomah Monitor-Herald for June 16,
1916 had a full-page advertisement for a Maxwell touring car
which could be purchased at the Central Hardware Company for
$655. The Unique Theater was showing three reels of “What Dorris
Did” for just ten cents.
-^Bayfield Progress, July 25, 1916.
Bay field Pi'ogress, July 18, 1916.
1963]
Miller— Chautauqua and Wisconsin Idea
167
In Evansville, which claimed the oldest lyceum course in the
state dating from 1882, a commercial Redpath Chautauqua took
the place of University Chautauqua in 1916.^®
In Dele van, the Dele van Assembly brought Wisconsin Week
Chautauqua to its Eighteenth Assembly season in 1915 but tried
an entirely new program in 1916 entitled, “Walworth County Com¬
munity Week’' which, while elaborately planned, proved no more
successful.^^
University Chautauqua was just about over. The summer of 1917
saw a modified program of Chautauqua constructed around “pa¬
triotic inspiration and instruction with reference to the war emer-
gencies”2® but this was the last year. An item in the Extension Di¬
vision’s Biennial Report published on July 1, 1918, gives this terse
account: “The results [of Chautauqua] were quite satisfactory
but the financial outlay was so great, considering the small number
of communities that were reached, that it was felt that the general
community betterment was not far-reaching enough to justify the
time, money, and energy expended.”^^
Ill
In retrospect. University Chautauqua was a daring idea, quite in
keeping with the leadership in extension work for which the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin was becoming so well known. Its similarity
to commercial Chautauqua provides us with tangible evidence that
at least at one university, educators saw in the circuit Chautauqua
an educationally worthwhile venture and a force for good in the
life of the small towns. At the same time that similarity to the cir¬
cuits provided the seeds for its own destruction for, even though it
was a non-profit university service, the cost of using commercial
talent and the limited one-month season brought the price of a
season ticket to $1.50 to $2.00. This was the standard price for a
similar-length Chautauqua on the commercial circuits. The Uni¬
versity could not hope to compete against the large, well-entrenched
circuits on their own terms and it is doubtful if Wisconsin could
have continued to sponsor Chautauqua for very long even if the
war had not come along.
But the war did come and by 1917 the University and particu¬
larly the Extension Division was deeply involved in the war effort.
More than one-third of the Extension staff had gone to war and
those who were left were busy in the activities of the Red Cross,
Liberty Bond drives, instruction at military camps and in conduct-
Evansville Review, July 30, 1916.
^ Delevan Enterprise, July 15, 1916.
^Biennial Report, 1916-1918, p. 183.
^Biennial Report, 1916-1918, p. 200.
168 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ing correspondence school study programs for enlisted men. There
was simply no time for Chautauqua.
University Chautauqua’s justification and its epitaph was pro¬
vided, fittingly enough, by Dean Lighty of the Extension Division,
in his 1918 report to President Van Hise. Said he:
In the last decade, University Extension teaching has undergone as pro¬
found a change and transformation as has occurred in any field of edu¬
cation in our own times. No longer ... is this a movement only ‘for the
promotion of university teaching’ . . . but something distinct and of
itself, and possessed of a body of text materials and of teaching tech¬
niques of its own, and destined independent development. It is, there¬
fore, no longer a mere transfer of intramural teaching into an extra¬
mural setting. It is not a substitute. In fact it is no longer the extension
of university teaching but it has become extension teaching — a distinct
instrument of the democracy of our times.®"
^Biennial Report, 1916-1918, p. 177-178,
DISTRIBUTION AND ACCUMULATION OF COPPER
FOLLOWING COPPER SULFATE APPLICATION ON LAKES
C. Joseph Antonie and Wayne H. Osness
Copper sulfate has been used for the control of algae for many
years. In 1904, Moore and Kellerman^ carried on studies to de¬
termine the dosages of copper sulfate for the control of offending
types of algae. As early as 1918, copper sulfate was experimentally
applied to Madison, Wisconsin, lakes for the control of algae. In
1925, Domogalla® began an extensive treatment program on Lake
Monona and between May and September used 49,363 kilograms
of commercial copper sulfate. Since this time through 1959, ap¬
proximately .77 million kilograms of copper sulfate (CUSO45H2O)
have been applied to Lake Monona making it the most heavily
treated lake reported in the literature. (Table 1).
Numerous studies have detailed the immediate effect of copper
sulfate treatment. Woodbury, Palmer and Walton^^ found that
copper sulfate added to distilled water in a concentration of 1.5
ppm would kill largemouth black bass; however, in a duplicate ex¬
periment by Nichols^b using Lake Mendota water with an alka¬
linity of about 170 ppm, the toxicity limit was found to be about
200 ppm of commercial copper sulfate. Nichols noted that Lake
Mendota water used in the experiments dropped from pH 8.0 to pH
6.8 after the addition of 200 ppm of copper sulfate crystals. In sim¬
ilar treatment of distilled water the pH dropped to 5.6. Using these
data, Nichols indicated that much of the copper sulfate added to
lake water of notable alkalinity is precipitated as a basic copper
compound. Since the alkalinity is principally due to the calcium
and magnesium carbonates, it is reasonable to believe that the
principal copper precipitate is in a carbonate or bicarbonate form.
Nichols further studied the distribution of the precipitated cop¬
per and found the greater concentration in the profundal region.
The top layer of mud contained more copper than did deeper strata,
but penetration was noted to a depth of 1.23 meters. The highest
reported concentration was 1063 ppm in 1947 which is some¬
what less than the 9000 ppm toxicity limit to certain types of
bottom dwelling organisms reported by Machenthun® in 1952. Since
1947 approximately 27,300 additional kilograms of copper sul¬
fate have been added to Lake Monona and with the passing of
time continued seepage could increase the concentrations reported
169
170 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
Table 1. Kilograms of Copper Sulfate Applied to Dane County Lakes
by Nichols. No determinations have since been made to ascertain
whether the copper concentration is increasing or decreasing in the
bottom muds due to prolonged treatment.
This study was initiated to determine the present concentration
and distribution of copper in the bottom muds of Lake Monona
to determine the soluble copper concentration following treatment
and the effect of time on this concentration.
Procedure. To determine the copper concentration after an
elapse of time since the last application of copper sulfate, the top
2.5 cm of lake mud was compared to an inch layer 15 cm to 17.5
cm below the top. This was done to avoid the top 10 cm layer of
mud that may be subjected to constant mixing. Thus, by using the
15 cm to 17.5 cm much layer it is assumed that this was deposited
1963] Antonie and Osness — Distribution of Copper
111
mud and not a mixture similar in content to the top 2.5 cm. The
operation was carried out by careful use of an Ekman dredge with
only the two layers mentioned taken as samples.
Sampling points (Figure 1) were chosen in a definite series in
the same section of the lake to show the accumulative effect on
different depths as well as in the deepest areas. None of the
sampling points were located close to the shoreline because of the
deposits of sand and gravel in those areas.
Three similar samples were taken from Lake Mendota to be used
as controls since Lake Mendota has been treated only slightly
(Table I) and the residual copper could be assumed to be similar.
Copper Determination. One gram of the finely divided dry mud
was weighed on an analytical balance and transferred to a 300
ml, Kjeldahl flask. Twenty ml. of concentrated sulfuric acid were
added and the mixture heated almost to the boiling point of the
172 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
sulfuric acid. The sample was then digested until nearly colorless.
This operation took about 3-4 hours. The sample was then cooled
and 100 ml. of distilled water added. The insoluble residue was
removed by filtering and the sample collected in another 300 ml.
Kjeldahl flask. The clear, pale yellow filtrate was then treated
with 2 ml. of 30% hydrogen peroxide. This mixture was then di¬
gested until entirely colorless. The digest was cooled and 50 ml.
of distilled water added. The sample was neutralized with concen¬
trated ammonium hydroxide using a piece of litmus paper as an
indicator. After neutralization, the sample was again filtered to
remove the iron which was precipitated as the hydroxide after the
addition of the base. The sample was collected and stoppered in a
250 ml. Erlenmeyer flask until final treatment.
The sample containing the digested copper was transferred to
a 500 ml. separatory funnel and 5 ml. of alkaline ammonium cit¬
rate (80 ml. of concentrated ammonium hydroxide and 420 ml. of
distilled water are used to dissolve 20 grams of ammonium citrate)
and 5 ml. of sodium diethyldithiocarbamate (5% of the reagent
dissolved in distilled water) were added and the entire contents
thoroughly mixed. The copper carbamate color usually developed
rapidly, but five minutes were allowed before extraction to make
sure the formation was complete. Ten ml. of amyl acetate were
added to extract the color, and the separatory funnel was used to
sepi^rate the layers. A second 10 ml. portion was added to obtain
all of the color present in the sample and also to bring the total
extraction to exactly 20 ml.
A portion of the extraction was placed in a photometer where
the light transmission was compared to that of distilled water,
which was given a reading of 100%. The amount of color present
was compared to that of a known standard and the amount of
copper in the unknown sample computed. In cases were a large
amount of copper was present, it was necessary to dilute the ex¬
traction to 40 ml. to get an accurate reading on the photometer
scale, the reading was then doubled to get the copper content. The
copper content was computed in milligrams per gram and then
multiplied by 1000 to determine the milligrams of copper per kilo¬
gram of dry mud sample (or ppm). Table II and III give the data
that were obtained in this analysis.
Discussion of Results. As shown in Table II the amount of cop¬
per present in the top layer of mud was consistently less than that
in the layer buried 15 cm deeper in the bottom of the lake. There
were only four exceptions in the thirty samples. Two of these had
little more than the natural copper in them (samples 140 and 150).
This is explained by the fact that they were taken from the region
1963] Antonie and Osness- — Distribution of Copper 173
of the lake close to the outlet of the Yahara River and carrying
it downstream. The other two samples (80 and 100) were taken
from areas of shallow depth near an area of greater depth. This
too, may cause a scouring effect. The average copper concentration
including all samples is 327 ppm in the top inch of bottom mud
compared to 440 ppm in the 15 to 17.5 cm layer. Eight of the
samples were reanalyzed to check accuracy of the procedure. It
was found that the error averaged less than 5 ppm which is an
error of about one percent.
Evidence that the copper content is less in the upper region
would suggest that the constant settling of silt into the deeper
areas of the lake would in time cover up the heavy concentrations
of copper that were deposited at the time of application. This
covering up or “healing” process would not be complete for quite
a number of years, however, the trend is most apparent. Since
bottom organisms inhabiting the upper limits of the mud are an
important link in the food web, it seems it would be but a matter
of time before they would be living in an environment with a grad¬
ual decrease in amount of artificial copper. The data also indicate
that, after many years of copper sulfate application, the greatest
concentration of copper is found in the lake muds of the profundal
region. The resulting covering-up process tends to take place more
rapidly in this area.
Table 2. Total Copper Content in the Bottom Muds of Lake Monona at Various Depths (Table Samples number
Ending in 0 is the Top 2.5 cm Portion and the Sample Numbers Ending in 1 is the 15 to 17.5 cm Deep Portion)
174 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
00
O'
tx. ro
>rs tx
— < K. r<i vn 00 O'
00 — I ^ O
O 00
nO 00 00
— ' ' — ' tx.
O — O'- O — '
ITS U-s O O t\
O —
00 00
O — «
O' O'
O— O— < O— O— '
OO — r<ir<i
O —
O O
' O yrsOO O'
—I
O
00 O'
r<i ro
O 00 — '
ITS
iTN fS
tr\ O O'
'—00 O 00 '—
O — O —
ro r<i
O'— O'- O'— O'- o — <
OO — ^ rOrO
Average: 0 numbered samples — 327.
1 numbered samples — 440.
1963] Antonie and Osness- — Distribution of Copper
175
Table 3. Total Copper Content in the Bottom Muds of Lake Mendota at
Various Depths (The Sample Number Ending in 0 is the Top 2.5 cm
Portion and the Sample Number Ending in 1 is the 15 to 17.5
cm Inch Deep Portion)
References
1. Anonymous. Copper Sulfate in the Eliminati onof Rough Fish (1933).
2. Committee on Water Pollution (Wis.) Report on the hCemical Treat¬
ment of Lakes and Streams with Special Reference to the Origin and
Control of Swimmers Itch. 1939.
3. Domogalla, B. D. 1926. Treatment of algae and weeds in Lakes at Madi¬
son, Wisconsin. Engineering News Record, 97:24, 950-954.
4. Doudoroff, P. and Katz, M. Critical review of literature on the toxicity
of industrial wastes and their components to fish. Sewage and Industrial
Wastes, Vol. 25, No. 7, 1953.
5. Hasler, a. D. Antibiotic Aspects of Copper Treatment of Lakes. Wis.
Acad, of Sci. Arts and Let. Vol. 39, pp. 97-103, 1949.
6. Mackenthun, K. M. and Cooley, H, The Biological Effect of Copper Sul¬
fate Treatmen ton Lake Ecology. Wis. Acad, of Sci. Arts and Let. Vol.
41, pp. 177-187, 1952.
7. Mackenthun, K. M. and Herman, E. F. A Heavy Mortality of Fishes
Resulting from the Decomposition of Algae, the Yahara River, Wis¬
consin. Trans. Amer. Fish Soc., Vol. 75. pp. 175-180, 1945.
8. Mackenthun, K. M, A Report on the Use of Chemicals on Lakes, Ponds,
and Streams for the Control of Algae, Weeds, and Other Aquatic Nuis¬
ances. The Chemical Control of Aquatic Nuisance, 1958.
9. Moore, George T. and Kellerman, Karl F. 1904. A method of destroying
or preventing the growth of algae and certain pathogenic bacteria in
water supplies. Bulletin 64: 15-44, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S. De¬
partment of Agriculture.
10. Moyle, John B. The Use of Copper Sulfate for Algae Control and its
Biological Implications, Amer. Soc. for Adv. of Sci., pp. 79-87, 1949.
11. Nichols, M., Henkel, T., McNall, D. Copper in Lake Muds from Lakes
of The Madison Area. Wis. Acad, of Sci. Arts and Let. Vol 38, 1947.
12. Speirs, Murray J. Summary of Lit. on Aquatic Weed Control, Canadian
Fish Culturist, 3: (4), 20-32 Aug. 1948.
NATURAL LAW AS CHAUCER’S ETHICAL ABSOLUTE
Gareth W. Dunleavy
This essay advances overlooked sources for Chaucer’s exposure
to the lawe of kinde^ defined today as a ‘‘standard of right inde¬
pendent and supreme over the will of man,” a law both autonomous
and spontaneous that proclaims “in every time and place ... a
right course of action, one eternal, immutable. It will argue that
allusions to natural law particularly in the General Prologue of the
Canterbury Tales reflect the impact of this doctrine on Chaucer.
Consequently, the evidence here will support the probability that
the poet was one of those “that weren of lawe expert and curious.”^
This juridical and theological concept, a legacy from the classi¬
cal and medieval eras, is alive in English law, in the post-war jur¬
isprudence of West Germany and elsewhere on the Continent.^
Natural law enjoys a life of its own in Black's Law Dictionary and
survives somewhat tenuously in the United Nations’ Draft Declaror-
tion of Rights and Duties of States.^ As in Chaucer’s time, it en¬
joys protected status as one of the pair of commandments on which
“hang all the Law and the Prophets” and by St. Paul’s pronounce¬
ment in Romans II, 14-15, that those having not the law, are a
“law unto themselves” if they do naturally those things contained
lA New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. J. A. H. Murray (Oxford,
1901). For a discussion of the relationship of the Law of Nature to the term and
concept natura in its mediaeval context, see C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cam-
bridg-e, 1960), pp. 58-62. Lewis writes: “On the one hand, if nature is thoug-ht of
mainly as the real (opposed to convention and leg'al Action) and the laws of nature
as those which enjoin what is really g-ood and forbid what is really bad (as opposed
to the pseudo-duties which bad governments praise and reward or the real virtues
which they forbid and punish), then of course ‘the law of nature’ is conceived as an
absolute moral standard against which the laws of all nations must be judged and
to which they ought to conform.'*
3 F. M. Taylor, “The Law of Nature,” Annals of the Amei'ican Academy of Political
and Social Science, I (1890), 560, 577.
3 J. M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York, 1926), pp. 7-18. Cited here¬
after as ‘Manly.’ See D. S. Bland, “Chaucer and the Inns of Court : A Re-examina¬
tion,” English Studies, XXXIII (1952), 3-4; R. J. Schoeck, “A Legal Reading of
Chaucer's Hous of Fame/’ University of Toronto Quarterly, XXIII (1953-54), 185-
192, suggests that Chaucer “wrote his Hous of Fame for one of the ritualistic func¬
tions of the Inner Temple.” See also, the same author’s “Gerard Legh, Herald,” Notes
and Queries, CC (1955), p. 140,
* On the strong link between “natural law” and the term “natural justice” as applied
in English courts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see H. H. Marshall,
Natural Justice (London, 1959), pp. 6-20. Gottfried Dietze, “Natural Law in the
Modern European Constitutions,” Natural Law Forum, I (1956), 73-91; also, Frieherr
von der Heydte, “Natural Law Tendencies in Contemporary German Jurisprudence,”
Natural Law Forum, I, 115-121.
^ The Law of Nations, ed. H. W. Briggs, 2nd ed. (New York, 1952), pp. 15-16. The
Draft Declaration “appears to reAect the natural law approach of inherent (basic)
rights of states. . .
177
178 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
in the law. Anthropologists and sociologists define natural law as
“supernatural intuitionalism” and a force “not subject to objec¬
tive determination,” while at the same time being forced to admit
it as a cultural fact and a determinative force in the law systems
of primitive societies.® Over forty years ago, Justice Holmes crit¬
icized for their naivete those jurists who believed in natural law.”^
Today, however, Chroust writes that no criticism “can ever succeed
in denying the immemorial merits and ideological importance of
Natural Law, which are to be found in the sublime meaning of its
honest quest for an enduring ultimate in a world perennially con¬
tingent and confusingly relative.”®
The Middle Ages is marked by a continuing effort to reduce
the antithesis between positive law typified by “givenness” and
natural law, the law that ought to be, uncritical in one sense yet
admirable in that it holds consistently to “an ultimate principle of
fitness with regard to the nature of man as a rational and social
being which is or ought to be, the justification of every form of
positive law.”® The literature and thought of Greece, largely de¬
voted to the dignity of man, gave rise to natural law and its stress
on moral principles derived from the nature of man and the need
for translating those principles into positive law. The idea of posi¬
tive laws founded on natural-law morality was taken up by the
Roman Jurists and then assimilated into Christian thought.^® From
the fifth through the tenth centuries the Greek and Roman con¬
cept of natural law survived in glosses and etymologies such as
those of Bishop Isidore of Seville.^^ At the outset of the Decretum
of Gratian (c. 1143) natural law is identified with the law of God,
for the church did not remain aloof to Aristotle, Cicero and Jus¬
tinian — important figures in the rediscovery of classical learning
during the “lesser Renaissance” of the twelfth century.^" Gratian
stated : “Natural law is the law common to all peoples, in that it is
« E. A. Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man ( Cambridg-e, Mass., 1954), p. 5. See also
Jacques Ellul, The Theological Foundation of Law, trans. M. Wieser (Garden City,
1960), pp. 27-28.
O. W. Holmes, “Natural Law,” Harvard Laio Review, XXXII (1918-19), p. 41.
See The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes, ed. M. Lerner (Boston, 1943), p. 369.
Nevertheless, in S. Pacific Co. vs. Jensen, Holmes refers to a “higher law,” a “brood¬
ing omnipresence in the sky.”
® A. H. Chroust, “On the Nature of Natural Law,” Interpretations of Modern Legal
Philosophies, ed. Paul Sayre (New York, 1947), p. 80. Cited as ‘Chroust’
9 P. Pollock, “The History of the Law of Nature: A Preliminary Study,” Journal of
the Society of Comparative Legislation, H (1900), 418. Cited as ‘Pollock.’
See J. Leclerq, “Suggestions for Clarifying Natural Law,” Natural Law Forum,
II (1957), particularly pp, 66-73. Cited as ‘Leclerq.’
See Etymologiae, V, 4, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris,
1850), LXXXII, Col. 199. Also, P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Eiirope (Ox¬
ford, 1929), p. 37. Cited as ‘Vinogradoff.” See O. Lottin, Le Droit Naturel, 2nd ed.
(Bruges, 1931), pp. 9-11. Cited as ‘Lottin.’ As early as 1159, John of Salisbury in his
political treatise, Pgiyci^aticus IV, 7, reflected the medieval tradition of natural law
doctrine as yet unaffected by new contact with Aristotle’s Politics. See Joannis
Sarest)eriensis Opera Omnia, ed. J. A. Giles (Oxford, 1848), HI, p. 241.
1^ Pollock, 422.
1963]
Dunleavy — Natural Laiv
179
everywhere held by the instinct of nature, not by any enactment:
as for instance, the union of man and woman, the generation and
rearing of children, the common possession of all things and the
one liberty of all men, the acquisition of those things which are
taken from air and sky and sea; also the restitution of an article
given in trust or money loaned, and the repelling of force with
force. For this, or whatever is similar to this, is never considered
unjust, but natural and equitable.
Chaucer’s first mention of Jurisprudentia perennis appears in
the Book of the Duchess:
And in this book were written fables
That clerkes had in olde tyme,
And other poets, put in rime
To rede, and for to be in minde,
While men loved the lawe of kinde. {B D 52-56)^^
Chaucer’s “clerkes” and “poets” include Homer, whose heroes were
accorded the hospitality and protection due suppliants, thus pleas¬
ing Zeus (however, this moral duty was not performed for Ulysses
at the hands of Circe in Bo IV, m. 3). Although there is no proof
that Chaucer knew his work, Sophocles had made the conflict be¬
tween moral law, the idea of the “really right” and positive law,
the law of the political ruler, the basis for the Antigone, Antigone
cries of “Unwritten laws, eternal in the heavens. Not of today or
yesterday are these, but live from everlasting, and from whence
they spring, none knoweth.”^^
Whether “twenty bookes ... of Aristotle and his philosophie”
lay at Chaucer’s own “beddes heed” is problematical, but in one of
the Clerk’s books lay this definition of the lawe of kinde: “Now
there are two kinds of laws, particular and general. By particular
laws I mean those established by each people in reference to them¬
selves, which again are divided into written and unwritten; by
general laws I mean those based upon nature. In fact, there is a
general idea of just and unjust in accordance with nature, as all
men in a manner divine, even if there is neither communication nor
agreement between them,” (Rhetoric I, 1373b 2)^®
Decretum Gratiana (Paris, 1601), Distinctiones I, c. 7. Translation is by E. Lewis
in Medieval Political Ideas (New York, 1954), I, 33. Cited as ‘Lewis.’ See M. Villey,
“Le Droit Nature! chez Gratien,” Studia Gratiana^ III (1954), 85-99.
All citations from Chaucer in text are from The Worhs of Geoffrey Chaucer^ ed.
F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
An Anthology of Greek Drama, ed. C. A. Robinson, Jr. (New York, 1949 ), p. 115.
See Leclerq, pp. 76-77 : “When Antigone opposes the rights of conscience to the
tyrant's decree and speaks of eternal laws, she is talking of moral laws.”
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans, John H. Freese (London, 1926), pp. 139-141,
See Max Shellens, “Aristotle on Natural Law,” Natural Law Forum, IV (1959), p. 81:
“The aim of the Rhetoric in regard to natural law, is to show that the term natural
law is in vogue and that from a certain point of view it is considered an advantage
to make use of its emotional appeal .... No judgment is passed on natural law. He
merely introduces us to a catchword without discussing its moral significance.” Shel¬
lens points out that the Magna Moralia and Nicomachean Ethics go deeper than this.
180 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
The Franklin’s ‘‘Marcus Tullius Scithero” had written in Tus-
culan Disputations of a “divine power” and a “divine nature”
which has its basis not in laws and decreesd^ In the Republic (III,
xxii, 33) Plato stresses the universality of law since it is based
upon the common nature of men. Its eternal and immutable aspects
stem from its endorsement by God. This doctrine — the jus naturae
of the Roman jurists — later was incorporated into canon law, the
body of legal rules administered by the ecclesiastical courts, as in¬
dicated in the above citation from the Decretumd^ Of the trio of
illustrious third-century Roman jurists, Chaucer mentions only the
name of Papinian “that had ben long tyme ful myghty amonges
hem of the court” (Bo III, pr. 5). Of the remaining pair. Gains and
Ulpian, the latter contributed the most in the way of natural law
theory to the massive compilation of law sponsored by that same
Justinian “eke, that made lawes.”^^
Chaucer’s rendering of Boethius from Trivet’s commentaries and
a French source probably did not appear until shortly after 1380,
but the De Consolatione Philosophiae had helped to preserve the
classical concept of the law of nature since the sixth century A.D.
Chaucer was far more than a sedulous copyist or indifferent trans¬
lator of the Boece. He read that “verray good is naturely iplauntyd
in the hertes of men, but the myswandrynge errour mysledeth hem
into false goodes” (Bo III, pr, 2). He had perhaps been influenced
to “techyn his soule that it hath, by naturel principles kyndeliche
yhyd withynne itself, al the trouthe the which he ymagineth to
ben in thinges withoute” {Bo III, m. 11).“^ Contemplative reading
of the Boece helped shape Chaucer’s view of the law of nature just
as it aided the canonists and schoolmen of the twelfth, thirteenth,
and fourteenth centuries in their task of reconciling the moral au¬
thority of the classical philosophers with the temporal authority
proclaimed in Justinian’s compilation. These scholars provided an
“identification of the law of nature with the law of God revealed
in human reason.”^^
A Dociumentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, eds. A. L. Lovejoy and
G. Boas (Baltimore, 1935), I, 256. Cited as ‘Lovejoy.’
See M. Radin, Handbook of Roman Laio (St. Paul, 1927), pp. 70-73; also A. P.
d’ Entreves, NaUiral Law (London, 1951), p. 19 and G. Tellenbach, Church, State and
Chn'istian Society, trans. R. Bennett (Oxford, 1940), p. 23.
19 The Commentaries of Gains and Rules of Ulpian trans. J. T. Abdy and B. Walker
(Cambridge, 1876), p. 1. Also, The Digest of Justinian, trans. C. H. Munro (Cam¬
bridge, 1904), I, p. 5. See E. Levy, “Natural Law in Roman Thought” Studia et
Documenta Historiae et Juris, XV (1949), 1-23.
99 Cf. also Bo III, m. 11, 11s. 38-43 ; Bo V, pr. 2, 11s. 10-15.
91 H. S. Maine, Ancient Law, new ed. (London, 1930), pp. 120-121. On the Italian
school of Post-Glossators of the fourteenth century, see R. Sohm, The Institutes, A
Text-Book of the History and System of Roman Private Law, trans. J. C. Ledlie,
2nd ed. (Oxford, 1901), pp. 144-46, 151-55. In seats at Perugia, Pavia and Padua,
the Post-Glossators forged a body of national Italian law similar to the national
Italian literature created by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Their jurisprudence was
a philosophical one “permeated by an idea which dates far back into antiquity, the
idea, namely, of a Law of Nature. ...”
1963]
Dunleavy — Natural Law
181
In an early commentary (1170) on the Decretum, Rufinus holds
that natural law is restricted to human beings rather than all
animals.22 At the hands of ecclesiastical jurists it became a law to
which Chaucer’s Troilus was subject, but not the 'proude Bayard”
who was subject only to “horses lawe” (Tr I, 223-224). St. Thomas
Aquinas posits an eternal law and the participation of this eternal
law in rational creatures is called natural law (S. T. q. 91, 2).^^ He
construes as the first precept of natural law that “good is to be
done and followed, and evil is to be avoided. And upon this are
based all other precepts of the natural law.” For Aquinas “all vir¬
tuous acts are prescribed in the law of nature, for each man’s rea¬
son dictates to him that he should act virtuously” (S. T, q. 94, 2).^^
in his De Regimine Principium, Aegidius Romanus, a student of
Aquinas, wrote of man’s natural desire for “existence and the
good” while shunning “non-existence and the bad,” emphasizing
that “other laws, whether natural or civil, originate in this and are
based on this.”-® Fourteenth century canonists worked to integrate
natural law idealism into canon law as Gratian had done in the
Decretum. Thus, when Chaucer writes in the Troilus (I, 236-238) :
“For evere it was, and evere it shal byfalle,/ That Love is he that
alle thing may bynde,/ For may no man fordon the lawe of
kynde”/ he reflects not only his debt to the De Consolatione of
Boethius, but also his church’s recognition of classical natural law
doctrine. Also, he reduces the distance between his Christian read¬
ers and the pagan Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus appreciably
more than might at first appear.^® However, we must examine the
Canterbury Tales, particularly the General Prologue and the Par¬
son’s Tale, to see Chaucer’s most skillful use of allusions to the
laive of kindeN
“Lewis, 37.
^8. Thoniae Aquino Sunima Theologiae (Ottawa, 1941), II, 1210a-1210b. See also
J. Bryce, Studies in the History of Jurisprudence (New York, 1901), II, 595. The
capstone for the work of the canonists and schoolmen in this respect is perhaps to be
seen in Tres Lihri Hodicis of the Italian Post-Glossator, Lucas de Penna (d, 1390).
Natural law is identified with divine law and becomes therefore the direct expression
and manifestation of the divine will. Cf. W. Ullman, The Medieval Idea of Law as
Represented by Lucas de Penna (London, 1946), p. 46.
^ Summa Theologiae, II, 1225a-1225b. Leclerq writes (p. 68) that St. Thomas re¬
lates all laws, eternal, natural, positive divine law and positive human law to a single
definition and “emphasizes more what unites them than what distinguishes them.”
Also, (p. 79) : In his definition of the law, “St. Thomas draws his inspiration indir¬
ectly from Roman law and directly from the canonists, who themselves followed
Roman law.”
^ Lewis, 69.
See M. W. Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde,”
PM LA, LXXII (1957), p. 19.
27 Mel* 2770-75 particularly “This is to seyn, that nature deffendeth and forbedeth
by right that no man make hymself riche unto the harm of another persone.” On
natural law and its relation to private property see B. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 28-33. See also Pars T 336; 526, “For soothly,
nature dryveth us to loven oure freendes . . . 865, 920, “This is verray mariage,
that was establissed by God, er that synne bigan, whan natureel lawe was in his
right poynt in paradys.”
182 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [VoL 52
Before moving to the Tales, two additional important sources of
Chaucer's exposure to the law of nature must be mentioned. If the
poet spent the years 1361-67 at the Inner Temple, into his hands
may have come definitions of natural law appearing in law-books
such as Bracton's De Legibus Angliae and its subsequent epitomes,
Fleta, and the Norman-French Britton, Unlike Glanvill, Bracton
had incorporated large portions of Roman law into his text, care¬
fully copying Azo of Bologna's glosses and explications of the In¬
stitutes and Code of Justinian. Bracton follows Azo very closely
in his account of the law of nature, but “omits enough to show that
he has not come in sight of those problems which Azo had to face
when he endeavoured to give a precise meaning to the term jus
naturaleT-^ Whereas canonists and canon law were not always
popular in England, the study of Roman law had never been dis¬
continued^® and the definition of the law of nature adapted from
Azo by Bracton was transmitted from one juridical writer to an¬
other close to Chaucer's time. For example, Fortescue, himself a
Sergeant of the Law, stresses in De Laudihus Legum Angliae
(1468-71) that the “laws of England, in those points which they
sanction by reason of the law of nature, are neither better nor
worse in their judgements than are all laws of other nations in
like cases. For as Aristotle said, in the fifth book of the Ethics,
'Natural Law is that which has the same force among all men'."®^
In Pecock’s Repressor (c. 1455) where the clergy is defended
against the attacks of the Lollards, we read that it is “natural re-
soun . , . and not Holi Scripture [that] is the ground of alle the
seid gouernauncis, deedis, vertues, and trouthis."'^^ Despite incom-
^ Robinson, xxv and Manly, p. 28. See n. 3, above. In this connection note Chau¬
cer’s reference to Giovanni da Lignaco (l^lO-lsgS) m the Clerk’s Prolog-'.^j, n : 34-35.
Lignaco was professor of canon law at Bologna. Well-paid, popular and influential,
he may have been known to Chaucer through arch-deacons who had gone to Bologna
from England to study canon law. See A. S. Cook, “Chaucer’s ‘Linian’,’’ Rojnanic
Review, VIII (1917). 353-382.
^Bracton and Aso, ed. F, W. Maitland [Selden Society] (London, 1895), VIII,
32—33. Cf. also C. Guterbock, Bracton and His Relation to the Roman Law, trans. B.
Coxe (Philadelphia, 1866), pp. 49, 53, 64. On Bracton’s acquaintance with Roman
law see T. P. T. Plucknett, Early English Legal Literature (Cambridge, 1958), pp.
47-48. Cited as ‘Plucknett.’
Vinogradoff, 98. Also see S. Kuttner and E. Rathbone, “Anglo-Norman Canonists
of the Twelfth Century,” Traditio, VII (1949—51), 279-358 for evidence of “the exist¬
ence in its own right of an Anglo-Norman school of canonists toward the turn of the
twelfth century.” On the introduction of Roman law to England see F. C. von Savigny,
Geschichte des Romischen Rechts im Mittelalter (Heidelberg, 1834), I, 167-171. John
Wyclif in his De officio regis (c. 1379), favors the study of English rather than
Roman law by the clergy, although he is aware of the argument that there is “more
subtle reasoning and more justice in Roman civilianship . . . [and] that it must needs
be studied if the canon law is to be understood.” See P. W. Maitland, “Wyclif on
English and Roman Law,” in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, ed.
H. A, L. Fisher (Cambridge, 1911), III. pp. 50-51.
Sir John Fortescue, De Laudihus Legum Anglie, ed. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge,
1942), p. 39.
32 The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. C, Babington [Rolls]
(London, 1860), I, 13.
1963]
Dunleavy— Natural Law
183
plete knowledge concerning the Inns of Court in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, it is likely that the student met natural law
tradition in the cases and writs recited by his teachers.®®
There is also firm reason to believe that Chaucer met the natural
law in the ethic of the dockside and trade fair known as law mer¬
chant. As the son of a wine merchant whose grandfather and step-
grandfather had also been wholesale vintners and customs officers
of the king;®^ Chaucer probably knew of law merchant long before
he assumed duties after June 12, 1374 as a controller of the cus¬
toms and subsidy of wool, woolfells, and hides in the city of Lon¬
don.®® In addition to this post, held until December, 1386, he served
with seven missions to France, Flanders and Italy—^one of these
involving the negotiation of a commercial treaty with Genoa that
would designate a port in England with special privileges for
Genoese merchants.®® The Venetian and Genoese with eastern
goods, the Italian with silks, velvet and glass, the Flemish weaver,
the Spanish iron merchant, the Gascon with wine from France,
Spain and Greece, the fur and amber traders from the Hanse
towns as well as the three chapmen in Surry “riche, and therto
sadde and trewe” were men of substance and status in medieval
society:®^ To them and to public officials like Chaucer the latve of
kinde reflected in the law merchant was a cosmopolitan and ef¬
ficacious means of insuring justice in disputes arising from trans¬
actions. To these men who “seken lond and see . . . for wynnynges,''
these “riche merchauntz, ful of wele been”®® with whom Chaucer as¬
sociated, the law merchant prevailed;®® At the Merchant’s Middle-
burgh and Orewelle, the Shipman’s Dartmouth and Bordeaux (the
Wife of Bath’s Ypres being a singular exception) the law mer¬
chant preserved in a practicable form the essence of natural law.
Like Roman law the law merchant was concerned with what was
aequum et bonum and “what was agreeable to mores or the usages
^ On some of the regrettably “unsolved mysteries of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries” reg'arding the Inns of Court, see Pension Book of ClemenPs Inn, ed. C.
Carr [Selden Society] (London, 1960), xvi-xxi. See also Plucknett, p. 114. On the per¬
sistent natural law tradition in England that extends from canon Jaw and scholastic
thinking (through Fortescue and St. Germain) to Hobbes and Locke, see Z, Epstein’s
review of H. Thieme’s Das Naturrecht und die Europdische PnvatreclitsgescMcTite
(Besel, 1 54) in Natural Law Forum, II (1957), p. 151.
Manly, 21, 27.
^IMd. 31-SS.
38/Md., 32.
T. A. Knott, “Chaucer’s Anonymous Merchant,” Philological Quarterly, I (1922),
1-16. Also Robinson, 657.
^ Prol MLT, Us, 122-133. See E. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers (Lon¬
don, 1954), pp. 239-264, for the extent of the English woolen trade in the fourteenth
century.
^ P. W. Thayer, “Comparative Law and the Law Merchant,” Brooklyn Law Review,
VI (1936-37), 41. . . The English Statute of the Staple [1358] expressly provided
that justice was to foe done [merchant strangers] according to the law merchant and
not according to common law or the special customs of any town.”
184 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
of honest and honorable people.”^® Like canon law the law merchant
emphasized natural law concepts of “equity and good faith and
the binding force of a simple promise.’’^^ The merchant of Chau¬
cer’s time once his goods had “comth . . . sauf unto the londe” thus
had recourse to a law that was versatile, expandable, and adaptable
— a law of custom.^2
Law merchant decisions were rendered quickly through neces¬
sity. The Little Red Book of Bristol (c. 1344) contains the phrase
“quod celerius deliberat se ipsam.”^^ Quick justice is prescribed
in a judicial definition of the law merchant given in 1473 where the
alien merchant “is not held to sue according to the law of the land
to abide a trial by 12 men and other solemnities of the law of the
land; but he ought to sue here and [his suit] will be determined
according to the law of Nature, in the Chancery, and he ought to
sue there from hour to hour and from day [to day] because of the
speed of the merchants etc.”^^
The law merchant was characterized also by a spirit of equity;
the merchant whose grievance was settled at a staple, fair or pie¬
powder court'^® could be sure that his fellow merchants serving as
court members were not particularly litigious-minded men.^® They
arrived at prompt decisions based on plain justice and good faith
with a disregard for abstruse technicalities that would have
shocked the Manciple’s “heep of lerned men” who belonged to the
Temple.
Most important, the law merchant was international in character
and hence true to that tradition of the law of nature. Staple and fair
courts were composed of laymen who might perform their duty at
Antwerp one month and find themselves sitting at St. Ives or
Ipswich six months later.^" For a dozen years Chaucer associated
A. T. Carter, “The Early History of the Law Merchant in England,” The Law
Qimrterly Review, XVII (1901), 240. Cited as ‘Carter.’
W. Mitchell, An Essay on the Early History of the Law Merchant (Cambridge,
1904), p. 158. Cited as ‘Mitchell.’
Mitchell, 10-12. Cf. also The Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. P. B. Bickley (Bristol,
1900), I, 60. Cited as ‘Bickley.” The force of custom in the law merchant is acknowl¬
edged here : “. . . set apponitur adhuc le affldauit propter antiquam consuetudinem.”
^Bickley. I, 58.
^Select Cases Concerning the Laiv Merchant, ed. H. Hall [Selden Society] (London,
1930), 46, Ixxxv-lxxxvi.
^ See Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, ed. C. D. DuCange (Paris, 1845),
V, 172. Also The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. T. Twiss [Rolls] (London, 1873),
II, 23 for entry regarding the piepowder court at Ipswich which dealt with “the plees
be twixe straunge folk that man clepeth pypoudrous.” See Select Cases Concerning the
Law Merchant, ed. C. Gross [Selden Society] (London, 1908), I, 107—109. Also T. E.
Scrutton, The Influence of Roman Law on the Law of England (Cambridge, 1885),
p. 177. (Cross’s treatment of the piepowder court remains the best. See “The Court of
Piepowder,” The Quarterly Joumval of Economics, XX (1906), 231-249. The institu¬
tion was extant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jonson refers to it in
Bartholomew Fair and Defoe mentions “pyepowder courts” in the Tour Through Great
Britain first published in 1724.
Bickley. I, 70.
Carter, 235.
1963]
Dunleavy— Natural Law
185
with international merchants — men for the most part dealing in
“marchandise . . . that oon is honest and leveful” according to the
Parson; “as God had ordeyned that a regne or a contree is suffi-
saunt to hymself, thanne is it honest and leveful that of habun-
daunce of this contree, that men helpe another contree that is
moore nedy’’ (Pars T 776-777). And Chaucer knew merchants to
be of many types. There was the shrewd risk=taker depicted in the
General Prologue “sownynge alwey th’encrees of his wynnyng;''
the Shipman’s merchant of St. Denys who was ready to settle all
debts according to tally the “marchant [who] deliteth hym
moost in chaffare that he hath moost avantage of.”^^ Among such
men Chaucer had observed the practical application of natural law
principles in the settling of disputes quickly and fairly in England
and on the Continent. During his civil career Chaucer saw a law
possessing the minimum “givenness” exerting maximum force in
behalf of equity and fairness in transactions among men of power
and prestige in the secular world.®®
In ironic contrast to the merchants and their relatively informal
judicial procedures based on natural law, stand certain characters
of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Both the Friar and the
Summoner are members of a group whose daily lives were gov¬
erned by canon law, a form of positive law that incorporates nat¬
ural law idealism. Yet had either the Friar or the Summoner
planned it, they could not have flouted natural law precept more
completely.®^ Neither the Friar’s instincts nor his reason dictated
to him that he should act virtuously. On the contrary he thwarts
the purpose and function of marriage as set forth at the head of
the Decretum in the basest way. He makes personal gain at the
expense of widows, and exploits the institution of the “love day”
(Gen Prol 258) for his own profit.®" It is here in his characteriza¬
tion of the Friar that Chaucer points up the extent of that worthy’s
^Debt by tally was a contract according- to the law merchant. Cf. Gen Prol 570.
Note that the Man of Law has heard his tale from a merchant and merchants are in
its background. See Mary Eliason, “The Peasant and the Lawyer,” Studies in P'hil-
ology, 48 (1951), pp. 525-26.
^^Pars r 850.
For the limited extent to which the law merchant was positive law see W. Holds-
worth, A History of English Law, 7th ed. rev. (London, 1956). I, 527-28; also Carter,
234-35.
51 Cf, Pollock, 423, who points out that the essence of Gratian’s opening definition
is that “the Law of Nature is nothing else than the Golden Rule comprised in the
Law and the Gospels which bids us to do as we would be done by and forbids the
contrary.” The binding force of Gratian’s definition for canon law long after the
Decretum itself had been superseded seems obvious. On the acceptance of canon law
by English courts Christian, see F. W. Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church
of England (London, 1898), pp. 1-4.
“J. W. Spargo, “Chaucer’s Love-Days,” Syeculum, XV (1940), 36-56. According to
J. W, Bennett, “The Mediaeval Loveday,” Speculum, XXXIII (1958), 370: “The funda¬
mental weakness of the mediaeval institution lay in the canon law principle, ‘Hoc enim
ad officium Praelati spectat ut discordantes sive Clericos sive Laicos magis ad pacem
quam ad Judicium coerceant.’ There can never be any lasting peace without justice.”
186 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
departure from natural law ideals, A cleric like the Parson could
be expected to refrain from further corrupting the 'dove day/’ with
its emphasis on natural law attributes of good faith, honesty and
out-of-court arbitration. It is doubly ironic that the Friar whose
calling is governed by laws tempered with natural law idealism
not only breaks those laws but joins in the debasement of a judicial
process that invokes the spirit of the lawe of kinde.
The Summoner, a petty officer of an ecclesiastical court, has the
duty of administering canonical justice from the same body of
positive law that ostensibly commands obedience of the Friar. How¬
ever, the Summoner’s own unethical operations, his amusing re¬
peated shrilling of the legal tag "Questio quid iuris”®^ allow Chau¬
cer to supply more than a hint of the corruption besetting at least
one ecclesiastical court.^^ It is the Parson, he who "Cristes gospel
trewely wolde preche” (Gen Prol 481), who restores faith in the
ecclesiastics, for he shows a strict and literal acceptance of the
Golden Rule and the Decalogue,®^
At least two other members of the party, the Sergeant and the
Franklin, are directly associated with positive law—secular not
canon. However, law is chiefly decision, statute, and case to Chau¬
cer’s Sergeant. Chaucer has us understand this holder of "pleyn
commissioun” to be a walking legal lexicon with an extraordinary
retentive memory and the talent for exploiting it for his own best
interest. Thus had he used the law to earn himself many "fees and
robes” and with them, social status close to that held by the Knight.
Although the Franklin exhibits openhanded hospitality in the old¬
est natural law tradition, his legal learning was primarily that
needed for the conduct of his duties as a "shirreve” and "contour.”
He draws on this learning in the telling of his tale "much of the
dramatic force of which relies on legal perceptions, and the recita¬
tion of which is couched at times in semi-legal language,”^® but
the Franklin does not seem the type to hold himself strictly to nat¬
ural law ideas.
It is worth noting that the two most complete Christians whom
Chaucer presents in the Prologue (aside from the Parson) lead
their lives according to the lawe of kinde. In a day when man-made
laws of chivalry are close to becoming ' superannuated, the Knight
independently adheres to the natural law concept of "trouthe and
honour” translated to mean "sense of honor, honorable dealing.”®*
W. Spargo, “Questio Quid luris,” Modern Language Notes, LXII (1947), 121.
^ For an analysis of one Court Christian and the apparitors who “acted as a kind
of ecclesiastical g-estapo,” see B. L. Woodcock, Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts in the
Diocese of Canterhihry (Bondon, 1952), pp. 49, 112.
55 Cf. fn. 27.
5® R. Blenner-Hassett, “Autobiographical Aspects of Chaucer’s Franklin,” Speculum,
XXVIII (1953), 793.
5^ Robinson, 652.
187
1963] Dunleavy — Natural Law
Moreover, we learn of the Knight:
He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde
In al his lyf unto no maner wight. (Gen Prol 70-71)
Closely related to the knight and to the Parson by his ideal Christ¬
ian conduct and by blood is the Plowman, whom Chaucer depicts
in the lines:
God loved he beste with al his hoole herte
At alle tymes, thogh him gamed or smerte,
And thanne his neighbor right as hymselve.
{Gen Prol 533-35)
There is irony in the fact that the Knight and the Plowman live
in honesty and charity in contrast to the ecclesiastics whose voca¬
tion is governed in part by natural law idealism.
Other echoes of the lawe of kinde appear in the Chaucer canon,
as in the Parliament of Fowls where nature appears before the
birds^ assembly as the “vicaire of the almyghty Lord’^ to implement
in a benign way her ‘‘Ryghtful ordenaunce'’ that birds and beasts
must choose their mates and rear their young.®® The sorting out
and interpreting of all the poePs allusions to natural law calls for
fuller study, but the evidence developed so far suggests that for
Chaucer the lawe of kinde was more than a theological common¬
place, or a dusty inheritance from the Alfredian Boethius lingering
on in Cursor Mundi. In the Boece, in the law merchant of the
wharfside, and possibly, in dialogues between teacher and pupil
at the Inner Temple, Chaucer recognized the lawe of kinde as the
counter-balance to the extremes of materialism and covetousness
reached by certain members of the Canterbury party and their
contemporaries.
A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules (Oxford, 1957), pp. 131—132. On this
aspect of the laxoe of kinde in Gower and Gangland, see pp. 207-209.
THE COMMEMORATIVE PROPHECY OF HYPERION
Karl Kroeber
The question which I suspect to underlie most of the objections
to Hyperion is this : can a sophisticated reader care about Apollo
and Hyperion? I believe much of Keats’s art is directed to making
a virtue out of this apparent difficulty. Because we do not care
about Apollo and Hyperion per se, we are free to respond to their
situation with an appropriate ambivalence. This freedom is not
available, for example, to readers of Paradise Lost, The meaning
of the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans must be dra¬
matically created by the poet, who cannot rely on his readers’ alle¬
giance to traditional attitudes toward the antagonists. The signifi¬
cance of his poem must evolve dynamically.^ Yet he is protected
against mere idiosyncrasy by the fact that his subject-matter de¬
rives from our oldest and most viable literary tradition.
Whether or not Hyperion is to be called an epic, its particular
characteristics may be defined by contrast with our epic tradition,
which began, it seems safe to say, in the humanising of what had
been narratives about divinities, myths.^ Much of the power in
epics such as Gilgamesh and the Iliad derives from the way in
which their human protagonists emerge, under our eyes so to
speak, from purely magical and religious contexts, in which gods,
not men, dominate all activity. Achilles’ manhood is impressive be¬
cause he stands so close to the gods. In Hyperion man reassumes
divine proportions; epic re-approaches myth. The Titans and the
Gods are, if the word may be divested of pejorative associations,
super-men. Keats’s monumental figures, so enormously sensual, ex¬
press spiritual actions and attitudes. So their strength is curiously
similar to that of Achilles or Gilgamesh. Though complex, self-con¬
scious and aesthetic as their “primitive” forebears were not, Keats’
1 Hence the variety of interpretations of the poem, to many of which my study is
indebted. I should perhaps single out the following as most influential : Douglas Bush,
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (Pageant Books reprint. New York, 1957, of
the original edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), pp. 115-128; Kenneth Muir, “The Mean¬
ing of Hyperion” in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Muir (Liverpool, 1959), pp.
102-122; M. H. Shackford, ‘^Hyperion,’’ Sexvanee Reviexv, XXH (1925), 48-60; D. G.
James, Scepticism and Poetry (London, 1937), pp. 198-202; James Ralston Caldwell,
“The Meaning of Hyperion,’^ PMLA, LI (1936), 1080-1097; Stuart Sperry, “Keats,
Milton, and The Fall of Hyperion,” PMLA, LXXVII (1962), 77-84. Bernard Black-
stone’s latest study, in The Lost Travellers (London, 1962). pp. 276-84, is disappoint¬
ing after his discussion in The Consecrated Urxi, cited below. All quotations are from
H. W. Garrod, The Poetical Works of John Keats (Oxford, 1958) 2nd edition.
2 See for example G. R. Levy, The Sxoox'd from the Rock (London, 1953).
189
190 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
protagonists, like the earlier heroes, have their being in a realm
that is not earth, not heaven, but inseparable from both.
Hyperion narrates the birth of a new kind of divinity. Keats is
not literarily archaistic; he does not ask us to admire the ancient
Greek god Apollo; he asks us to see Apollo as a manifestation of
the evolutionary principle which gives dynamic order and meaning
to the universe. Thus the “remoteness'' of the Titanomachia also
serves Keats's central purpose.
For this reason the mythic, rather than symbolic, nature of the
personae of Hyperion is appropriate. Apollo does not “stand for"
something other than himself, yet he is not merely the old Apollo.
He is not a literary reconstruction of a dead mythological figure,
yet he is not fully separable from the ancient mythological figure.
Keats's Apollo manifests a beauty that surpasses his individuality.
He is a god. He is not a symbol of unchanging divinity nor is he a
timeless object of adoration. Apollo must be one of many gods, not
merely because there are other Olympians, but because there have
been and will be other kinds of gods, other dazzling manifestations
of developing beauty.
To Keats beauty is harmony, and there can be progress from
simple to complex harmony. Such progress is dramatized by Hy¬
perion, which moves from the description of Saturn, wherein sen¬
sory particularities are subdued to the harmony of a single mood
of tranced sadness, to the narrative of Apollo's dying into godhead,
which unifies in vital concord contrasting sensations, feelings, and
thoughts. The Olympians, as Oceanus' says, surpass the Titans in
“might" because the Olympians are “first in beauty." Titanic
beauty is little more than mechanical unity ; Olympian beauty is an
organic unity which reconciles contraries and diversities.
But Hyperion is more than story, it is history — the early history
of the universe.^ The progress from Titanic to Olympian beauty re¬
veals our cosmos to be a developing historical entity, as subject to
(and a theater for) evolutionary processes. Keatsian evolution,
however, differs from Darwinian, Keats thinks in purely aehthetic
terms; he does not anticipate the later scientific concept, Darwin
applies the theory of evolution horizontally, to one level of being
at a time. Keats concentrates upon the “thresholds" of being. The
scientific evolutionist seeks to connect man with the animals and
the physical world, but Keats seeks to connect man with the gods
and a supranatural world.
3 Bernard Blackstone, The Consecmted Urn (London and New York, 1959), p. 237:
“Hyperion is to be a cosmog-onic epic. It will ‘unfold through images the theory of the
world,’ ” Blackstone’s emphasis is upon the relevance of Phato’s Timaeus.
1963]
Kroebe?’ — Ptvphecy of Hyperion
191
Nevertheless, the “system” of Hyperion is evolutionary;^ in this
respect Keats labors in direct opposition to Milton, and, indeed, to
the entire classical-Renaissance literary tradition upon which so
much of Hyperion depends.® What principally characterizes Keats’s
poem, in fact, is the intensity with which a commemorative, tradi¬
tionalistic impulse interacts with a prophetic, progressive impulse.
Keats fabricates a new “personal” mythology out of old religion
and traditional literature.
Hyperion progresses from simple harmony to complex. The mar¬
velous opening lines portray a scene in which all the details are
of a piece, each contributing to a mood of sad silence appropriate
to Saturn’s fallen divinity.
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star.
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Eobs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went.
No further than to where his feet had stray’d.
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet,
Saturn listens to the Earth for comfort. To Hyperion words of com¬
fort are spoken by Coelus, who is “but a voice,” whose “life is but
the life of winds and tides,” yet who speaks “from the universal
space.” Coelus is more “heavenly” than Earth, and Hvperion’s
superiority to his fellow Titans derives from his association with
the sky. He is “earth born/ And sky engendered.” One must admire
4 Two unpublished doctoral dissertations which deal with the influence of William
Godwin’s Pantheon on Keats’s system of progressive evolution deserve mention : Sister
Mary Carlin, ‘^John Keats’ Knowledge of Greek Art, A Study of Several Sources,
Catholic University of America, Washing-ton, D. C., 1951, and Norman Anderson,
Bard in Fealty: Keats’ Use of Classical Mythology, University of Wisconsin, Madison,
1962.
^ See, of course, Bush, 115—128; also Ernest De Selincourt’s edition of The Poems
of John Keats (New York, 1921, 4th ed.), p, xlv; . a story of the ancient world
had to assume Elizabethan dress before it could kindle his imag-ination.” Also, pp.
xlvii-xlviii : . The poems of Greek inspiration exhibit no trace of influence of
classical literature, but are determined in each case by the influence of different
models of English poetry.” This last probably overstates an excellent point.
192 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
Keats’s narrative strategy : Apollo and Hyperion are more equally
matched than any other pair of God-Titan opponents and their
clash ought to be the climax of an evolutionary movement in which
“supranatural” gods are born out of the agony of “natural” deities.
Apollo, though “Celestial,” is not detached from the earth. Not only
is he born on Delos but his assumption of divinity occurs under the
aegis of Mnemosyne,
an ancient Power
Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
Of loveliness new born.
The new celestial must encompass within his progressive divinity
the memory of earthly powers. The old is not to be obliterated but
absorbed into a more complicated and comprehensive unity, just as
Hyperion is meant to absorb previous literary traditions into a new
unity.
To understand Apollo’s dying into life, therefore, we must under¬
stand Hyperion’s living into death, which is the climactic repre¬
sentation of all the Titans’ tragedy. Unlike Saturn, who is old and
gray and surrounded by silence and inertness, Hyperion “flares”
along, “full of wrath,” in a blaze of crystalline and golden opulence
to the sound of “slow-breathed melodies” from “solemn tubes.” The
entrance to his palace, unlike the tranced woods in which Saturn
sleeps, is described with the dynamic richness of full Keatsian
synaesthesia.®
And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape.
In frag-rance soft, and coolness to the eye.
That inlet to severe magnificence
Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.
Yet one notices that “this haven” of Hyperion’s “rest” and “this
cradle” of his “glory,” a structure of pure light, seems now
strangely alien from the earth.'^ The beauties of the earthly world
appear in reference to Hyperion’s palace only in metaphors and
similies. The palace, full of “the blaze, the splendour, and the sym¬
metry” of artifice, suffers “death and darkness” when elements of
the natural world intrude. The Titans have fallen. Natural phe¬
nomena appear to Hyperion as “effigies of pain,” as “spectres,” and
as “phantoms.” This is the effect of the Olympian triumph. Hy¬
perion is a Titan, an earth-god. and he swears “by Tellus and her
briny robes !”^ Yet earthly nature enters his “lucent empire” as a
* I use the word synaesthesia in its more general sense. R. H. Fogle, The Imagery
of Keats and Shelley (Chapel Hill, 1949), drawing on C. D. Thorpe’s work, analyses
with more intensity and profundity the significance of synaesthesia in Keats’s art ;
see esp. p, 137.
See Caldwell, 1093.
® A good discussion of the Titans’ “earthliness” is to be found in Lucien Wolff,
John Keats, sa vie et sow oeuvre (Paris, 1910), p. 628. Though old, Wolff’s book is
still valuable.
1963]
Kroeher— Prophecy of Hyperion
193
threat, in its least attractive guise, as something sinister and sug¬
gestive of death: the ‘‘cold, cold gloom'' of “black-weeded pools”
and the “mist” of a “scummy marsh.” Hyperion's impotence, when
he finds himself unable to utter his “heavier threat” is imaged by
a serpentine power usurping his supra-mundane godhead.
. . . through all his bulk an agony
Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,
Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
Making slow way, with head and neck convulsM
From over-strained might.
Hyperion, “releas'd,” in desperation attempts to disrupt the
order of nature; he bids “the day begin . . . six dewy hours/ Be¬
fore the dawn in season due should blush.” Hyperion is “a Prime¬
val God,” but “the sacred seasons might not be disturbed.” The
Titans, more primitive divinities than the Olympians, are identified
with purely natural processes ; Hyperion's actions reveal how
shaken is his divinity. The Olympians are not to be identified, how¬
ever, with the anti-natural. Rather they represent nature advanced
to a new level Hence the conflict of the poem is not between good
and evil but between one kind of truth and beauty and a superior
kind of truth and beauty. The inert lifelessness of the opening
scene where all the animation of the natural surroundings is dead¬
ened by Saturn's presence symbolizes the limitation of the primeval
gods : they do not represent the progress and fulfillment of natural
life. Their successors will be more “godlike” because they will carry
forward and more nearly fulfill the developing natural processes
of earthly life. Implicit here is the idea that increased conscious¬
ness fulfills, does not thwart, “nature”; man's supranatural life
is the proper evolutionary successor to unreflective biological
existence.
Hyperion, “by hard compulsion bent,” no longer strides and
stamps and flares.
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch’d himself in grief and radiance faint.
He is approaching the gray passivity of Saturn; he has reached
the boundaries of day and night moving toward darkness, Apollo
at the same moment, as we learn in Book III, has also reached “the
boundaries of day and night,” but the Olympian is moving toward
light. He appears in a dim, quiet solitude analogous to that of
Saturn, “I have sat alone/ In cool mid-forest,” that is as much a
psychological condition as a physical situation:
For me, dark, dark,
And painful vile painful vile oblivion seals my eyes:
I strive to search wherefore I am so sad,
Until a melancholy numbs my limbs.
194 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
But, contrary to Hyperion, Apollo begs that Mnemosyne may “point
forth some unknown thing/' The new and unknown attracts and
draws forth his godhead instead of strangling it/ He does not
stretch himself in grief and radiance faint but aspires toward the
natural lights of the heavens, the inanimate “brilliance" and
“splendour" of which he desires to fill with the passion of life.
There is the sun, the sun!
And the most patient brilliance of the moooni
And stars by the thousands! Point me out the way
To any one particular beauteous star
And I will flit into it with my lyre.
And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss.
We travel from Hyperion to Apollo by way of the council of
the Titans, which is held in a cavern far from the life and light of
surface earth.^° The most important speech in this deliberation is
that of Oceanus,^^ who advises acceptance of the truth that the
Titans have been overpowered by a “fresh perfection" and “a
power more strong in beauty." Although Oceanus speaks the truth,
the “comfort" and “consolation" he offers is bleak. “Receive the
truth, and let it be your balm," he says, asserting that
... to bear all naked truths.
And to envisage circumstance, all calm.
That is the top of sovereignty.
This stoicism is the “top of sovereignty" for the Titans. It is not
the top of sovereignty for Apollo. Every Titan who speaks regrets
that he, and his world, is no longer “all calm." The passivity of
Saturn in defeat, ironically, reveals the limits of the life he ordered
in triumph. Oceanus preaches stoicism because the characteristic
quality of Titanic rule was placidity. Even fiery Enceladus urges
renewed war to regain “the days of peace and slumberous calm."
Apollo, representative of the Olympians, does not seek “days of
peace and slumberous calm." He hates his idleness, he wishes to
make the stars “pant with bliss," he is exhilarated to godhead by
the knowledge of “dire events, rebellions . . , Creations and destroy-
ings." The life over which Apollo will preside is to be active, vio¬
lent, aspiring.
Leone Vivante, English Poetry (London, 1950) provides a valuable definition of
Keats’s love for the new and unknown : “Keats describes . . . the moment of novelty
as outstandingly representative of life and life's value . . (p. 182) “ “Novelty”
must be understood as laying stress on an intimate value of non-predeterminedness
and potency, rather than on change.” (p. 183).
“The assembled Titans themselves approximate to the chaos surrounding them :
. . . Plainly Hyperion ... is a macrcosmic model of the psyche in ignorance and
enlightenment.” Blackstone, p. 238.
n “What Oceanus proclaims is the imaginative center of the fragment, . . .” Harold
Bloom, The Visionary Company (Garden City, New York, 1961), p. 385.
1963]
Kroeber— -Prophecy of Hyperion
195
Evolution, as described by Oceanus, is a process of rising and
lifting, a process of increasing movement and activity, a process by
which more and more vitality emerges and gives meaning to inert,
disorganized matter. “From Chaos and parental Darkness came/
Light,'’ he says. The “sullen ferment” of chaotic darkness “for
wondrous ends/Was ripening in itself,” and when “the ripe hour
came” light was born.
Light, engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd
The whole enormous matter into life.
First chaos, then light, an ordering of inanimate matter, finally
life, a further ordering of light. The Titans came into being with
the appearance of life. They are now to be superseded, not because
life is to vanish, but because a more intense kind of life is being
born out of the old life, just as the old life (a more intense kind
of “light”) was born out of the older light, which, in turn, had
emerged from darkness.
The new life that is being born, the life of which the Olympians
are the highest representatives, is a life of increased intelligence,
and, since the universe now includes life, increased consciousness of
life, increased consciousness of self. “Knowledge enormous makes
a God of me,” cries Apollo. He is aware of becoming a god, his god¬
head is in large measure his self-awareness.
The intensity of Apollo’s self-awareness is impossible for
Oceanus. He is aware of the god who replaces him and he knows
the new god is som_ehow superior to him, but in what this superior¬
ity consists he does not know. Were he capable of the “knowledge
enormous” which fills Apollo’s mind Oceanus would be an Olympian.
He is not capable of that knowledge, and, because he is the wisest
of his kind, he does not try for it. He retires stoically.
Clymene, not so wise, experiences the anguish of not being able
to comprehend. She suffers what Oceanus would have suffered had
he not possessed the wisdom to recognize his limits. In so suffering,
however, Clymene prepares the reader for Apollo’s apotheosis. Hy¬
perion opens with a scene of complete deadness and silence, one
without consciousness, for Saturn sleeps and his divine sleep
trances his surroundings. When Hyperion himself appears we have
action, but arrested action, awareness (Hyperion recognizes the
stifling of his divinity) , but arrested awareness. In the cavern we
have more activity, the arrival of Saturn, the debate, and finally
the appearance of Hyperion, But this activity is cramped, self¬
lacerating, inconclusive, and the same adjectives might be applied
to the awareness developed by the arguments.^^ Oceanus’ opening
196 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
plea for storical endurance is finally answered by Enceladus’ hope¬
less fulminationsd^ But the Titans’ struggle into self-defeat is the
matrix of agony out of which the Olympians are born, and in the
unfinished third book we move upward and outward from the
cavern to reach, finally, the ecstatic sufferings of Apollo dying into
a more intense and harmonious life, a life fully conscious of its
own power and capable, therefore, of reconciling the potent diver¬
sities of a wonderful and ever developing cosmos. Apollo’s ecstasy
and its significance is adumbrated by Clymene, whose plaintive
speech links Oceanus’ stoicism to Enceladus’ rage.
Clymene dramatizes the truth of what Oceanus has said (while
emphasizing the painfulness of his truth). Her story reveals how
unfit are the Titans to control the new life that pervades the
universe.
I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore,
Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers.
Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief;
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth;
So that I felt a movement in my heart
To chide, and to reproach that solitude
With songs of misery, music of our woes,
Clymene could only reproach the joy and warmth of nature with
‘'songs of misery.” It is not in the Titans’ power to reconcile con¬
traries, as it is in the Olympians’ power, as is shown by the music
which destroys Clymene’s sad melody murmured into “a mouthed
shell.” “That new blissful golden melody” was, for Clymene, “a
living death” which, she relates, made her “sick/ Of joy and grief
at once.” What sickens her and is for her “a living death” is the
new harmony which enables Apollo “with fierce convulse” to “die
into life.”
The apotheosis of Apollo which concludes the fragmentary third
book is, as one might guess from Clymene’s story, the exact oppo¬
site of Saturn’s trance at the opening of the poem. Saturn sleeps
in silence, dimness, and inertness.^^ The apotheosis of Apollo is a
^ A. E. Powell (Mrs. E. R. Dodds), The Romantic Theory of Poetry (London,
1926), p. 229: “In their [the Titans’] very passion there is no conflict, no strug-g-le to
recreate their being out of tragedy. The “vale of Soul-making’’ is not for these. They
are like great natural forces, which governed by an overmastering law fulfill easily
and unconsciously that for which they are formed. It is not theirs to win knowledge
and by art to make, with all the agony and effort of creation. The new gods seem
smaller, but more vivid . . . they are convulsed in making .... Art and knowledge
have entered into their singing, so that it is able to express their complex life, with
its active, conscious effort to shape things to its intent.”
Bush, 124: “The Titans, however benign and beneficent, had in a crisis behaved
not like deities but like frail mortals ; they had lost, and deserved to lose, the
sovereignty of the world because they had lost the sovereignty over themselves.”
Note that Keats stresses Saturn’s loss of “identity,” see I, 11, 112-116.
1^ “All is negative here. The divisions of the day are, as it were, oblitered : the four
elements are presented in terms of silence and inaction. There is no air. The rhythms
of the verse gyrate sluggishly ...” Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn, p. 234.
1963]
Kroeher— Prophecy of Hyperion
197
birth full of sound, movement, and the radiant anguish of emerg¬
ing consciousness. The contrast between the two passages is best
told in the concluding images. Saturn, like a sculptured figure, is
long bowed to the earth for comfort, whereas from Apollo's “limbs
Celestial" some yet undefined power is forever about to emanate.
But the contrast is not merely that Saturn retreats toward familiar
consolation and Apollo yearns toward new and painful wonder. The
difference between the two divinities lies in the different harmonies
which unify the contrasting passages. The description of Saturn
is harmonious in that nothing contrary to the mood of tranced
stillness intrudes. The narrative of Apollo's apotheosis reconciles
contraries. For instance, Apollo's ecstatic words contrast to
Mnemosyne's “silent face," as the “wild commotions ... of his
limbs" contrast to her rigid pose, “upheld/ Her arms as one who
prophesied."^® Likewise “dire events . . , pour" into his brain like
“some blithe wine" ; his “level glance . , . steadfast kept/ Trembling
with light." Virtually every word in this narrative of “Creations
and destroy ings" is matched by a contrary, so that the Dionysiac
fury of the event is controlled by an Apollonian symmetry of form.
The harmony of the Saturn passage is substantive, that of the
Apollo passage compositional, a total order imposed upon diverse
sensations, feelings, and ideas. The beauty born with Apollo is the
beauty of complex design. The particularities retain their integ¬
rity : pain remains pain, it does not become pleasure ; death and life
remain distinct conditions; creations and destroyings remain op¬
posed processes. But pain and pleasure, life and death, creations
and destroyings interlock in a design that reconciles them.^®
Apollo's birth is meant to transform the value, the meaning, of
each of these particular elements, because the god's birth is the
birth of understanding of the place of each particularity and its
opposite within the scheme of cosmological history.
The comprehension of this scheme, the dying out of incomplete
life into total life, should not merely change the value of the parts
but should also increase it, because the formal symmetry of the
whole event will reflect back upon each particle more energy than
it .alone can generate. Once the encompassing design is conceived,
each element within it will be seen to contribute not alone to its
own existence but to the ordering, the significance, of all existences
On this point see D. G. James, The Romantic Comedy (London, 1948), p. 136.
“James, p. 128 : ‘‘The beauty of the new Gods is a more difficult and terrible beauty
than that of the old ; yet it is none the less greater. The Godhead of Hyperion is that
which acknowledges for its own the world in which Lear suffered and Cordelia was
hanged, and is yet no less a principle of Beauty and Order think this is the
point toward which Dorothy Van Ghent moves in “Keats’s Myth of the Hero,” Keats-
Shelley Journal, III (1954), 7-25 (pp, 10-16 on Hyperion), but I confess I do not
fully follow her argument. See also R. D, Havens, “Of Beauty and Reality in Keats,”
ELH, XVII (1950), 206-13, for a discussion of how the connotations of “beauty”
change in Keats’s later poetry.
198 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
together. The final contrast between Apollo and Hyprion is prob¬
ably that life become conscious of its system of vitality is more in¬
tense and precious and enduring, more fully supranatural, self-
transcending, divine, than unreflective life, life unaware of its own
potency.^^
One must speak tentatively because Keats did not finish Hy¬
perion. We can only speculate as to why he was dissatisfied with
it, but his own ' ‘explanations” suggest that he was more troubled
by stylistic problems than by his subject-matter. Perhaps he did
not control the style necessary to represent the Olympian life, a
style which ought to transcend that of the first books. The logical
culmination of the Keatsian Titanomachia ought to be the triumph
of Apollo over Hyperion. Oceanus’ stoical retirement before Nep¬
tune is not a reconcilement of contraries, not an absorption of an
old, incomplete beauty into a new, more complete beauty. This re¬
concilement and absorption are necessary to authenticate Olympian
divinity, and they should be fashioned in a manner suggested by
but not fully realized in the narrative of Apollo’s apotheosis.
At least partial realization of this new manner is found, perhaps,
in the early portion of The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, Keats’s re¬
casting of the original poem.^® The Fall is certainly a more personal
poem than Hyperion, and it might be argued that it is also more
literary,^® that it includes a wider range of literary references and
incorporates a more intense appreciation of its mythological and
poetic sources.^® The key to this double development seems to me to
lie in Keat’s recognition that the life of full consciousness, includ¬
ing of course consciousness of self, must be deeply involved with
visions or dreams.
Consciousness, after all, is more than mere perception. A mind
fully aware is not satisfied by appearances, it strives to comprehend
more than meets the eye. Consciousness is also something more than
commonsense. A mind fully aware is sensitive to causes and mo¬
tives which lie beyond the reach of workaday rationalism. No one
could deny that scientific activity of the past one hundred and fifty
years has advanced man’s awareness of the workings of his uni¬
verse and of his own being. And the modern understanding of the
Caldwell, 1096.
1*^ Sperry, 80 : “The life-and-death struggle with which the first Hyperion ends is
carried over and expanded in the second. But its context is changed in such a way as
to lead one more and more to consider Keats’s allegory within a framework of sin and
redemption.’’ My only diagreement with Mr. Sperry’s excellent point is that he seems
to make it exclusive ; without denying the relevance of “sin and redemption” to The
Fall of Hyperion, I should say that some less orthodoxly religious conceptions are
as important.
79 See Sperry, 77.
99 John D. Rosenberg, “Keats and Milton: The Paradox of Rejection,” Keats-Shelley
Journal, VI (1957), 87-95. Rosenberg argues that the principal change between the
two Hyperions is to be traced to Keats’s effort “to humanize the poem” (p. 91).
1963]
Kroeber — Prophecy of Hyperion
199
natural universe is founded, as A. N. Whitehead pointed out, upon
a willingness to accept as truth explanations that seem to contro¬
vert “commonsense.” Most important work in the physical sciences
today concerns phenomena which simply cannot be observed by
“the naked eye.” Psychoanalysis of course, is founded upon the
study of what appears to be irrational, particularly upon the study
of the “truth” of dreams.
Keats was neither a proto-Freud nor a proto-Einstein. He knew
little about science and contributed nothing directly to its develop¬
ment, In some respects he looked backward, toward Socrates, who
“examined” life with the most intense rationality, who constantly
sought self-awareness, and whose climactic utterances passed be¬
yond dialectic into stories of visions. But Keats also looked for¬
ward. In The Fall of Hyperion he suggests a conception of poetic
truth as “visionary” truth which foreshadows our contemporary
interest in extra-ordinary mental conditions and in new systems of
logical enquiry and organization. This is perhaps why The Fall of
Hyperion is so complex, and why, specifically, even more than the
earlier version it speaks in two voicees, one commemorative, one
prophetic.
The Fall of Hyperion is above all else what Keats himself called
it: a dream. In the first eighteen lines of the fragment the word
“dream” appears five times.
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, — ■
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
“Thou art no Poet — mayst not tell thy dreams"?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had lov'd
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be Poet's or Fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.
The distinction drawn here appears to be intended as the foun¬
dation for everything else in The FallF Keats distinguishes be-
21 Bloom, p, 412 : “Keats implies that the fanatic and the savage are imperfect poets,
with a further suggestion that religious speculation and mythology are poetry not
fully written.” p. 413 : “Moneta . ... is a priestess of intense consciousness doing
homage to the dead faiths which have become merely materials for poetry.”
200 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
tween the poet on the one hand and, on the other, the fanatic, the
savage, and the “man whose soul is not a clod: but who has not
“been well nurtured in his mother tongue/’ These latter differ from
the poet only in that they do not or cannot effectively tell their
dreams, so their dreams die with them. The poet is like them in
that he, too, dreams. But his melodious utterance lives on after
his death. “Every man,” Keats says, “hath visions and would
speak” — if he could. The fanatic differs from “every man” and the
savage in that he does speak. The fanatic can “weave/ A paradise
for a sect.” The poet, then, differs from the savage and “every
man” in that he does speak, with his “fine spell of words” he
escapes the “sable charm,” achieves something more than “a para¬
dise for a sect,” achieves something precious for all men.^^
All men, including poets, are dreamers. The poet alone can effec¬
tively tell his dreams. Hence the poet can be certainly recognized
only after his death. If what he has told results only in “a paradise
for a sect” he is to be identified as a fanatic. If his melodious utter¬
ance does more than delude a few, does more than create a fantasy
world of escape, and bodies forth, instead, heretofore unrecognized
truth, he is to be identified as a poet.
This differentiation is not possible until the Apollo of Hyperion
has died into life. Until life has evolved to the point where it not
only exists but is conscious of its existence, the problem of “dream¬
ing” cannot arise. As long as we are unconscious of ourselves we
cannot be mistaken about ourselves. But as soon as we attain self-
consciousness we are open to self -misunderstanding and self-
delusion.
That Keats was interested in this problem is implied, I believe,
in his dramatic strategy of presenting his story as a vision within
a vision within a dream. His first words after the introduction are :
“Methought I stood where trees of every clime.” He is “purposed
to rehearse” a dream, and the supra-reality of that dream is accent¬
uated by its setting, an idyllic garden where, contrary to nature’s
practice, every species of tree flourishes. In this paradisical setting
Keats drinks a “transparent juice” which he describes as “parent
of my theme,” because it induces a “swoon” from which he wakes,
not in the garden, but in “an old sanctuary,” an “eternal domed
monument.” There he encounters Moneta, who transports him,
23 Sperry, p. 78 : . . the true poet, as the closingr lines of the parag’raph make
clear, is the very opposite of the fanatic who speaks merely to a “sect.” True poetry
implies not only imag-inative activity but the perception of value and meaning- relevant
to all mankind. “In dreams,” Keats seems to say with Yeats, “begins responsibility,”
and the special obligation of the poet to society is destined to become, particularly
through Moneta’s urging, the major concern of Keats’s dreamer.”
1963]
Kroeber — Prophecy of Hyperion
201
first, to ''the shady sadness of a vale'' where he can observe Saturn
and Thea, because
. . . there grew
A power within me of enormous ken,
To see as a god sees, and take the depth
Of things as nimbly as the outward eye
Can size and shape pervade,
and later to Hyperion's palace where he observes in the same god¬
like fashion.
By presenting inspired perceptions with a vision of which he
dreamed Keats makes his form functional, that is, representative
of the nature and worth of that awareness which transcends or¬
dinary observation and ordinary reason. The truth he seeks to
establish, after all, is extraordinary. Ultimately it is the manner of
the dream's presentation that must convince us of its substantive
value. Keats seems to want his literary dream, in one way at least,
to be like an actual dream, in which style is literally substance.
Dreams differ from waking thoughts in that form or manner of
apparition is decisive in dreams. One can rephrase an argument but
not a dream. A dream can recur only by repeating its form.
Keats also discusses dreamers with Moneta, and about that dis¬
cussion have gathered most of the critical controversies concerning
The Fall of Hyperion.^^ There is too little evidence for anyone to
explain with assurance Keats's meaning and intentions, but I
should like to suggest some ways in which my understanding of
the direction of his thinking relates to the major problems of the
poem. If we accept The Fall in the most nearly finished form Keats
achieved, that is, with the twenty-three lines beginning "Majestic
shadow, tell me" (the cancelled passage comprising lines 187-210
of Book I) exised, Keats's argument is not inherently difficult, for
it does not become fully engaged with the dreamer-poet distinc¬
tion, Keats asks by what right he has been allowed to attain the
altar, and is told :
. . . Thou hast felt
What ’tis to die and live again before
Thy fated hour ; . . .
None can usurp this height . . ,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days . . .
Rot on the pavement where thou rotted’st half.”
23 For a recent example, David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge,
Mass., 1959), pp. 276-82,
24 A most important and helpful article on this matter is that of Brian Wicker,
“The Disputed Lines in The Pall of Hyperion/^ Essays in ‘Criticism, VII (1957),
28-41. A famous discussion of the lines is that of J. M. Murry, “The Poet and the
Dreamer” now in Keats (London, 1955), pp. 238-49.
202 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Keats then asks why he is alone, since
“Are there not thousands in the world . . .
Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the g’iant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good?”
These humanitarians are like Keats in that the miseries of the
world will not let them rest. They are, however, more than he :
. . . “they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice — ■
They come not here, they have no thought to come^ —
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.”
We may overestimate Keats’s praise of busy go-gooders. He cer¬
tainly credits them with virtue, but perhaps he subtly implies their
limitations, too, by having Moneta — one must remember that her
wisdom is not complete, for she is not a true Olympian but “the
pale Omega of a wither’d race” — praise the humanitarians in terms
which recall those “who find a haven in the world.” The humani¬
tarians find their satisfaction and fulfillment, their “haven,” in
the world. True, they “feel the giant agony” of the world, but in a
fashion that might be meant to recall the giant agony of the Titans,
who were unable in Hyperion to sustain the feeling, as Apollo
could, of pain and joy together. If so, from one point of view Keats
is indeed “less” than the humanitarians, as the Olympians give the
impression of being physically less than the Titans in Hyperion,
but from another point of view he is more : he can bear “more woe
than all his sins deserve,” and can be “admitted oft” to paradise¬
like gardens.
Then in a passage which Keats (according to his good friend and
careful scribe Woodhouse) meant to strike from The Fall, the dis¬
cussion is carried from the poet-humanitarian contrast to the poet-
dreamer contrast. Keats proposes that poets are not “useless,” that
their “melodies” do good, though he does not yet claim himself to
be such a poet, a “physician to all men.” Moneta replies with the
query: “Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?” And she asserts:
The poet and the dreamer are distinct.
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world.
The other vexes it.
In the introductory lines Keats states plainly that the poet is a
dreamer. The difference between poet and fanatic lies in the effec¬
tiveness of their expressions, but both tell their dreams. Possibly
Moneta’s distinction is meant to assist in refining the earlier defini¬
tion. According to her the poet-dreamer pours out a balm upon the
1963]
Kroeber — Prophecy of Hyperion
203
world while the fanatic-dreamer vexes it. Both, as it were, offer
potions : that of the poet-dreamer heals, that of the fanatic-dreamer
poisons.
At any rate, Moneta’s words bring forth an angry exclamation
from Keats, his first violent outburst:
Apollo! faded! 0 farflown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers,
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse.
This is the first mention of Apollo in The Fall, and, in keeping with
the pattern of imagery introduced by the word “physician’ ' at the
opening of the cancelled passage, he is invoked, not as the god of
poetry, but as the god of pestilence.^® But Keats skillfully links the
god’s two functions : Apollo is called upon to destroy not dreamers
but bad poets, “mock lyrists,” and “careless Hectorers in proud
bad verse.” This returns us to the problem of Moneta’s words. In
the introduction Keats defines the fanatic as less than the poet but
not as evil. Now he condemns those who tell their dreams without
genuine poetic gifts as vexatious poisoners of the world. He who
weaves “a paradise for a sect” is now identified as a “self-wor¬
shipper”— not a worshipper of Apollo’s supra-personal truth? —
who ought to be destroyed.
Tho’ I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
It may be that the harmless fanatic is now seen to be the poi¬
sonous dreamer because Keats has reached the point where he is
able to invoke Apollo, that is, he has passed the first tests of his
initiation into genuine poethood. It is certain that this Apollo is
not the new-born god of Hyperion. He is “faded” and “farflown.”
It appears to be the bad poets, the fanatic dreamers, who have
exiled him. As remarked above, the effectiveness of a dream de¬
pends entirely upon its style. A badly told dream is a falsification,
a distortion of the dream’s truth. The “large self-worshippers” de¬
stroy the truth of Apollo, not because they dream, but because they
recount their dreams badly. The poet recounts his dreams well and
thus makes manifest the truth of his vision ; by his art he invokes
Apollo the healer who “pours out a balm upon the world.” Keats,
not claiming to be a poet yet, is nonetheless dedicated to the “ob¬
jective” truth of vision. Thus it will be “life” to him, even though
^ This imagery fits in with the pattern of sickness-medicine imag'ery, so far as I
know unnoticed by the critics, which runs throug'hout the second version of Hyperion.
For example, by Moneta’s “propitious parley” the poet is “medicin’d/In sickness not
ig'noble,” and later the face of the goddess is described as “bright blanch’d/By an
immortal sickness which kills not ; . . . deathwards progressing/To no death . .
204 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
he must personally suffer extinction in the process, to see the proud
falsifiers of vision destroyed.
I do not wish to insist dogmatically on the correctness of this
reading, and I propose it principally because it suggests that at
the end of his career Keats may be reaffiming his faith in the
truth expressed by Apollo’s apotheosis in Hyperion, But if so
Keats does not merely repeat his earlier celebration of evolutionary
consciousness. He recognizes that increased consciousness leads in¬
evitably beyond ordinary rationality to the exploration of the truth
of dreams and visions.^® And he recognizes that the best authentica¬
tion of such visionary consciousness lies in the manner of its ex¬
pression. The moral, then, would be that in the modern world the
evil man is he who falsifies his dream or vision by telling it badly.
This is no minor, aesthetic sin. It is blasphemy, the distortion of
the highest truth. The genuine poet must be a good and useful man
-—'‘a sage, a humanist, a physician to all men” — for his well-told
dream will embody the truth that surpasses the limited truth of
sensory observation and rational discourse.^^ The dedicated poet
expresses the one truth fully appropriate to modern man’s capacity
for conscious life.
Whatever the problems and uncertainties of The Fall of Hy¬
perion may be, this faith is his art, this confidence in the worth of
his poetry as something more than ornamental and entertaining,
sustains all Keats’s finest work.^® In this belief, moreover, Keats
is typical of his era, not unique. His contemporaries share his pas¬
sionate conviction that in uttering beautifully their private visions
they contribute to a better, a more fully human life for all men —
that they in fact help to bring to birth the new life falsely promised
by political revolutionists and social reformers, fanatic-dreamers
who are not poets.
Rosenberg', 93: “He [Keats] reveals an instinctive historical sense and faith in
the collective development of mind.”
27 Albert Gerard, “Coleridg-e, Keats and the Modern Mind,” Essays in Criticism,
I (1951), 249-61, emphasizes the general significance of this point. For example: “The
Romantics . , . firmly believed that xoithin ‘mankind’ there is room for a faculty
that goes beyond reason. This is the basic assumption of romanticism.” (p. 253).
Fall of Hyperion must be regarded as one of the major attempts within
European romanticism to reconcile the imagination with a realistic and human aware¬
ness of the suffering of mankind.” (Sperry, p. 83). Mr. Sperry’s insistence on the
poem’s adherence to the orthodox pattern of sin and redemption leads him to stress
the dark side of The Fall — he speaks of Keats’s final attitude as “closer to resignation
than to hope — ■ perhaps even despair.” I wish to emphasize the element of reaffirma¬
tion within Keats’s admittedly ever more tragic view of life.
PRINCIPLES OF SOIL CONSERVATION AND SOIL
IMPROVEMENT AS THEY APPLY TO CERTAIN GROUPS
OF SOILS IN SOUTHEASTERN WISCONSIN
M. T. Beatty and A. E. Petersoyi
Modern technology has made available an ever increasing num¬
ber of practices for the conservation and improvement of soils.
These practices are based on one or more of five fundamental
principles. It is the purpose of this discussion to illustrate the
application of these principles to problems in the conservation and
improvement of two major groups of soils in southeastern
Wisconsin.
Principles of Soil Conservation and Improvement
The many practices and techniques of soil conservation and soil
improvement are based on five fundamental principles. These are:
1. The amount of soil which can be lost by erosion without
serious damage to the productivity of the remaining soil
varies among the many soil types.
2. Soil losses by erosion can be minimized by protecting the
soil surface with living or dead organic matter, and/or by
reducing the velocity or amount of water which flows over
the soil.
3. Among the various kinds of soil, considerable difference
exists in the ease with which the soil structure may be dam¬
aged by excessive or improper soil tillage.
4. Many soils can be improved beyond their natural state for
the production or crops and/or wildlife by appropriate and
timely applications of lime, fertilizer and organic matter,
and by controlling the water table by drainage or flooding.
5. Appropriate combinations of practices based on one or
more of the above principles are frequently needed on most
soils or groups of soils.
While these five principles have been known for a considerable
period of time, the importance of some of them is only now being
1 Contribution from the Department of Soils and the Soil Survey Division, Wis¬
consin Geological and Natural History Survey; University of Wisconsin, pub¬
lished with the approval of the Director, Wis. Agr. Expt. Station, Madison, Wis.
2 Associate Professors of Soils. Appreciation Is expressed to Professor P, D.
Hole for his helpful suggestions on the manuscript.
205
206 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
more fully recognized. Modern technological advances such as land
forming, minimum soil tillage and numerous others which can be
combined to produce high crop yields have greatly aided in the ap¬
plication of these principles to everyday agriculture.
Application of Principles to Groups of Soils
The application of the fundamental principles of soil conserva¬
tion and soil improvement outlined previously, as implemented by
modern technology, must be carefully fitted to particular combina¬
tions of soil type, length and gradient of slope, amount of existing
topsoil and the overall physiography of the land being treated.
Standards for the application of such practices have been devel¬
oped from research by Agricultural Experiment Stations and by
the United States Department of Agriculture. The Soil Conserva¬
tion Service, U.S.D.A., has prepared standards for such practices
in Wisconsin (1956, 1958).*
While every tract of land must be treated individually in the
design and layout of soil conservation and soil improvement prac¬
tices, there are certain repeating patterns of soils and slopes which
are found in nature. This regularity of soil and slope patterns is a
result of systematic variations in the factors of soil formation :
parent material, relief, biological activity, time, and climate. These
repeating patterns of soils and slopes make it possible to draw
maps and diagrams of groups of related soils. Such maps and dia¬
grams can include the major soils of landscapes throughout an area
where soils have formed as a result of particular combinations of
the five factors of soil formation. An example is the series of maps
and accompanying landscape diagrams showing major groups of
soils, and combinations of soil conserving and soil improving prac¬
tices for each group, which has been prepared for the major soils
of southeastern Wisconsin by Beatty and Murdock (1960). Dia¬
grams of soils in two typical landscapes in southeastern Wisconsin
illustrate the application of the principles of soil conservation and
improvement outlined previously.
The most extensive group of soils in southeastern Wisconsin is
one consisting of light-colored, medium textured soils formed from
losses and calcareous glacial till on glaciated uplands and the poorly
drained depressional soils associated with them. The areas of oc¬
currence in this group of soils are shown in Figure 1. Figure 2
shows a cross section of a typical landscape in which these soils
occur. Sketches of profiles of major soil series have been set into
the diagram to portray important soil characteristics. The soils
are shown in the landscape position in which they typically occur.
* Number in parentheses refer to literature cited.
1963] Beatty and Peterson— -Soil Conservation 207
Figure 3 illustrates the combination of soil conservation and im¬
provement practices which would allow intensive development of
these soils for agriculture, wildlife and forestry without excessive
erosion or other permanent damage to the soil. These practices are
based on the principles of soil conservation and soil improvement
outlined previously, as implemented by new soil management tech¬
niques such as minimum tillage of row crops, especially on the roll¬
ing McHenry, Miami and Dodge soils, and land forming and water
table control on the Elba, Emily and Clyman soils. The amounts
and velocities of water flowing over the surfaces of all soils subject
to erosion are controlled by terraces, diversions, waterways and by
alternate contour strips of sod-forming and tilled crops. The Elba
and Emily soils are recommended either for development for ag¬
riculture, for wildlife or for both simultaneously. If developed for
agriculture, they can be used intensively for row crops if large
amounts of fresh organic matter from crop residues or barnyard
manure are returned to the soil, if pests can be adequately con¬
trolled, if high soil fertility is maintained, and if minimum soil
tillage is practiced. This is possible because these soils are seldom
subject to erosion, and have a structure which is not easily dam¬
aged by tillage.
Adoption of this combination of land-use practices on this group
of soils, with minor modifications to fit variations in slope and
Liaht btMnish
silty fopsw'l
Whirffsh htom
day /mtn
^Isubsoi/
OOD&E*
Tentative soil name
Figure 1. Geographic extent of light-colored soils of the glaciated uplands.
208 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
McHenry
Rotation
1-67. 7-12%
s/o^es slopes
tnP*
ar^
Rotation
year of corn
year of hay
year of oats
Elba and Emily
Rotation
Any crop sequence
including cont/nous corn
if all stalks are returned
to the soil and minimum
soil tillage is practiced
Do not grow canning crops more than
two years in four. Use rotations such
as sweet corn- p^as- hay- hay
Figure 2. Typical landscape relationships of light-colored soils of the glaci¬
ated uplands in southeastern Wisconsin. * Tentative soil name.
other conditions, would represent an intensive program of multiple
land-use development for agriculture, wildlife and forestry. All
five principles of soil conservation and improvement need to be
applied for the intensive multiple development of these soils.
Figure 4 shows the extent of the principal soils found in the
Kettle Moraine of southeastern Wisconsin; figure 5 shows the
typical landscape relationships of the soils in this group and figure
6 illustrates the combination of practices which will allow multiple
land-use development for agriculture and wildlife on an intensive
basis.
The intensity of recommended land use varies among the soils in
the landscape in accordance with their potential for damage by
erosions (see first principle above). For soils such as the McHenry,
the permissible soil loss by erosion is greater than for shallow soils
over sand and gravel such as the Casco. Therefore, more intensive
cropping is allowed on the former soil under similar slope lengths
and gradients. Permanent cover is recommended for the very
shallow Rodman soil, because soil loss by erosion would almost
totally destroy it. The irregular slopes in this landscape limit the
use of mechanical practices for soil conservation. For this reason,
1963] Beatty and Peterson — Soil Conservation 209
rotations of crops which keep vegetative cover on the land much
of the time are recommended. The structure or tilth of Boyer sandy
loam is somewhat less susceptible to damage from excessive or im¬
proper tillage (see principle 3) than is that of other soils in the
group. The fourth principle, that of improving the natural condi¬
tion of a soil, is illustrated by the practices recommended for peat
or muck. Many of these deposits occur in small depressions which
have no drainage outlet. This, together with their small size,
Figure 3. Soil conservation and soil improvement practices adapted to light-
colored soils in a typical glaciated upland landscape in southeastern Wisconsin.
210 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
greatly limits their use for agriculture, but many of them can be
greatly improved as wildlife habitat. The fifth principle of using
combinations of practices applies particularly well to this group
of soils.
Light brownish
topsoil
-'i^l/owish brown
day hem
■subeoil
Sand y loam
^glacial fill
BOYER CASCO RODMAN PEAT^MUCK FOX McHENRY
Figure 4. Geographic extent of soils of the Kettle Moraine.
1 yaar of hay
(Tt^
"3^ 1 year- of oats
Casco in
Rotation pe^'Tianent
McHenry
Rotation
Fox
Rotation
Peat
Muck
£)e.velop Vo^es
for wildlife
133
(JT®
Figure 5. Typical landscape relationships of the major soils of the Kettle
Moraine.
1963]
Beatty and Peterson — Soil Conservation
211
Figure 6. Soil conservation and soil improvement practices adapted to soils
in a typical landscape of the Kettle Moraine.
Discussion
The two groups of soils used as examples illustrate the wide
range of soil and slope conditions found in parts of southeastern
Wisconsin. It is also apparent from figures 3 and 6 that a variety
of mechanical and vegetative soil conservation and soil improve¬
ment practices are needed for intensive development of these soils.
The illustrations also show that soils in typical landscapes of the
area are in many cases adapted to use for agricultural crops, for
212 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
woodlands and for wildlife. Planning the land-use for tracts of
land may involve assigning bodies of soil to one or more of these
uses.
Comparison in the field of soil improvement and soil conserva¬
tion practices now in use on typical landscapes of the soil groups
with practices needed for adequate soil conservation and intensive
soil development have shown that these soils are now generally far
below their potential for multiple development for agriculture, for¬
estry and wildlife. Soil conservation practices have not been ap¬
plied to the extent considered necessary for adequate control of
soil erosion.
Summary
The application of principles of soil conservation and improve¬
ment to a diverse group of soil and slope conditions on two land¬
scapes in southeastern Wisconsin are illustrated. Of the two land¬
scapes, the first is typical of much of southeastern Wisconsin, and
the second contains extremes of soil and slope conditions and thus
is well suited to illustrating the basic principles of soil conserva¬
tion and improvement. Widespread application of the recommended
practices would lead to more intensive multiple development of
such soils for agriculture, woodland and wildlife, and would greatly
reduce the possibility of excessive soil erosion.
Literature Cited
Anonymous. 1958. Standards for Soil and Water Conservation Practices,
Wisconsin. USDA Soil Conservation Service, Madison, Wis.
Beatty, Marvin T. and Murdock, J. T. 1960. Farming Southeastern Wiscon¬
sin Soils Wisely. Multilithed bulletin, Dept, of Soils, Univ. of Wis.
Densmore, J. W., DeYoung, Wm., Klingelhoets, A. J., Pierre, J. J. and
Prange, F. a. 1956. A Guide for the Management of Soils, Field Crops,
Pastures, and Orchards in Wisconsin. U.S.D.A. Soil Conservation Service,
Madison, Wis.
A STUDY OF THE NATURAL PROCESSES OF
INCORPORATION OF ORGANIC MATTER
INTO SOIL IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
WISCONSIN ARBORETUM
Gerald A. Nielsen and Francis D, Hole
Soil studies on long term plots under natural vegetation in the
1200 acre University Arboretum at Madison were undertaken in
1956 at the suggestion of the late Professor John T. Curtis of the
Botany Department of the University of Wisconsin. Measurements
were made to determine (1) annual production of natural litter
in forest and prairie areas, (2) relative contributions by roots and
above ground parts of prairie plants to the store of nitrogen in
the soil, and (3) rate and processes of incorporation of organic
matter in forest soils (Nielsen, 1963). Twenty-six rectangular
plots were established and sampled in 1956 and total soil nitrogen
contents determined by W. A. Noel. Resampling of the soils and
analysis of total nitrogen were done three years later by the senior
author (Nielsen, 1960). Measurements of production of vegetative
growth have been continued from 1956 to date.
Introduction
A soil is a three-dimensional body (Soil Survey Staff, 1951) that
records past events. The record, in the form of arrangements of
chemical bonds, mineral and organic compounds, soil aggregates
and horizons (layers) and the soil body itself, is a summary or
synthesis of pedologic changes. In this sense a soil is a ‘‘synthome-
ter’\ an integrated product of a succession of external and internal
conditions. Climate, flora, fauna and man himself have all left their
mark upon the soil.
Prairie and forest soils of Wisconsin (Figure 1) embody a par¬
tial record of Wisconsin’s natural history for a period of at least
12,500 years (Frye and Willman, 1960). This includes the deposi¬
tion of Cary dolomitic glacial drift and an overlying 2- to 3- foot
* Paper read at the 92nd annual meeting- of the Wisconsin Academy of Sci-
‘^nces. Arts and Letters. Published with the permission of the Director of the
Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station and the Director of the Wisconsin
Geological and Natural History Survey, University of Wisconsin, Madison. This
contribution from the Department of Soils and the Soil Survey Division, Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin was supported in part by grants of funds from the
National Science Foundation and through the Research Community of the Grad¬
ate School from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for research
assistants, equipment and laboratory facilities. Journal paper No. 53, University
of Wisconsin Arboretum.
213
214 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
deposit of loess, and subsequent changes in vegetation and climate
(Curtis, 1959) to the present. Starting with the two-layered par¬
ent material, loess over drift, widely different plant and animal
communities and associated microclimates have differentiated con¬
trasting prairie and forest soils in southeastern Wisconsin, The
prairie soil, called Brunizem by Simonson, Riecken and Smith
(1952) has the simpler profile of the two. It consists of an acid,
deep, dark, granular surface soil, the horizon, overlying a
weakly developed blocky subsoil, the B2 horizon (see Parr silt
loam. Hole, 1956, p. 55). Content of organic matter in the Brun¬
izem soil decreases gradually with depth. The deciduous forest soil,
termed Gray-Brown Podzolic by Baldwin (1927), has a shallow,
nearly neutral surface soil (AJ overlying a bleached layer (A.)
and strongly developed clayey subsoil (Bg) (see Dodge silt loam,
Hole 1956, p. 40). The content of organic matter does not decline
gradually with depth, as in the Brunizem, but decreases abruptly
at the lower boundary of the shallow A^ horizon.
Five plots, measuring 12 feet on a side, were created in 1956
at each of three sites on the Curtis Prairie of the University
Arboretum. Prairie vegetation was established at the three sites
in 1940, 1950, and 1956, Four plots were created in each of two
oak stands, the Noe and Wingra woods. Prior to the 1840’s in
which decade plowing began on what was then the farm of Elipha-
let Cramer, the soils of these areas were all forest soils (Gray-
Brown Podzolics) similar to the Dodge silt loam of Figure 1. Al¬
though there is evidence that in the 1830’s the forests were largely
of the oak opening type with prairie vegetation betwen the scat-
tred oak trees^ (Curtis, 1951; Cottam, 1949), still the soil exhibits
characteristics related to forest stands and not to prairies. The
soils of the Noe and Wingra woods have never been plowed, whereas
the soils of the artificial prairies were plowed repeatedly from
about 1840-1926 and again at the time of establishment of the
prairie stands. The brown 5- to 7-inch plow layer is still visible in
the prairies, but is undergoing modification. Given sufficient time,
the present vigorous prairie may be expected to produce a Bruni¬
zem soil, as the savannah of the 1830's did not. On the 23 plots the
natural organic materials were manipulated, and resulting changes
in nitrogen contents of the soils were measured. Manipulation in¬
cluded the addition or removal of plant materials above-ground.
These plot treatments are described below.
It is understood that the data collected over a short period and
summarized in this paper constitute a progress report,
1 Estimates from the orig-inal Government land survey of 1835 sug-g-est that
bur and white oak trees were more or less randomly scattered over the uplands
at a rate of 15-20 trees per acre. Certain large oaks over 150 years old still
remain as relics of the original oa.k openings (Curtis, 1951).
1963]
NicLscn and Hole— Natural Processes
215
ORGANIC MATTER
(dry- weight, tons per acre)
Figure 1. The distribution of organic matter in forest (white oak, black oak)
and praire (big bluestem, Indian grass) ecosystems in south central Wiscon¬
sin: generalized presentation.
216 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
Figure 2. Production of vegetation and accumulation of mulch on plots at
three prairie sites in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,
»Veg-etation refers to above-g'round org-anic material produced in a growing
season and harvested in November, 1959, 1960, 1961.
Data based on material from entire plot (16 yd^).
c Data based on material from one square yard per plot.
The first figure is for data obtained in the autumn after springs when the
plots were burned. The second figure is for years when there was no spring burning.
® Mulch refers to dull brown, partially decomposed above-ground organic mate¬
rial remaining from previous growing seasons and measured in November, 1959,
1960, 1961.
* These data represent fresh harvest transferred in November from plot ^3
and not weight of year-old mulch. Therefore, the data are not strictly compara¬
ble with the data from plots ^4 and #5.
s Bach figure is an average of measurements taken with a point frame appa¬
ratus at 40 points per plot in April 1961.
These plots had been burned shortly before these data were taken. Variations
in depth of mulch are attributable to the erratic character of burning.
‘ Average number of seed stalks of big bluestem and Indian grass as counted
in August, 1960, and 1961.
i Average for 2 years in which plots were burned in the spring.
1963]
Niehen and Hole — Natural Processes
217
Investigations in the Prairies
The five treatments on the three prairie sites are shown dia-
grammatically at the top of Figure 2: plot #1 was kept clipped
so that vegetative growth both above- and below-ground was
minimal ; plot #2 was likewise kept clipped, but was mulched each
autumn with the total stand harvested from plot #3; plot #3
was disturbed only by removal of vegetation each autumn, as pre¬
viously stated; plot #4 was undisturbed throughout; plot #5 was
subjected to spring burning biennially, on the average, but was
otherwise undisturbed. Corrugated galvanized iron strips, em¬
bedded about a foot in the soil and protruding 6-inches above the
surface, created a vertical barrier around plots #1 and #2.
Soil sampling^ in 1956 and 1959 in plots at prairie and forest
sites was by means of an Oakfield soil sampling tube®, and con¬
tents of total nitrogen were determined by the Kjeldahl method
(Jackson, 1958; Bremner, 1960).
Production of Vegetation and Accumulation of Mulch
The field data summarized in Figure 2 indicate that production
of vegetation growth on plots #1 and #2 was suppressed by
clipping, although much less than anticipated. Simultaneously the
composition of the vegetation changed from big bluestem (Andro-
pogon gerardi)] Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) and switch-
grass (Panicum virgatum) to quack grass, dandelion, bluegrass
and other species capable of surviving severe treatment. Data for
plots #3, #4 and #5 are based on material collected each No¬
vember. The averages for these three plots imply that annual pro¬
duction of vegetation has not been greatly influenced by the differ¬
ent treatments during the three-year period. However, if data
for the two older prairie sites are averaged, the mean annual dry
weight of vegetation produced under the three treatments is 5,750
pounds on the harvested plots (#3), 5,700 pounds on the undis¬
turbed plots (#4), and 7,250 pounds on the burned plots (#5)
in the year of burning. These figures seem to substantiate the
contention of some ecologists (Weaver, 1954; Curtis, 1959) that
burning to remove excessive natural mulch promotes the growth
of prairie vegetation. Growth on plot #5 in the two older prairies
in years without burning averaged 5,250 pounds, dry weight. The
1956-prairie seeding, however, was still in the process of estab¬
lishing itself in 1956-1959, and showed best growth^ on the un-
2 Columns of soil 42" deep and %" in diameter were taken at 15 points per plot.
® Description available from the Oakfield Apparatus Co. Oakfield, Wisconsin.
* “Best growth” refers not only to greater weights of vegetative growth, but
also to the larger number of seed stalks of Indian grass and big bluestem pro¬
duced in years prior to 1961. In 1960 plots 3, 4 and 5 of the 1956- prairie pro¬
duced 90, 300 and 60 seed stalks respectively.
218 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
disturbed plot (#4) when a mulch was accumulating, and poorest
growth where autumn harvesting (plot #3) or spring burning
(plot #5) removed mulch. Robocker and Miller (1955) also found
that under certain conditions burning was detrimental to the estab¬
lishment of big bluestem in south central Wisconsin. The higher
production of the 1950-prairie, as compared with the oldest (1940)
prairie, may be attributed to the slightly more moist soil conditions
and higher content of available phosphorus of the moderately-well
drained Gray-Brown Podzolic soil at the 1950-prairie and 1956-
prairie sites. A nearly complete cover of moss on plot #3 of the
1940 prairie may be correlated with reduced growth of prairie
vegetation on that plot.
Data on numbers of seed stalks of bluestem ( Andropoyon
gerardi) and Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) per plot indicate
that uninterrupted accumulation of mulch, as on the undisturbed
plots (#4) depressed the production of seed stalks. This is most
evident on the oldest (1940) prairie, where the undisturbed plot
(#4) producd 165 less stalks than the harvested plot (#3) and
530 less stalks than the burned plot (#5). The count for plot #5
of the 1950-prairie is low because switchgrass (Panicum vir-
gatum) was abundant on that plot and seed stalks of that plant
were not counted. The figures for the 1956-prairie plots must be
interpreted in the light of the fact that the vegetation was in the
process of establishing itself, as has already been mentioned. On
August 29, 1958, a year when burning of the 1940-prairie did not
take place, the harvested plot (#3, 1940-prairie) displayed 300
seed stalks in August, in contrast to the other near-by plots as
well as the surrounding prairie, where no seed stalks of big blue¬
stem and Indian grass were to be seen. In 1961, on both the 1950-
and 1956-prairies, the grasses on the undisturbed plots (#4) in
early September showed darker green leaves and delayed fiowering
as compared with the harvested (#3) and burned (#5) plots.
These phenomena are associated with an effectively cooler and
more moist soil climate than obtains in the absence of a mulch. On
the same date on the oldest (1940) prairie, the grasses on the
undisturbed plot (#4), as well as on the harvested plot (#3)
showed slight symptoms of nitrogen and phosphorous deficiencies,
whereas the vegetation of the burned plot (#5) was free of such
symptoms, though lighter green than the less mature vegetation on
undisturbed plots (#4) at the 1950- and 1956-prairie sites. A
beneficial effect of burning on an established prairie is suggested.
Data for a wet prairie (big bluestem and Indian grass on a
Humic-Gley soil) based on annual sampling from 3 quadrats, 1
square yard each, indicate an average annual production of 4,000
1963]
Nielsen and Hole — Natural Processes
219
Figure 3. Nitrogen content of soils (1 lb. per acre) in prairie plots, Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin Arboretum, in 1956; and gains and losses of nitrogen, 1956-
1959.
Note: In columns 1 throug-h 5 the first of a pair of figures signifies pounds of
nitrogen per acre in 1956, and the second figure represents the gain ( + ) or loss
( — ) of nitrogen during the period 1956-1959.
Data in this figure, as well as in figure 6, are based upon the percent total
soil nitrogen as determined by a modified Kjeldahl method (Jackson, 1958). The
first figure of the pair in each column was obtained by multiplying percent total
nitrogen by an assigned soil density of 1,000,000 pounds per acre 3-inch layer.
Thus the 0 to 3, 3 to 6, 6 to 15 and 15 to 42 inch layers of soil was given weights
1, 1, 3 and 9 million pounds per acre respectively. Soils of the type studied would
in fact range from about 800,000 pounds for the top 3-inch layer to about
1,100,000 pounds for a 3-inch layer near the bottom of the profile, because their
bulk densities range approximately from 1.2 in the top 6 inches to 1.7 at a 42
inch depth (Shields, 1955). Assignment of the same bulk density to the same
bulk density to the entire soil profile introduces slight errors in the figures
showing totai weight of soil nitrogen. However, it has little effect on figui-es
showing changes in content of nitrog'en.
The second figure of the pair in each column of this figure, as well as of
figure 6, was obtained by subtracting pounds of nitrogen in 1956 from a similar
figure (not given) based on the soil samples collected in 1959.
Each figure of the 0 to 3 inch and 3 to 6 inch layers is an average of duplicate
analyses of soil samples taken at three diffrent soil depths, whereas the 6 to
15 inch and 15 to 42 inch layers represent duplicate analyses of samples taken at
four different depths within each of the two zones indicated (Fig. 4).
The average deviation from the mean for all duplicate analyses was 0.0015 per¬
cent nitrogen. This is equivalent to about 15 pounds of nitrogen per arce 3-inch
layer of soil.
220 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
lbs per acre of above-ground prairie vegetation. This area, like
that of the entire mesic prairie is burned annually or biennially.
Gains and Losses of Soil Nitrogen, 1956-1959. The data pre¬
sented in Figure 3 record the status in 1956 of the soils of the
prairie plots in terms of total nitrogen. The significance of the
figures for gains and losses of nitrogen during the short period,
1956-1959 is as yet unclear. Future studies can be expected to
show to what extent the gains and losses represent actual changes
in soils, on the one hand, and experimental errors in sampling and
analysis, on the other. However, the present data suggest the fol¬
lowing trends. (1) The effect of tillage in lowering soil nitrogen
content (from M.F. to C.F., Figure 8) is being erased by the in¬
crease in soil nitrogen which is occurring under prairie vegetation
Figure 4. Total nitrogen content of soil in 4 plots in the reconstructed
prairies, University of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison. Bars indicate depths
at which soil samples were taken in 1956 and 1959. Black bars represent
gains in total soil nitrogen over the 3-year period. Dotted bars represent
losses in nitrogen during the same period. Burning of plot #5 took place in
late April of 1957 and 1959 on the prairie established in 1940, and in late
April, 1958 at the prairie planted in 1956. Plot #2 of the 1956 prairie re¬
ceived each autumn the harvested prairie stand from an adjacent plot. Vege¬
tation on plot #2 was kept clipped throughout each growing season. Plot
#4 of the prairie which was established in 1940 was not clipped, harvested
nor burned.
1963] Nielsen and Hole — Natural Processes 221
(from C.F. to Y.P. in Figure 8). This trend is further illustrated
in Figure 4, plots #2 and #5 of the 1956-prairie which show a
3-year loss of nitrogen at a depth of 4 inches, and a gain above
that. (2) The removal of mulch from soil has promoted increases
in soil nitrogen. This is evident in the burned plots (#5) where
soil profiles showed an average 3-year gain of 380 pounds of nitro¬
gen per acre, and in the harvested plots (#3), where the gain in
nitrogen averaged 287 pounds. Smaller gains or outright losses oc¬
curred under natural (plots #4) and artificial (plots #2) mulches.
(3) The soils at the three prairie sites of the University Arbore¬
tum are in early stages of development with respect to nitrogen
content, and are far from the steady state of mature prairie or
Brunizem soil (Figures 1 and 8). Fourteen of the fifteen prairie
plots gained nitrogen in the upper 3 inches of soil. Plots number
3, 4, and 5 in the 3-year-old (1956) prairie gained twice as much
nitrogen in the upper 6 inches of soil, as well as in the entire pro¬
file, as did the soil at the 19-year-old (1940) prairie site.
Investigations in the Forest
The four treatments at two wooded sites are shown diagramatic-
ally at the top of Figure 5. Plot #1 was stripped of 6 inches of top¬
soil (Ai and A2) and refilled with yellowish subsoil (upper B hori¬
zon material) containing much less organic matter. Since this
treatment in 1956, natural forest litter has been allowed to accum¬
ulate on this plot. Plot #2 was kept free of leaves and other litter
that fell onto the surface of the A horizon. Plot #3 received a
double application of litter each year. Plot #4 was left undis¬
turbed.
The approximate weight and composition of litter received on
the forest soil plots is presented in the body and footnotes of Fig¬
ure 5. The litter that fell by November each year on forest plots
#1 and #4 averaged 4600 pounds (oven-dry weight) per acre.
This included branches and other woody materials with an equiva¬
lent diameter of less than % inch.
Studies in Noe Woods of the monthly changes (Oct. 1960~Dec.
1961) in weight, depth and composition of litter have shown: 1)
the total weight of litter on the forest floor to increase from a low
of 2700 pounds per acre (35% leaves, 65% woody material) on
October 1, 1960 to a maximum of 6300 pounds (58% leaves, 42%
woody material) on April 7, 1961. 2) The depth of litter ranged
from 18 mm on October 3, 1960 to 48 mm on December 3, 1960.
3) Observations at 80 points per month using a vertical point-
frame with l/16th-inch diameter rods indicated that on October
1, 1960 leaves appeared on only 46 percent of the forest floor area
222 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
while wood and bare soil were exposed at 22 percent and 32 per¬
cent of the area respectively. On February 11, 1961 leaves con¬
stituted 98 percent and wood 2 percent of the exposed surface of
the forest floor.
The litter depth data in Figure 5 indicate the relative amounts
of litter remaining on the Noe Woods plot on October 3, 1961. A
litter depth of 24 mm on the undisturbed plot #4 agrees exactly
with the litter depth obtained on October 12th by measuring at 80
points along a 640-foot transect in Noe Woods. The litter depth
for plots #3 and #4 measured the same on October 3 (Figure 5).
This suggests that decomposers have in one years time reduced the
double amount of litter on plot #3 to about the same as that on
plot #4. Field observations of the Aoo horizons on these plots sub¬
stantiate this conclusion as does the larger population of earth¬
worm (Lumhricus terrestris) middens^ and the greater weights of
earthworm casts® deposited on the plot receiving a double amount
of litter. Field observations also indicate that the low figure
(15mm) for litter depth on plot #1 (Figure 5) results from the
removal of leaf litter by agents of erosion. Litter remaining on
the plot was concentrated in the vicinity of Lumhricus terrestris
middens (Nielsen and Hole, 1964). Between middens there was
a smooth and rather hard soil surface with few castings or plants
to stabilize the litter.
Data for a 30-year-old pine (Pinus strobus and Pinus resinosa)
plantation on formerly plowed Dodge silt loam soil, showed
an average production since 1955 of 3300 (range 2800 to 3700)
pounds (oven-dry weight) of little per acre per year. The litter con¬
sisted of 92 percent needles, 5 percent cones and 3 percent twigs.
The weight of the L (upper litter) and F (fermenting) horizons or
total 'ditter’’ accumulated on the forest floor averaged 10,700
(range 7200-12,400) pounds per acre and contained 90 percent
needles, 6 percent cones and 4 percent twigs. Earthworms con¬
tinued to mix these organic materials with the underlying mineral
soil. This anparently explains the absence of a H (humus) layer
below the F layer.
Gains and Losses of Soil Nitrogen, 1956-1959. The data pre¬
sented in Figure 6 record the status in 1956 of the forest soil plots
s The number of middens of Lunibricus terrestris in duplicate four-square-foot
quadrats on soil plots in Noe Woods on June 23, 1962 were as follows: plot #2
(litter continually removed) 5,5 ; plot #1 (topsoil removed, litter undisturbed)
14, 18; plot #3 (litter doubled) 26, 30; plot #4 (litter undisturbed) 13, 16; middens
counted had burrow opening's at least %th inch in diameter.
« Weight (oven-dry) of casts collected 7 times between April 8 and October 3,
1961 from 3 by 20.9 inch (10-^ acre) staked quadrats in the Noe and Wingra
Woods soil plots was as follows; for plots #1, #2, #3 and #4 the weights were
62.2, 48.8, 149.9 and 112.3 grams per quadrat or 6.8, 5.4, 16.5 and 12.7 tons per
acre respectively. The average range of diiplicates was 15.5 gm or 1.7 tons per
acre.
1963]
Niels-en and Hole — Natural Processes
223
in terms of total nitrogen. The figures for gains and losses of
nitrogen during the period 1956-1959 suggest the following trends.
1) A new A-horizon is being formed on plot #1 of the wooded
sites. The top 6-inch layer of plot #1 is the Noe Woods gained
250 pounds of nitrogen per acre after receiving a natural supply of
litter for 3 years (Figure 6). This 30 percent increase in soil
nitrogen is illustrated in Figure 7. At this rate of nitrogen accumu¬
lation on this plot a period of 30 to 40 years would be necessary
for the nitrogen content of the new A-horizon to reach the level of
that of A-horizon (0" to 6") in surrounding undisturbed forest
Plot Number
Plot Treatment
WOODS
SITE
Q)
O
Litter
undisturbe
j]
soil
Subsoil
42"
Average Weight of Litter ° ( I bsyb ere) Received each
Figure 5. Weight, depth and composition of natural litter on forest soil
plots of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.
Natural litter includes leaves and acorns as well as woody materials with an
equivalent diameter of less than % inch.
The weight of forest litter falling on the surface of plots #1 and ^4 is based
upon the oven-dry weight of litter that falls each year on triplicate square yard
collecting screens located near the plots.
The litter is predominantly from white oak (' Quercus alha) and black oak ( Quercus
vehitma). The average composition of the litter was 75% leaves, 15% twigs, 9% bark
and 0.3% acorns and cups.
c This figure represents a range from 4300 pounds per acre in 1957 to 5900
pounds in 1961.
The litter • is predominantly from red oak (Quercus borealis). The average
composition of the litter was 69% leaves, 11% twigs, 3% bark and 17% acorns
and cups.
® This figure represents a range from 3300 pounds per acre (6% acorns) in 1960
to a high of 4400 pounds (29% acorns) in 1958.
* Depths measured at 40 points per plot with a point frame apparatus.
224 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Figure 6. Nitrogen content of forest plots (lbs. per acre), University of Wis¬
consin Arboretum in 1956 and gains and losses of nitrogen, 1956-1959. In
columns 1 to 3 the first of a pair of figures is pounds of nitrogen per acre in
1956 and the second figure is the gain (-f-) or loss ( — ) of nitrogen during
the period 1956-1959. Data in column 4 are for 1959 only. (See footnote to
Figure 3.)
soils. 2) The systematic removal of forest litter for 3 years resulted
in a loss of 250 pounds per acre of nitrogen in the top 6-inches of
plot #3. This 7 percent decrease is illustrated in Figure 7. 3)
Doubling the application of litter caused the top 6-inch of soil in
plot #3 to gain 570 pounds of nitrogen per acre. This 14 percent
increase is illustrated in Figure 7.
Summary
This progress report on a continuing study in the University
of Wisconsin Arboretum of factors affecting the incorporation of
organic matter into soils under natural vegetation documents the
1963]
Nielsen and Hole — Natural Processes
225
Figure 7. Total nitrogen content of soil in 3 plots in the Noe Woods, Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison. Bars indicate depths at which
soil samples were taken in 1956 and 1959, Black bars represent gains in total
soil nitrogen over the 3-year period. Dotted bars represent losses in nitrogen
during the same period. In plot #1 B^-horizon material was substituted for
the A-horizon removed in 1956.
major contrast between soils of deciduous forests and soils of
prairies. Storage of organic matter is largely above-ground at
forest sites studied and largely under-ground at the prairie sites
(Figure 1). The accumulation of above-ground parts of prairie
plants as a mulch on the soil not only suppresses the vigorous
growth of the prairie vegetation but may be of little benefit as a
source of soil organic matter. Over a period of about 90 years
(1840’s to 1930's) under agricultural management, the forest soil
studied lost about 20 tons of organic matter or 26 percent of the
total organic matter in the undisturbed forest soil (Figure 8).
Within a period of 19 years (1940 to 1959) under planted prairie
vegetation the soil has regained about 12 tons of organic matter,
or 60 percent of that lost under agricultural management (Fig¬
ure 8). The abrupt lower boundary of the plow layer has been par¬
tially erased. The greatest changes in three years (1956-1959)
226 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
in the organic matter content of the soils studied were associated
with earthworm activity in forest soil plots. A plot receiving twice
the normal weight of forest litter for 3 years gained in the 0^'
to 6" soil layer 570 pounds of nitrogen, or about 5% ton of
organic matter per acre. Investigation is being continued of the
sources of soil organic matter and the processes and rates of in¬
corporation of it into soil.
Organic Matter Content (%) (N % 20)
Figure 8. Distribution of organic matter in a mature forest soil (Noe Woods),
a forest soil cropped for about 90 years (1956 prairie site), a cropped forest
soil under prairie vegetation for 19 years (1940 prairie site) and a mature
prairie soil (generalized from data of Shields, 1955 and Simonson, et al, 1952).
References
Baldwin, M. 1927. The gray-brown podzolic soils of the eastern United States.
First Interntl. Soil Sci. Congress Proc. 4:276-282.
Bremner, J. M. 1960. Determination of nitrogen in soils by the Kjeldahl
method. Journal of Agr. Sci. 55:11-33.
CoTTAM, G .T. 1949. The phytosociology of an oak woods in southwestern Wis¬
consin. Ecology. 30:271-287.
Curtis, J. T. 1951. Arboretum master development plan. Unpublished report
of the Arboretum Research Coordinator, Unpublished manuscript, Dept,
of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Curtis, J. T. 1959. The Vegetation of Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin
Press. Madison.
Frye, J. C. and Willman, H. B. 1960. Classification of the Wisconsin Stage
in the Lake Michigan Glacial Lobe. Circular 285, Division of the Illinois
State Geological Survey.
1963] Niehen and Hole— Natural Processes 227
Hole, F, D. 1956. Soil Survey of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, BuL 81, Soil
Survey Division, Wis, Geological and Nat. Hist. Survey, University of
Wisconsin.
Jackson, M. L. 1958. Soil Chemical Analysis. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood
Cliffs, N. Y.
Nielsen, G, A. 1960, Some quantitative measurements of annual natural or¬
ganic deposits and their effects on prairie and forest soil profiles. M.S.
Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Nielsen, G. A. 1963. Incorporation of organic matter into the A-horizon of
some Wisconsin soils under native vegetation, Ph.D. Thesis, University
of Wisconsin, Madison.
Nielsen, G. A. and Hole, F. D, 1964. Earthworms and the development of
coprogenous Ai horizons in forest soils of Wisconsin, Soil Sci. Soc. Am.
Proc. (in press)
Robocker, W, C, and Miller, B. J, 1955. Effects of clipping, burning and
competition on establishment and survival of some native grasses in Wis¬
consin. Journal of Range Management. 8:117-120.
Shields, L. G. 1955. Soil body and soil profile characteristics of members of
the Miami and Parr catenas in northwestern Dodge County, Wisconsin.
M.S. Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Simonson, R. W., Riecken, F. F., and Smith, G. D. 1952. Understanding Iowa
Soils. W. C. Brown Co., Dubuque.
Soil Survey Staff. 1951. Soil survey manual. U.S.D.A. Handbook No. 18,
U.S.D.A., Washington, D.C.
Weaver, J. R. 1954. North American prairie. Johnson Publishing Co. Lincoln,
Nebraska.
NOTES ON WISCONSIN PARASITIC FUNGI, XXIX
H. C. Greene
This series of notes is based in large part on observations made
on phanerogamic specimens in the Wisconsin section of the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Herbarium. As a result of the activity of
Professor H. H. litis and his students a great many new Wiscon¬
sin specimens have been added to our herbarium in the past eight
years. Many of these have yielded new records of parasites, but
older specimens have also been examined, with similar results. In
some cases adequate material has been available for a separate
fungus specimen, but in other instances where this has not been
possible '‘(U. W. Phan.)” is appended to the record. Also included
are notes on specimens collected in the season of 1962.
The following undetermined powdery mildews have been noted
on hosts not previously reported as bearing these fungi in Wiscon¬
sin: 1) On Brassica nigra. Sauk Co., near Sauk City, September
1961. Coll. 0. Glaeser; 2) Associated with pycnia of Gymnoconia
peckiana on Rubus occidentalis. Dane Co., near Cross Plains, May
23, 1962; 3) On Taraxacum erythrospermum. Dane Co., Madison,
June 5, 1962 ; 4) On Sedum purpureum. Dane Co., Madison, August
8, 1962.
Erysiphe graminis DC., in its conidial stage, occurs very com¬
monly on Poa pratensis in Wisconsin. In the course of a long col¬
lecting career the writer has examined hundreds of such infections
without observing even incipient formation of cleistothecia until
collecting them in abundance on this host at a station near Cross
Plains, Dane Co., June 19, 1962. As indicated by specimens in the
Wisconsin Cryptogamic Herbarium, development of cleistothecia
on Poa pratensis is probably not uncommon in northwestern Amer¬
ica, but it is certainly most unusual in Wisconsin.
Mycosphaerella sp. occurs on dead tips of plants of Eleocharis
palustris collected at Madison, June 25, 1962. The lower portions of
the plants are still green. The perithecia are black, gregarious,
lenticular, approx. 100-115 in long diam. The asci are broadly
clavate, about 37-40 x 14-15 /x. The ascospores are somewhat vari¬
able, subfusoid, subcylindric, or slightly falcate, subhyaline with
a faint greenish tinge, 21-24 x 3. 5-4. 5 /x. They are borne in a com¬
pact group in the stout ascus, usually not completely filling the
upper ascus. Possibly parasitic.
229
230 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Mycosphaerella sp. is present on overwintered leaves of Cornus
canadensis, collected by H. H. litis, June 14, 1959, near Porcupine
Lake, Florence Co. It seems possible this is connected with Septoria
canadensis Peck. The latter is quite common on this host in Wis¬
consin and the spots are similar. The perithecia are black, closely
gregarious, subglobose, approx. 200-250 /x diam. The asci are
slender-cylindric to subfusoid, 35-42 x 6-7 ix. The ascospores have
a pallid greenish tint, are subfusoid, mostly biseriately arranged,
and with the septum not median, but toward the base of the spore,
about to 1% of the distance to the apex, approx. 11-12.5 x
3.5-4 IX.
Mycosphaerella sp. occurs in profusion on the overwintered
basal leaves of Pentstemon gracilis var. wisconsinensis, collected by
J. Patman near Neshkoro, Marquette Co., June 14, 1959. The en¬
tire leaf surface is black from the closely crowded, globose peri¬
thecia, which are about 100 ix diam., with numerous curved— -obcla-
vate asci, 27-30 x 8-9 }x. It seems likely this is connected with Sep¬
toria pentstemonicola Ell. & Ev. which is very common on this host.
The Wisconsin collection does not seem to bear any reation to My¬
cosphaerella pentstemonis Earle, collected on dead stems of Pent¬
stemon in Colorado.
Mycosphaerella sp. was found consistently on Galium concin-
num on rounded, translucent lesions of the type usually associated
with so-called Phyllosticta decidua Ell. & Kell., in a specimen col¬
lected near Verona, Dane Co., June 21, 1962. The perithecia, one or
two per lesion, are black, thick-walled, subglobose, approx. 125-140
fx diam., the asci cylindric to subclavate, slightly curved and short-
pedicellate, about 30-35 x 6-8 /x, the ascospores hyaline, broadly
fusoid and noticeably constricted at the median septum, approx.
12-13 X 3.5 IX. As in other specimens of this general type one sus¬
pects primary insect action in the formation of the lesions, yet the
absence of frass and other signs of such activity leave the matter
open to doubt.
Leptosphaeria sp. is present with considerable regularity on
lower leaves of specimens of Agrostis perennans in the Wisconsin
Herbarium. Such leaves are usually, but not always, brown and
dead. A specimen collected near Hatfield, Jackson Co., August 23,
1940 (L. H. Shinners 2676), has mature perithecia on leaves which
are, in the main, still green, indicating possible parasitism. The
perithecia are brownish, thin-walled, broadly oval in outline and
somewhat flattened, approx. 115-125 /x diam. The asci are cylindric,
46-48.5 X 7.5-8 /x, the ascospores greenish olivaceous, slender fal-
cate-fusoid, 5 septate, about 20 x 3 /x.
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 231
Melannoma sp, occurs in an uncertain relationship to the host
on hairy branchlets of Hudsonia tomentosa, collected by J. Patman
near Prescott, Pierce Co., June 28, 1959, The superficial, black,
subconic perithecia, approx. 225-300 fx diam., are scattered and
firmly nested within the tomentum, appearing confined to the pre¬
vious season’s growth. The large asci are curved-clavate with a
short pedicel, approx. 125-135 x 25-28 }x, the ascospores broadly
fusoid, 3 septate and olivaceous with the two central cells of a
slightly deeper tint, 35-38 x 13-15 /x.
Ophiobolus instabilis Ell. & Ev. on Artemisia biennis was de¬
scribed from material collected by J. J, Davis at Racine, Wis. in
1897. The type specimen has withered leaves which appear frost¬
bitten. This same fungus has been noted on several recent Wis¬
consin collections of A. biennis where, except for the infected
leaves, the hosts are still green, indicating that the fungus may be
a parasite.
PSEUDOPEZIZA SALICIS (Tul.) Pat. (Drepanopeziza solids (Tul.)
Hoehn.), the perfect stage of Gloeosporium solids West. (Mono-
stichella solids (West.) v. Arx.), was collected on overwintered
leaves of Salix (probably S. fragilis) at Madison in June 1962 by
A. Nelson.
PUCCINIA CORONAta Cda. is the only rust recorded up to now on
Schizachne purpurascens in Wisconsin. However, several specimens
of this grass, particularly one collected by N, C. Fassett at Ontario,
Vernon Co., June 14, 1936, bear mature uredia whose spores have
dimensions markedly smaller than those ascribed to P. coronata,
leading to the supposition that they are the spores of P. recondita,
but no positive record can be made since telia are not present.
PucciNiA sp. ii. III is present in small amount on Oryzopsis
pungens collected by N. C. Fassett at Necedah, Juneau Co., May
22, 1932. It is difficult to say whether the leaf on which the rust
occurs was produced in 1932 or the season before, but it looks quite
fresh and green. The few urediospores observed were broadly
obovate to globoid, 28-30 x 22-27 y, the wall slightly yellowish,
about 2.5 jtt thick, echinulate, with 3-4 equatorial pores. The telio-
spores are golden yellow throughout, rather variable in shape, from
obovate to narrowly clavate, or almost cylindric, and from almost
no constriction to moderately constricted between the cells, tip sub-
obtuse to almost acuminate, wall 1.5-2 /a thick at sides, 5-7 y. above,
pedicel not collapsed, about as long as spore and tinted near it. A
good many of the teliospores have germinated, which would seem
to indicate previous season’s origin for the host leaf. Uredia of an¬
other rust occur on an old specimen of 0. pungens collected by G.
232 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Roden near Appleton, Outagamie Co., in May 1890. The sori are
aparaphysate, the spores obovate to narrowly obovate or ellipsoid,
the best developed about 22-25 x 16-18 the wall yellowish, about
1.5 jLt thick, finely echinulate( with smooth areas on some spores,
pores obscure. No rusts are listed on this host in Arthur’s Manual.
PUCCINIA ASPARAGI DC. I has been reported in the phytopatholo-
gical literature as occurring on Allium cepa var. viviparum in Wis¬
consin, but there have been no specimens in our herbarium until a
profuse infection on this host was discovered July 4, 1962 by H. M.
Clarke on his property near Cross Plains, Dane Co. According to
Arthur only the aecial stage has been collected on Allium in nature.
Isopyrum hiternatum has had no rust recorded as occurring on
it in Wisconsin, but in a collection made near Leland, Sauk Co.,
June 2, 1962, there are pycnia, but no aecia, of a rust which it
seems very likely is Puccinia recondita Rob. ex Desm.
Phyllosticta grossulariae Sacc. has been reported on Ribes
sativum (R. vulgare) in Wisconsin and such specimens as are in
the Wisconsin Herbarium have well-defined, margined spots. In a
collection on this host, made July 25, 1962 at Madison, the spots
are immarginate, dingy brown, broadly oval, about 1.5 cm. long.
Microscopically the specimen, with conidia about 5-7 x 3 /x, corre¬
sponds well with the description of P. grossulariae and has been
so named.
Phyllosticta numerospora H. C. Greene (Amer. Midi. Nat.
50: 506. 1953) on Potentila argentea has up till now been noted
only on the type from Madison, but it has recently been detected
on phanerogamic specimens collected in various counties, including
Columbia, Grant, Marinette, Rock, Sauk and Waupaca.
Phyllostictae indet. have been noted on a number of hosts and
are reported on collectively, as follows: 1) On Sparganium eury-
carpum coll, by H. C. Wilson near Johnson Creek, Jefferson Co.,
August 23, 1961. Leaf lesions are elongate, marginal, dull yellowish
brown with narrow darker border, the black pycnidia innnate and,
conforming to the narrow band of tissue available for their devel¬
opment, markedly flattened, approx. 150-175 /x diam., and scat¬
tered. The conidia are hyaline and globoid, 10-11 x 11.5-12.5 /x,
with granular contents and a smooth wall about 1 fx thick. The gen¬
eral macroscopic aspect is very similar to that of Stagonospora
sparganii (Fckl.) Sacc., except that in that species the pycnidia are
even more deeply sunken and inconspicuous; 2) On Sparganium
chlorocarpum coll, by W. A. Skroch near Babcock, Wood Co., June
26, 1961, Pycnidia are on brownish, but current season’s, basal
leaves. Pycnidia themselves are light brown, gregarious, thin-
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 233
walled, somewhat flattened, about 100-115 /x diam,, with a promi¬
nent ostiole. Conidia are cylindric, hyaline, mostly biguttulate, but
with no evidence of septation, 7-10 x 2.5-3 /x. What appears to be
the same fungus is present on a leaf of Sparganium americanum,
coll, by J. J. Davis at Spring Green, Sauk Co., July 14, 1921; 3) In
small amount on sharply defined, elongate, dark bordered, pallid
tan lesions on Aristida intermedia coll, by T. G. Hartley in the
Camp McCoy area, Monroe Co., August 19, 1956. The pycnidia are
brownish, flattened, subellipsoid, approx. 75 /x in longest dimension,
with prominent ostiole, the conidia hyaline, rod-shaped, of the
micro- type, 4-5 x 1-1.3 /x. A very similar Phyllosticta has been
noted on a specimen of the adventive Bouteloua gracilis, coll, by
0. Anderson and H. C. Greene near Black Earth, Dane Co., August
1, 1950; 4) On cinereous dead areas on leaves of Agropyron repens
coll, at Madison, June 28, 1962, where the pycnidia are pallid
brownish, thin-walled, about 115-125 /x diam., the conidia hyaline,
short cylindric, approx. 4-5 x 1.5-2 /x. Perhaps a microsporous
stage, but the spores are somewhat wider than is usual in such
forms; 5) On Silene dichotoma, coll, near Harrisville, Marquette
Co., August 15, 1960. The conidia are up to 10 x 3.5, outside the
range of Phyllosticta nehulosa Sacc., reported on this host in Wis¬
consin, and approach P. silenes Peck where they are 10-12.5 x
3.5-5 /x; 6) On Astragalus canadensis coll, by G. Struik near Juda,
Green Co., August 8, 1956. The pallid-brownish pycnidia are
epiphyllous and zonate, about 125-150 /x diam., with hyaline, sub-
cylindric conidia 5-7 x 2-2.5 (-3) /x. Evidently very similar to, and
perhaps identical with, a fungus reported on this host by J. J.
Davis (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 19(2) : 686. 1919). Davis
considered his fungus as possibly identical with Gloeosporium
davisii Ell. & Ev. which was described from a specimen coll, in
Wisconsin on pods of Vida americana, but stated that he had filed
the specimen provisionally under the name Gloeosporium astragali.
There is currently no specimen in the Wisconsin Cryptogamic Her¬
barium under this name, nor is there any specimen on Astragalus
filed under G. davisii. In his revision of Gloeosporium von Arx
states, and I think correctly, that G. davisii is sphaeropsidaceous
and names it Dothiorella davisii (Ell. & Ev.) von Arx. This fungus,
however, has conidia distinctly larger than either of the specimens
on Astragalus ; 7) On rounded tan spots, 4-5 mm, diam., with nar¬
row darker border, on Acer saccharum coll, near Browntown,
Green Co., June 13, 1962. The light brown pycnidia are subglobose,
approx, 100-175 /x diam., the hyaline conidia 5-6 x 1.8-3 /x Similar
to an undetermined Phyllosticta on Acer ruhrum, reported on in
my Notes 24. (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 47 : 102. 1958) ;
8) On Impatiens halsamina (cult.) coll, at Madison, August 27,
234 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1962. The well-marked spots are rounded and cinereous, with
brownish margins, about .3-5 cm. diam. The globose, blackish
pycnidia are epiphyllous and gregarious, about 125-225 /x diam.,
with a prominent ostiole marked by a ring of darker cells. The
hyaline conidia are rod-shaped, biguttulate, approx. 4-6.5 x 1.3-1. 5
/X. This is evidently not P. balsaminae Vogl., said to have conidia
7 X 2,5 /X and smaller pycnidia. Seemingly, no satisfactory descrip¬
tion of P. impatientis Fautr. (Depazea impatientis Kirchn.) exists
and I have been unable to locate any specimens so labeled for study ;
9) On Galium aparine coll. June 5, 1962 near Verona, Dane Co. On
sordid brownish immarginate areas, usually on only one leaf of a
whorl. The pycnidia are few, scattered, pallid brownish, sub-
globose, prominently ostiolate, approx. 125-140 /x diam., conidia
hyaline, cylindric, straight or slightly curved, 7-11 x 2.5-3 /x. This
fungus has somewhat the aspect of an Ascochyta, but none of the
apparently well-matured conidia are septate, so far as observed;
10) On Galium triflorum, coll, at the same time and place as 9),
there is a similar, possibly identical Phyllosticta, The rounded,
reddish-brown spots with narrow, dark margins are much more
sharply defined than those on G. aparine, but the pycnidia are
about the same. The conidia, however, are 5-8 x 1.8-2. 5 /x; 11) On
sordid brownish to blackish, indefinite, but rather extensive areas
involving the tips of leaves of Galium circaezans coll. June 21, 1962
near Verona, Dane Co., in the same general location as 9) and 10).
The thin-walled, flattened pycnidia are pallid brownish, approx.
90-125 /X diam., the conidia hyaline, narrow-cylindric, (4-) 5-6 (-7)
X 1.3-1.7 (-2) /x; 12) In an uncertain relationship on the cinereous
upper side of lesions caused primarily by the microcyclic Puccinia
silphii Schw. on Silphium perfoliatum coll, near Leland, Sauk Co.,
July 21, 1962. The pycnidia are black when viewed with a hand
lens, but translucent and merely sooty under high magnification,
globose, with a ring of darker cells delimiting the rather wide
ostiole, and are approx. 165-200 /x diam. The hyaline conidia are
narrowly cylindric to narrowly subfusoid, straight or slightly
curved, often biguttulate, (5.5-) 6.5-7.5 (-10) x 1.5-2 (-2.5) /x. Two
of the eight pycnidia examined also contained some globose conidia,
about 9-10 /X diam., but the cylindric type seem characteristic; 13)
On Aster sagittif olius coll, near Verona, Dane Co., July 25, 1962.
The suborbicular, sordid brownish spots are about 1 cm. diam., the
pycnidia deeply immersed, thin-walled, pale yellowish brown,
approx. 90-110 /x diam., the conidia hyaline, short-cylindric, 5-7.5
X 2.5-3 /X. Quite different from a Phyllosticta on the same host men¬
tioned in my Notes 28.
Phoma sp. occurs on stems of Paronychia fastigiata from Som-
erfield Island, Buffalo Co., collected August 27, 1926 by N. C. Fas-
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 235
sett. In my Notes 20 (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 43 : 167.
1954) I informally described this same fungus on Paronychia cana¬
densis. Discovery of it on P. fastigiata would seem to indicate that
it is probably a characteristic parasite of Paronychia. Neither
specimen in hand is ample for formal description.
Phoma sp. infects stems and leaves of a specimen of Spergularia
ruhra, collected by H. H. litis (13704) in the State Forest Nursery
at Trout Lake, Vilas Co., June 16, 1959. Since the affected parts
have been killed back, parasitism is uncertain. The closely gregari¬
ous pycnidia are dark brown, subglobose, prominently ostiolate,
about 75-100 y diam. Conidia are hyaline, ellipsoid to broadly el¬
lipsoid, or occasionally subfusoid, 4-5 (-6) x 1.8-2. 7 ji.
Phoma sp. is present in small amount on stems of Talinum
rugospermum, collected near Newark, Rock Co., July 18, 1957 (E.
W. Fell 57-774). The flattened brown pycnidia are about 75 fx
diam., the hyaline, elongate-fusoid conidia 13-17 x 4-5.5 /x, without
any indication of incipient septation. Perhaps parasitic.
Phoma (?) sp. occurs in profusion on the stem of an old speci¬
men of Portulaca oleracea, collected at Poynette, Columbia Co.,
July 10, 1886 by H. L. Russell. The pycnidia are jet black and large,
approx. 200-250 y diam. and closely gregarious. The hyaline coni¬
dia are broadly ellipsoid and large, 17-19 x 11-13 (-14) /x. The gen¬
eral aspect of this fungus and the size and shape of the conidia
suggest that it is perhaps an immature Sphaeropsis, but whatever
its taxonomic niche, there seems little doubt it was strongly para¬
sitic. Phoma stigma Cke. & Hark., described on P. oleracea, has
minute pycnidia and conidia 6 x 3 /x.
Macrophoma spp. are occasionally noted on senescent or dead
lower leaves of various grasses. One such has been studied on a
specimen of Bouteloua curtipendula, collected by L. H. Shinners at
Elkhart Lake, Sheboygan Co., September 2, 1940. The innate, sub-
globose, black pycnidia are about 175 /x diam., the large, elongate,
subfusoid, hyaline conidia approx. 2,1-25 x 7-8 /x. What appears to
be the same fungus occurs on Agrostis scabra, collected by Shin¬
ners at Spooner, Washburn Co., July 7, 1942. Sprague notes a num¬
ber of species of Macrophoma on Gramineae, but considers them to
be at most weakly parasitic.
Phomopsis diachenh Sacc. has been noted occasionally on leaves
and fruits of Pastinaca sativa in Wisconsin, but has appeared to
be at most a mild parasite. In 1962, however, numerous plants of
this weed in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum at Madison
were killed back by profuse development of P. diachenii on the
upper stems.
236 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Phomopsis sp. occurs on Phyllosticta decidua-type lesions on
Solidago canadensis, collected at Madison, July 26, 1962. The
fuscous pycnidia are approx. 140-160 [i diam., the Phoma-type
conidia hyaline, fusoid, 7.5-9 x 2.7-4 /x, the scolecospores hyaline,
from straight to strongly curved, subobtuse, 8-10 x 1.2-1. 5 /x Pos¬
sibly parasitic.
Ascochyta sp. on dead lower leaves of a specimen of Agrostis
stolonifera collected by N. C. Fassett at Marquette, Green Lake Co.,
September 18, 1929, does not correspond in spore dimensions with
any of the species mentioned by Sprague in his ‘‘Diseases of Cere¬
als and Grasses in North America”, The black pycnidia are 85-110
fx diam., the hyaline conidia 7-9 x 2. 5-3. 5 /x.
Ascochyta sp., which may be referable to A. utahensis Sprague,
occurs on the dead lower leaves of the current season’s culms of
Agropyron smithii, collected by L. H. Shinners near Granville,
Milwaukee Co., June 26, 1940. Sprague found this fungus on
Agropyron inerme and A. trachycaulum in the Rocky Mountain
region. He states A. utahensis is definitely parasitic and distin¬
guished by its large spores which exceed in size those of any other
Ascochyta on Gramineae. He gives pycnidial size as 110-150 /x and
conidia as 22-29 x 6.5-10 /x. If anything the Wisconsin specimen
has slightly larger pycnidia and the conidia are about 30-33 x
6.5-8 /X. It may be noted that Agropyron smithii is adventive in
Wisconsin from farther west.
Ascochyta, which seems close to but is probably not identical
with Ascochyta chelidonii Kab. & Bub., occurs on more or less well-
defined dead areas on leaves of Chelidonium majus collected near
Verona, Dane Co., June 5, 1962. In the Wisconsin specimen those
conidia which are septate and seem best developed are mostly
about 10-13 X 3-3.5 /x, whereas Rabat and Bubak give the measure¬
ments as 10-22 X 4-6 /x.
Ascochyta sp. on Amphicarpa hracteata from near Leland,
Sauk Co., August 18, 1962, is very well marked and seems distinct
from any species of Ascochyta reported on closely related Legumi-
nosae. I have found no species of Ascochyta listed on Amphicarpa
and if additional collections are made a formal description will
probably be justified. Notes on the specimen are as follows: Spots
orbicular, .3-.7 mm. diam., tissue thin, translucent, ashen-brown
in center, with narrow dark brown margin; pycnidia gregarious,
pallid brownish, thin-walled and translucent, subglobose, approx.
115-150 /X diam. ; conidia hyaline, cylindric or broadly ellipsoid, not
constricted at septum, 7-9 (-10.5) x 2. 5-3. 5 /x.
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 237
Ascochyta sp. on Viburnum lentago^ collected near Leland, Sauk
Co., July 21, 1962, is on translucent spots of the type ascribed to
Phyllosticta decidua Ell, & Kell The sooty, somewhat flattened
pycnidia are black when viewed from above, but are quite thin-
walled, approx. 180-230 /x diam., the conidia hyaline, narrowly
ellipsoid to fusoid or subfusoid, 8-11 x 2.5-3 (-3.5) /x and the sep¬
tum median. Possibly, but not certainly, saprophytic.
Ascochyta compositarum J. J. Davis was reported on Solidago
ulmifolia from Madison in my Notes 26. This collection had conidia
about of the size specified in Davis’ description, 15-22 x 4-6 /x. In
a very ample specimen on the same host, collected near Lake Lulu,
Troy Twp., Walworth Co., August 13, 1962, and somewhat doubt¬
fully referred to A. compositarum, those conidia which are septate
run (7.5-) 9-10 x 2.7-3 /x, at the lower end of the size range of the
form which Davis originally designated as A. compositarum var,
parva, but later incorporated with the species. In the recent speci¬
men only a small minority of the conidia are septate. Those which
are continuous are slender-cylindric, about 6-8 x 2 /x. In some less
well developed pycnidia no septate conidia are to be found and
those present run even shorter than the 6-8 /x just mentioned.
However, the large, blackish-brown, orbicular, more or less zonate
lesions are quite characteristic for A. compositarum.
Diplodia sp. has been noted on leaves of Chrysothamnus graveo-
lens from a plant in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum at
Madison, June 25, 1962. Although the infected leaves are dead and
brown there seems little doubt that the Diplodia was primary. The
pycnidia are light brown, subglobose, erumpent and papillate,
approx, (115-) 140-155 (-180) /x diam., the conidia pale grayish,
subcylindric or broadly subfusoid, septum median and not con¬
stricted, or only slightly so, (18-) 22-26 (-28) x 10-12.5 /x. The host
plant appeared to be very seriously damaged. I have found no
record of any species of Diplodia on this or closely related hosts.
Stagonospora bromi Sm. & Ramsb. and Ascochyta graminicola
Sacc. (A. sorghi Sacc.) have both been reported on species of
Bromus and, it would seem, grade into one another. In a specimen
on Bromus japonicus collected at Madison, August 1, 1962, many of
the spores are 2 septate, but all are less than 20 /x long, so the
specimen fits neither S. bromi nor A. graminicola, but is close to
both.
Stagonospora zonata J. J. Davis, noted on a specimen of As-
clepias exaltata (A. phytolaccoides) , collected near Athelstane, Mar¬
inette Co., August 11, 1956, has conidia which are 6-7 septate and
238 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
35-40 X 7-8 /X, as opposed to an earlier collection on the same host
where the conidia were somewhat narrower and mostly only 1-2
septate. A highly variable, yet integrated species, as shown by
numerous collections on other species of Asclepias.
Septoria (?) sp. occurs associated with Puccinia recondita on
leaves of Agrostis perennans, collected by L. H. Shinners near
Tony, Rusk Co., August 24, 1940. The thin-walled, pale brown
pycnidia are about 125-150 /x diam. and are somewhat flattened.
The spores are hyaline, straight to slightly curved, approx. 20-30
X 3 /X, obscurely 1-3 septate. Somewhat resembling Septoria no-
dorum Berk, which, however, has thicker-walled and larger pycni¬
dia. Still another in the confusing assemblage of forms on the
borderline between Stagonospora and Septoria, so prevalent in the
Gramineae.
Septoria sp. occurs on leaves of Alopecurus pratensis collected
by J. Patman near Cadott, Chippewa Co., June 26, 1959. The small
black pycnidia are only about 50-65 /x diam., the hyaline acicular
spores (18-) 23-27 x 1.5 /x. I And no mention of any species of
Septoria on Alopecurus in North America, but S, graminum Desm.
is reported on Alopecurus in Europe. This species has small
pycnidia and slender spores, but they are twice the length of those
of the Wisconsin specimen.
Septoria sp. is present in some quantity on Aster angustus col¬
lected by S. C. Wadmond at Horlicksville, Racine Co., September
30, 1898. Although some leaves are heavily infected only a few of
the pycnidia contain spores indicating, perhaps, the presence of an
overwintering stage. Similar structures present on the stems like¬
wise do not have differentiated contents. The pycnidia are globose,
black, with large ostiole, approx. 75-85 /x diam., the spores hyaline,
slightly curved or sinuous, about 20-32 x 1.5-2 /x, 2-3 septate.
Colletotrichum sp., which appears to have been parasitic, oc¬
curs in abundance on long, pallid streaks on the fruiting stalks and
capsules of Camassia scillioides (C. esculenta) collected by S. C.
Wadmond at Dill, Green Co., July 18, 1931. The acervuli are thickly
beset with coarse, subacuminate, blackish-brown setae which are
only slightly curved, several septate, from 50-125 x 4-6 /x. The hya¬
line conidia are slender-falcate, 20-23 x 3-3.5 /x.
Colletotrichum sp., appearing parasitic, occurs on pale brown¬
ish, more or less elongate and wedge-shaped lesions located distally
on the lobes of leaves of Crypto taenia canadensis, collected near
Albany, Green Co., July 19, 1962. The acervuli are amphigenous,
scattered to gregarious, variable in diameter. The setae are black-
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 239
ish below, paler near the tip, long-tapering, several septate and
divergent, mostly from the edge of the acervulus, approx. 60-190 ijl
long by 3.5-6 ju, wide at the base. The conidia are hyaline, falcate,
about 18-23 x 3-4 /x. The lesions tend to shred and curl toward the
outer edge. Except for the infected portion the leaves are deep
green and seemingly in flourishing condition. It was noted that the
infected plants were all growing in deep shade, whereas closely
adjacent plants in a sunny opening were free of the Colleto trichum.
Also found near New Glarus, Green Co., the same day.
Acremonium sp, had overgrown the uredia of Kuehneola ured-
inis (Lk.) Arth. on Rubus allegheniensis collected at Madison,
October 24, 1961. The hyaline, ellipsoid to subfusoid conidia approx.
4-6 X 1.5-2 /X, are produced acrogenously from slender, simple side
branches from the equally slender, decumbent mycelium. Possibly
parasitic. It seems likely that a similar fungus on Pucciniastrum
agrimoniae, reported by me as a possible Monosporium (Amer.
Midi. Nat. 41 : 730. 1949), would be better assigned to Acremonium.
Epicoccum neglectum Desm. has been reported as a possible
weak parasite of soybean and hog-peanut in Wisconsin. The fungus
occurs in a similar relationship on small, oval, sharply defined tan
spots on leaves of Erythronium americanum collected at Madison,
May 23, 1962.
Ramularia (?) sp. is hypophyllous on dull reddish-brown, or¬
bicular to somewhat elongate lesions, about .5-1 cm. diam., on
leaves of Spiraea alba, collected at Madison, September .11, I960.
This is a very delicate fungus, scarcely discernible with an or¬
dinary pocket hand lens. The hyaline or subhyaline conidiophores
are rather widely scattered, arising at right angles from mycelial
threads which themselves appear superficial at the points of origin
of the phores. The phores are simple, straight and quite rigid, 70-
120 X 2.5-3 /X, sometimes continuous, but mostly 2-3 septate, with
a cluster of spore scars at the tip and occasionally in whorls at
points lower on the phores. The hyaline conidia are subfusoid, con¬
tinuous so far as observed, (7.5) 10-13 (-17) /x, and show some evi¬
dence of catenulation. This seems close to, but probably not identi¬
cal with, Ramularia spiraeae Peck which occurs on Physocarpus
(Spiraea) opulifolius in Wisconsin and has conidia which are very
similar to those of the specimen in question, but whose conidio¬
phores are rather rudimentary. Conidiophore length is, of course,
often strongly influenced by external environmental factors and the
infected Spiraea alba was growing in a low, marshy site in a more
than ordinarily wet summer. More specimens, collected in different
years would be desirable for comparative study.
240 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Ramularia sp., somewhat similar to Ramiilaria variata J. J.
Davis, yet differing in being more delicate and in an epiphyllous
habit, occurs on Satureja vulgaris collected by W. M. Shaughnessy
near Cable, Bayfield Co., October 3, 1959. The mostly 1 septate con-
idia have a maximum length of 20 /x, are about 2.5-3 /x wide, and
lack the subfusoid configuration found in many of the conidia of
R. variata.
Ramularia virgaureae Thum. was observed in profuse fruiting
on overwintered basal rosette leaves of Solidago nemoralis at Madi¬
son, May 16, 1962. When sections were made the conidiophores
were seen to be produced from the surface of globose, perithecium-
like bodies which, no doubt, developed in the fall of 1961. At the
time of collection new leaves, presumably susceptible to infection,
were being produced, insuring perpetuation of the parasite without
intervention of a perfect stage.
Stigmina Juniperina (Georg. & Bad.) M. B. Ellis is the name
applied by C. S. Hodges to the fungus on Juniperus communis var.
depressa, originally cited in the Wisconsin lists as Cercospora
sequoiae var. juniperi Ell. & Ev. and later referred to Exosporium
deflectens Karst. As for the similar fungus on Juniperus virginiana,
Hodges places it once again in C. sequoiae var. juniperi. Chupp
does not consider this to be properly a species of Cercospora, but
Hodges has made an intensive study of the group, so it seems ad¬
visable to accept his names for the time being.
Cercosporella CANA Sacc., on lower leaves of Erigeron annuus,
collected by E. Beals near New Post, Sawyer Co., June 24, 1959,
has completely killed back the leaves and on the old spots there are
very numerous black, thick-walled, astomous, spherical fruiting
bodies, 55-60 diam., which contain very large numbers of hyaline
microconidia, approx. 3-4 x .6-.8 /x.
Cercospora sp. has been observed on the stem of a specimen of
Polygonella articulata collected by T. G. Hartley near Burr Oak,
LaCrosse Co., September 5, 1956. The conidiophores are in diver¬
gent fascicles from small stromatic bases, clear deep brown in
color, tortuous, rather closely multigeniculate, approx. 35-60 x 3-4
/X. Conidia are fuliginous, narrowly obclavate, truncate below, with
noticeable scar, (20-) 25-35 (-45) x (2-) 2.5-3 /x, 1-3 septate.
Chupp does not report any species of Cercospora on Polygonella.
This seems rather similar to C. avicularis Wint. on species of Poly¬
gonum, but C. avicularis has conidia 30-75 x 3-5 /x.
Cercospora GEI Fckl., as interpreted by Chupp in his “Mono¬
graph of Cercospora'’, includes in the synonomy several species of
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 241
Ramularia which have been described on Geum. This may be as
satisfactory a disposition as any for what is a puzzling series, the
extremes of which seem distinct, yet in which there are intergrad¬
ing forms. As far as Wisconsin collections are concerned, an at¬
tempt has been made to keep separate the extremes, but the more
specimens examined, the less valid such treatment seems. A recent
collection on Geum allepicum var. strictum has been referred to
Cercospora, yet earlier specimens on this host have seemed more
Ramularia-like and have been so placed.
Cercospora sp. occurs on leaves of Chelone glabra collected by
R. C. Koeppen near Middleton, Dane Co., September 7, 1956. The
spots are rounded and small, with cinereous centers and dark-
purplish borders. The epiphyllous conidiophores are in spreading
tufts from small blackish stromata. The phores are (40-) 70-100
X 4-5 /x, slightly curved, mildly tortuous and geniculate, several sep¬
tate, clear light brown. The few conidia seen were hyaline, nar¬
rowly obclavate, truncate below, about 3-4 septate, approx. 50-75
X 3-4 /X. Chupp does not mention Chelone as a host genus.
Elymus canadensis, collected by D. Ugent on Chambers Island,
Door Co., July 2, 1961, bears on the leaves elongate “char’’ spots,
the locules of which contain a mixture of vast numbers of short,
rod-shaped microconidia and considerably longer, but equally slen¬
der scolecospores. The spots suggest Septogloeum oxysporum Sacc.,
Bomm. & Rouss., common on a variety of grasses in the northwest,
but in Wisconsin known so far only on Glyceria striata.
Aralia nudicaulis from near Verona, Dane Co., June 26, 1962,
bears a so far undetermined parasite which is hypophyllous on
large, suborbicular or irregularly angled, sordid brownish, sub-
zonate blotches, 2-4 cm. diam., or sometimes more, with very nar¬
row, dark brown borders. The scattered, more or less decumbent
conidiophores are up to 3 mm. long, slender, approx. 13-15 /x wide,
with occasional constricted areas, many septate, clear brown,
mostly simple but sometimes branched, candelabrum-like, near the
base, the fruiting tips appearing simple or, if branched, only in
very rudimentary fashion. The conidia are hyaline, moderately
thick-walled, broadly ellipsoid or ovoid, (8.5-) 10-11 (.12) x
(5.5-) 6.5-7 y. No conidia have been seen attached, but it appears
they may be borne successively from small protuberances clustered
near the apex.
Salix humilis leaves, collected near Swan Lake, Pacific Twp., Co¬
lumbia Co., September 21, 1962, bear conspicuous, applanate, shin¬
ing black, non-fruiting fungus growths which may involve as much
as half the area of otherwise still green leaves. The fungus appears
to be intraepidermal on both surfaces, but is particularly notice-
242 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
able only on the smooth upper surface. The tissues between the
epidermal layers have largely disintegrated. There is no sign of
insect action. Rhytisma salicinum (Pers.) Fr., of which this is
somewhat reminiscent, is decidedly more limited in extent and is
also elevated well above the leaf surface.
Additional Hosts
The following hosts have not been previously recorded as bear¬
ing the fungi mentioned in Wisconsin.
Peronospora parasitica (Pers.) Fr. on Erysimum cheiran-
thoides. Grant Co., near Platteville, June 26, 1960. Coll. R. P.
Wunderli,
Sphaerotheca humuli (DC.) Burr var. fuliginea (Schl.)
Salm. on Erigeron divaricatus. Columbia Co., near Lodi, November
16, 1929. Coll. N. C. Fassett (9202). (U.W. Phan.).
Erysiphe graminis DC. Conidia on Poa annua. Jackson Co., near
Hatfield, June 28, 1947. Coll. D. F. Grether. (U. W. Phan.).
PSEUDOPEZIZA MEDICAGINIS (Lib.) Sacc. on Medicago lupulina.
Manitowoc Co., near Newtonburgh, June 4, 1960. Coll. R. Bolge.
Although reported for Wisconsin in the Agricultural Handbook of
Plant Diseases, there is no earlier specimen on M. lupulina in the
Wisconsin Cryptogamic Herbarium.
Venturia sporoboli H. C. Greene on Andropogon scoparius.
Iowa Co., Gov. Dodge State Park, August 15, 1962. The elongate,
fuscous lesions are strikingly similar to those produced on Sporo-
holus. The dry, narrow, strongly ribbed leaves of A. scoparius pro¬
vide a developmental site very much like that offered by Sporo-
holus cryptandrus on which this fungus was originally described.
Phyllachora graminis (Pers.) Fckl. on Agropyron smithii.
Dane Co., Madison, June 18, 1921. Coll. J. J. Davis. (U. W. Phan.),
Although the parasite is present in only small amount it is in ex¬
cellent maturity.
Elsinoe veneta (Burkh.) Jenkins. Sphaceloma stage on Rubus
sp. (dewberry). Dane Co., Pine Bluff, September 7, 1962. While
the host species is undetermined, it is not Rubus allegheniensis, R.
occidentalis, or R. strigosus, the three species previously reported
as bearing this fungus in Wisconsin.
USTILAGO STRiiFORMis (West.) Niessl on Agrostis perennans.
Grant Co., Glenhaven, September 14, 1940. Coll, N. C. Fassett
(21940). (U. W. Phan.).
1963]
Greene— Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX
243
CiNTRACTiA CARICIS (Pers.) Magn. on Carex ahdita and on Carex
richardsoni. Both collected May 31, 1962 in Sect, 1, Town of Ver¬
ona, Dane Co., near Madison. Also on Carex blanda. Dane Co., near
Verona, July 1, 1962. Coll J. H, Zimmerman.
SCHIZONELLA MELANOGRAMMA (DC.) Schroet. on Carex ahdita.
Kenosha Co., 41/2 mi. S. of Kenosha near Lake Michigan shore,
May 27, 1962. Coll. H. H. litis.
Entyloma dactylidis (Pass.) Cif. on Agrostis stolonifera.
Green Lake Co., Marquette, September 18, 1929. Coll. N. C. Fassett
(8573).
Doassansia martianoffiana (Thum.) Schroet. on Potamogeton
gramineus. Grant Co., Glenhaven, September 9, 1930. Coll. N, C.
Fassett (12618). U, W. Pham).
Melampsorella caryophyllacearum Schroet. II on Stellaria
calycantha. Forest Co., near Alvin, August 12, 1953. Coll. E. M.
Christensen.
Cronartium RIBICOLA Fisch. ii, III on Ribes sativum. Dane Co,,
Madison, September 11, 1961.
Puccinia recondita Rob. ex Desm. II on Agropyron psammo-
philum (A. dasystachum) . Door Co., Washington Island, July 6,
1931, Coll J. J. Davis. (U. W. Phan.),
Puccinia poae-nemoralis Otth II on Alopecums carolinianus.
Vernon Co,, Northwood Nurseries near Coon Valley, June 15, 1942.
Coll T. R. Koethe. Also on Alopecums aequalis. Marathon Co.,
near Mosinee, September 10, 1940. Coll N, C, Fassett (21189),
(U. W. Phan.).
Puccinia coronata Cda. Ill on Cinna latifolia. Florence Co.,
near Pine Lake, July 17, 1941, Coll J. T, Curtis. (U. W. Phan.).
It seems likely that the report by J. J. Davis of P. coronata on
Cinna arundinacea should be dropped, as a collection from Luck,
Polk Co., of which his specimen seems to be a part, has been au¬
thoritatively re-determined as C. latifolia. Also on Beckmannia
syzigachne. Milwaukee Co., Milwaukee, August 2, 1938. Coll L, H.
Shinners. On a phanerogamic specimen in the herbarium of the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Comm. J. W, Baxter.
Puccinia graminis Pers II, III on Oryzopsis pungens, Vernon
Co., Wildcat Mt. State Park, July 17, 1956. Coll. T. G. Hartley.
(U. W. Phan,). Referred here because of the very characteristic
urediospores. The teliospores observed are well within the width
range for P. graminis, but at the lower limit of the length, as given
244 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
in Arthur’s Manual. However, intensive studies of grass rusts by
Cummins and others in recent years have usually resulted in de¬
cided revisions, in both directions, of the spore size ranges given in
the Manual. Also on Agropyron psammophilum (A. dasystachum) ,
Sheboygan Co., Terry Andrae State Park, September 1949. Coll. E.
L. Loyster.
PUCCINIA DioiCAE P. Magn. I on Oenothera strigosa. Marathon
Co., near Edgar, June 23, 1957. Coll. H. Gale. (U, W. Phan.). II,
III on Carex deweyana, Marathan Co., near Hogarty, June 10,
1961. Coll. R. A. Schlising. (U. W. Phan.).
PucciNiA SPOROBOLI Arth. I on Lilium michiganense, Jefferson
Co., Faville Prairie near Lake Mills, June 9, 1947 (H. C. Greene
1166). JJromyces hohvayi Lagh., according to Arthur’s Manual,
has aecia which are cupulate in groups and the writer’s No. 1166,
which corresponds to this account, was distributed to several
herbaria as U. holyivayi. D. B. 0. Savile has examined this speci¬
men and commented on it in a recent article (Mycologia 53: 34.
1961). He points out that Arthur’s description of the aecia as
cupulate is in error, since they are actually bullate, and that Ar¬
thur’s description very probably was based on aecia of a grass rust,
perhaps Puccinia sporoboli. My 1166 was collected in close prox¬
imity to a large stand of Sporobolus heterolepis which commonly
bears P. sporoboli II, III in this area, so the collection is referred
here, especially since Lilium is known to bear P. sporoboli and since
my material corresponds very well in spore wall thickness and in
other characters. It is of interest that J. J. Davis did collect two
Wisconsin specimens on Lilium with the bullate aecia of JJromyces
holwayi.
Puccinia arenariae (Schum.) Wint. on Spergula arvensis. Lin¬
coln Co., Merrill, August 12, 1956. Coll. M. H. Iwen.
Puccinia mariae-wilsoni Clint. 0 on Claytonia caroliniana. Iron
Co., near Upson, May 27, 1956. Coll. P. F. Maycock. (U. W. Phan.).
Puccinia helianthi Schw II, III on Helianthus decapetalus.
Sauk Co., near Denzer, October 7, 1961. Coll. R. W. Berry.
Uromyces peckianus Farl. ii. III on Aristida basiramea. Trem¬
pealeau Co., near Whitehall, August 27, 1940. Coll. L. H. Shinners
(2781).
Uromyces striatus Schroet. II on Medicago lupulina. Dodge Co.
near Horicon, August 25, 1958. Coll. C. Martz. In September 1962
J. W. Baxter collected the rust on this host at Milwaukee.
1968] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 245
Uromyces triquetrus Cooke III on Hypericum canaclense. Jack-
son Co., near Millston, September 9, 1958. Coll. A. M. Peterson.
Xenogloea eriophori (Bres.) Syd. on Scirpus atrocinctus.
Juneau Co., near Mauston, July 12, 1962.
Pellicularia filamentosa (Pat.) Rogers on Dianthus armeria.
Iowa Co., Gov. Dodge State Park, July 4, 1959. Coll. B. Wislinsky.
(U. W. Phan.). Also on Veronica serpyllifolia. Lincoln Co., near
Merrill, September 7, 1960. Coll. T. A. Ebert.
Phyllosticta amaranthi Ell. & Kell on Amaranthus tuher-
culatus (Moq.) J. D. Sauer (host det. Sauer). Grant Co., Potosi,
September 8, 1930. Coll. N. C. Fassett (13649). (U. W. Phan.).
Phyllosticta boehmeriicola J. J. Davis on Urtica dioica. Dane
Co., near Pine Bluff, August 9, 1962. As in collections on Laportea
canadensis assigned to this species, the pycnidia are almost super¬
ficial, whereas in the type on Boehmeria they are somewhat more
deeply imbedded. More material on Boehmeria would be desirable.
There is no question at all of the identity of the fungi on Laportea
and Urtica, but it would seem they may be varietally different from
the type, although similar in every way except growth habit on
the host.
Phyllosticta nebulosa Sacc. on Silene armeria. Racine Co.,
Racine. Coll, T. J. Hale. (U. W. Phan.). The date of collection is
not given, but this specimen is at least one hundred years old and
well illustrates the durability of sphaeropsidaceous fungi, since
after a short time in mounting fluid the conidia appeared in ex¬
cellent condition and matched those of recently collected specimens
of this fungus.
Phyllosticta fragaricola Desm. & Rob. on Frag aria virgini-
ana. Jefferson Co., Faville Prairie near Lake Mills, August 2, 1962.
The large, black, epiphyllous pycnidia are very sparingly developed
on cinereous lens-shaped spots which have a rather wide purplish
border. The spots are about 3-5 mm. long and tend to lie along the
midrib. Ramularia spots are also present and somewhat confuse the
picture. Previous collections of P. fragaricola in Wisconsin have
been on species of Potentilla. An undetermined Phyllosticta on
Fragaria virginiana, microscopically similar to this, but producing
very different lesions was mentioned in my Notes 26 (Trans. Wis.
Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 49 :89. 1960) .
Phyllosticta palustris Ell. & Dearn. on Stachys hispida. Iowa
Co., Gov. Dodge State Park, August 15, 1962.
246 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Phyllosticta verbascicola Ell. & Kell, on Verbascum hlattaria.
LaCrosse Co., Bohemian Valley, Washington Twp., June 22, 1959.
Coll. A. M. Peterson.
Phyllosticta decidua Ell. & Kell, on Solidago gigantea. Dane
Co., Madison, June 18, 1962. A dubious parasite but, to my knowl¬
edge, convincing proof of saprophytism has never been presented.
Phyllosticta cacaliae H. C. Greene on Cacalia suaveolens.
Green Co., Decatur Lake near Brodhead, August 28, 1962.
Phoma mariae Clint, on Lonicera morrowi. Dane Co., Madison,
March 25, 1945. Coll. M. S. Bergseng. (U. W, Phan.). The char¬
acteristic bleached areas on the twigs are immediately adjacent to
expanding leaf buds.
Ascochyta graminicola Sacc. on Poa pratensis. Milwaukee Co.,
Milwaukee, August 1962. Coll. F. Kroll. Comm. E. K. Wade. This
is on leaves which also have presumably been attacked by Helmin-
thosporium vagans Drechsler, although no conidia of that species
were observed.
Ascochyta silenes Ell. & Ev. on Silene cucuhalis (S. latifolia).
Vilas Co., near Found Lake, July 11, 1940. Coll. F. W. Stearns.
(U. W. Phan.). The Ascochyta is present in rather small amount
at the bases of leaves which have numerous perithecia of Myco-
sphaerella on their dead tips.
Ascochyta ribicola H. C. Greene on Ribes missouriense. Dane
Co., Madison, October 6, 1962.
Ascochyta asclepiadis Ell. & Ev. on Asclepias (Acerates)
lanuginosa. Rock Co., near Shopiere, May 30, 1957, Coll. E. W. Fell.
(U. W. Phan.) . The conidia are 7-9 x 3-3.5 ix, with a faint greenish
tinge,
Darluca filum (Biv.) Cast, on Coleosporium viburni Arth. II
on Viburnum lentago. Dane Co., Madison, September 25, 1962.
Stagonospora arenaria Sacc. on Dactylis glomerata. Dane Co.,
near Pine Bluff, October 2, 1962.
Stagonospora cypericola H. C. Greene on Cyperus rivularis.
Lincoln Co,, near Tomahawk, September 16, 1950. Coll. F. C. Sey¬
mour. The conidia are the same in width, but slightly shorter than
in the type of Cyperus filiculmis, and mostly 1-2 septate. Very sim¬
ilar in the effect on the host.
Septoria nodorum Berk, on Agropyron repens. Dane Co., Madi¬
son, June 28, 1962. The spores in this specimen are from 2.6-4
1963] Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX 247
in width, much too large to be included in Septoria elymi Ell. &
Ev., often found on A. repens. Also on Agrostis scabra. Iowa Co.,
near Arena, August 10, 1945. Coll. S. C. Wadmond.
Septoria elymi Ell. & Ev. on Lolium multi florum. Dane Co.,
Madison, October 19, 1962.
Septoria tandilensis Speg. on Panicum meridionale var. al-
hemarlense. Marquette Co., Glenoaks, September 17, 1929. Coll. N.
C. Fassett (8736). (U. W. Phan.).
Septoria passerinii Sacc. on Elymus canadensis, Sauk Co., near
Leland, July 21, 1962. The spores are mostly about 25-30 x 2.5-3 /x,
rather short for this species. Also present is a microsporous stage
(Septoria microspora Ell.) with narrow spores not more than 10-
12 /X long. Sprague (Mycologia 40: 184. 1948) identifies this as
being one of two such stages connected with S. passerinii. Much
remains unknown about the Septoria-Stagonospora complex on
broad-leaves native grasses.
Septoria didyma Fckl. var. santonensis Pass, on Salix pentan-
dra (cult.). Barron Co., Barron, June 20, 1917. Coll. C. Goessl.
(U. W. Phan.). This variety is discussed at some length in my
Notes 22 (Trans Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 45: 182. 1956).
Septoria musiva Peck on Populus simoni (cult.) Dane Co., Madi¬
son, September 12, 1962.
Septoria lythrina Peck on Lythrum salicaria. Jefferson Co.,
near Sullivan, June 27, 1955. Coll. G. V. Burger. (U. W. Phan.).
Septoria sii Rob. & Desm. on Berula pusilla (B. erecta). Rock
Co., 5 mi. N, of Milton, October 7, 1956. Coll. H. H. litis (8509).
U. W. Phan.).
Septoria psilostega Ell. & Mart, on Galium lanceolatum. Sauk
Co., Denzer, June 16, 1948. Coll. E. A. Steuerwald. (U. W. Phan.).
Septoria campanulae Lev. on Campanula uliginosa. Dane Co.,
Madison, September 29, 1962.
Lecanosticta acicola (Thum.) Syd. on Pinus sylvestris. Vilas
Co., Star Lake Plantation, July 11, 1962. Coll. R. F. Patton.
Hainesia lythri (Desm.) Hoehn. on Vitis riparia. Dane Co.,
Madison, September 11, 1962. In a collection on this same host
made August 13, 1962 near Lake Lulu, Troy Twp., Walworth Co.,
most of the fruiting bodies are strongly beaked. As Shear and
Dodge point out (Mycologia 13: 144. 1921) : 'Though ordinarily
248 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
disc-shaped or patellate the sporodochia may be elongate and
slender or even cylindrical. Such forms when dried and capped
with a pointed mass of spores were mistaken by Cooke and Ellis
for a Sphaeronema and described as S', corneum”
Hainesia lythri (Desm.) Hoehn. on Fragaria virginiana, Jef¬
ferson Co., Faville Prairie near Lake Mills, August 2, 1962. J. J.
Davis collected the Scerotiopsis stage of this fungus on F, virgini¬
ana at Madison. On Potentilla argentea. Portage Co., near Blaine,
August 24, 1945. Coll. W. E. Rogers. (U. W. Phan.), On Cornus
femina. Dane Co., near Pine Bluff, August 9, 1962. Associated
with spots caused by Septoria cornicola and perhaps doubtfully
parasitic. On Steironema lanceolatum. Jackson Co., near Black
River Falls, July 6, 1958. Coll. A. M. Peterson.
SCLEROTIOPSIS CONCAVA (Desm.) Shear & Dodge on Corylus
americana. Dane Co., near Verona, September 25, 1962. The paral¬
lel Hainesia lythri stage is not present in this specimen.
COLLETOTRICHUM FUSARioiDES (Ell. & Kell.) O’Gara on
amplexicaulis. Green Co., Monroe, June 28, 1891. Coll. C. S. Stuntz.
(U. W. Phan.). The fungus is on the stem in abundance. The
conidia have mostly fallen away, but the characteristic short, stout
setae are present in greater numbers than in most specimens.
Phleospora panici H. C. Greene on Panicum meridionale var.
albemarlense. Waushara Co., Wautome, September 14, 1934. Coll.
N. C. Fassett (17720). Sprague equated Phleospora panici with
Septoria tandilensis Speg., but the former seems to me to be dis¬
tinct.
Cylindrosporium calamagrostidis Ell. & Ev. on Calamagrostis
inexpansa, Ashland Co., Manitou Island, August 7, 1896. Coll. L.
S. Cheney. Also on Muhlenbergia glomerata. Lincoln Co., Wilson
Twp., September 11, 1949. Coll. F. C. Seymour (10965). I follow
Sprague who assigned western material on Muhlenbergia filiformis
to Cylindrosporium calamagrostidis, since the characters of the
Wisconsin specimen match his account.
Ramularia mitellae Peck on Mitella nuda. Oconto Co., near
Oconto Falls, June 24, 1958. Coll. H. Gale.
SCOLECOTRICHUM GRAMINIS Fckl. on Agropyron psammophilum
(A, dasystachum) . Door Co., Whitefish Bay, July 27, 1933. Coll.
J. J, Davis. Also on Beckmannia syzigachne, Douglas Co., near
Brule, July 20, 1897. Coll. L. S. Cheney. (U. W. Phan.).
Helminthosporium giganteum Heald & Wolf on Muhlenbergia
sylvatica. Sauk Co., Aldo Leopold Memorial Tract, Sect. 1, Town of
1963]
Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX
249
Honey Creek, September 15, 1962. Also on Muhlenbergia uni flora.
Wood Co., near Dexterville, September 18, 1961, Coll. W. A.
Skroch. (U. W. Phan.).
Cercospora MUHLENBERGIAE Atk. on Muhlenbergia glomerata.
Adams Co., near Oxford, July 24, 1932. Coll. N. C. Fassett (14416) .
(U. W. Phan,).
Cercospora fusimaculans Atk. on Panicum columbianum. She¬
boygan Co., Terry Andrae State Park, June 30, 1925. Coll. A. M.
Fuller. (U. W. Phan.) . On most specimens as old as this the conidia
would have dropped away long since, but here a few were trapped
in the conidiophore fascicles and these, together with the very
characteristic lesions, serve to establish identity.
Cercospora eleocharidis J. J. Davis on Eleocharis acicularis.
LaCrosse Co,, near Amsterdam, Holland Twp., August 25, 1958.
Coll. A. M. Peterson. Only a single conidium observed — ^as usual,
spores produced externally on smooth surfaces have rapidly fallen
away—but the very short, compact, substomatal clusters of
conidiophores are entirely characteristic for the species.
Cercospora avicularis Wint, on Polygonum achoreum. Vernon
Co., Chaseburg, August 24, 1920. Coll. E. A. Baird. Earlier reports
fail to distinguish satisfactorily between Polygonum achoreum and
P. erectum.
Cercospora lecheae Chupp & Greene on Lechea stricta. Trem-
peleau Co., Perrot State Park at Trempeleau, August 16, 1956.
Coll. T. G. Hartley. (U. W. Phan.) .
Tuberculina persicina (Ditm.) Sacc. on Puccinia magnusiana
Korn, I on Anemone canadensis. Dane Co., Mazomanie, July 18,
1931. Coll. J. J. Davis. On Puccinia punctata Link I on Galium con-
cinnum. Dane Co., near Verona, June 21, 1962. On Puccinia stipae
Arth. I on Aster oblongifolius. Columbia Co., Black Hawk’s Look¬
out near Prairie du Sac, May 31, 1962.
Additional Species
The fungi mentioned have not been previously reported as oc¬
curring in Wisconsin.
Sphaerella (mycosphaerella) bacillifera Karst, occurs on a
number of Wisconsin specimens of Scheuchzeria palustris var.
americana in the Wisconsin Herbarium. Karsten (Hedw. 22: 179.
1883) states that the type was on dead foliage, but in the Wiscon¬
sin material the infection plainly originated in living tissue of the
250 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
current season. That this fungus is a parasite common on, and
characteristic of, Scheuchzeria in this region would seem indicated
by the remarkable fact that it has been found on 14 out of the 40
Wisconsin specimens in our herbarium, specimens collected at
random by various collectors over a period of 100 years, and with
no thought to the fungi thereon. Plants bearing the fungus are
from Ashland, Barron, Bayfield, Jackson, Manitowoc, Oconto,
Sawyer and Vilas counties, the earliest collected in 1889, the last
in 1960. Descriptive notes, in amplification of Karsten's meager
description, are as follows: Perithecia scattered over brownish or
pallid zones on the narrow leaves and bracts, inmate or nearly so,
black when viewed from above, but with the wall thin and pale
brown at sides and below, subglobose, ostiole wide and prominent,
bounded by black, rather thick-walled cells, the perithecia approx.
(150-) 165-185 (-200) /x diam., aparaphysate, asci hyaline, rather
thick-walled, often noticeably so at apex, broadly clavate or cy-
lindro-clavate, pedicellate, 95-105 x 23-26 /x; ascospores hyaline
with a faint greenish tinge, essentially straight, broadest at mid¬
point and tapered gradually to the subobtuse ends, 57-62 x 4, 8-5. 5
fx, the septum median without constriction. The arrangement of the
spores in the ascus is somewhat variable, but they tend to lie along¬
side of and parallel with one another. The fungus has also been
noted on specimens from Nova Scotia, Maine, Minnesota and Mon¬
tana in the University of Wisconsin Herbarium.
Linospora brunellae Ell. & Ev. on Prunella vulgaris. Sauk
Co., near Leland, August 18, 1962. Immature, but so completely
characteristic as to leave no doubt as to identity. A devastating
parasite which seems to have hitherto been reported only from
far northwestern North America and from Europe.
Elsinoe panici Tiffany & Mathre on Panicum virgatum. Four
specimens: Columbia Co., near Lodi, June 30, 1938; Sauk Co.,
Ferry Bluff, August 10, 1959; Iowa Co., near Arena, August 16,
1960; Dane Co., Madison, August 8, 1962. Tiflany and Mathre (My-
cologia 53: 600. 1961) have established that this fungus, only the
conidial stage of which has so far been noted in Wisconsin, has an
Elsinoe perfect stage. In my Notes 4 (Farlowia 1 : 575. ,1944) I
discussed the conidial stage at some length, under the assumption
that it was closest to the genus Sporonema and might be connected
with Phyllachora graminis (Pers.) Fckl.
Thecaphora deformans Dur. & Mont, on Desmodium nudi-
fiorum. Sauk Co., Parfrey's Glen near Merrimac, September 19,
1962. Fischer reports this on D. nudiflorum only from Pennsyl¬
vania, Maryland and Virginia.
1963]
Greene— Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX
251
The late Dr. Roderick Sprague, shortly before his death, pro¬
vided the following description of a species of Coniothyrium on
Poa pratensis, collected in Wisconsin in 1959 and sent to him for
study.
Conioth3rrium poavora R. Sprague sp. nov.
Maculis luteis, ellipticis, marginibus brunneis vel vinaceis ;
pycnidiis paucis, interdum sub-gregariis, depressis, erumpentibus
denique, globosis vel sub-ellipsoideis, brunneis v. nigris, 85-120
(-150) X 80-100 ostiolatis ; conidiophoris brevis ; pycnidiosporu-
lis ellipticis, apicis utrinque acutis vel sub-obtusis, aureis-brun-
neis, (5-) 6.5-9 (-10) x 2.4-3,2 /x.
Figure 1. Segments of leaves of Poa pra-
tensis showing lesions caused by Coniothy¬
rium poavora R. Sprague. X 2.
Spots buff to straw color, elliptical, margin brown to vinaceous,
pycnidia few, sometimes aggregated, depressed, finally erumpent,
globose to somewhat ellipsoid-globose, brown to black, 85-120
(-150) X 80-100 /X, ostiolate; condiophores short, pycnidiospores
elliptical, both ends pointed, or sometimes obtuse and almost trun¬
cated, walls relatively thick, golden brown, (5-) 6.5-9 (-10) x
2.4-3.2 /X.
252 Wisconsin ^Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
On living leaves of Poa pratensis. Coll, by H. C. Greene near
Cross plains, Dane County, Wisconsin, U. S. A., September 1, 1959.
WSP 51152 is a slide removed from the specimen and retained at
Washington State University. The rest of the type is hied at the
University of Wisconsin.
Greene (Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci. Arts Lett. 49: 91. 1960) pub¬
lished a descriptive note on this fungus, pointing out the strikingly
conspicuous nature of the lesions, as shown in the photograph. Fig.
1, and the fact that the infected leaves often show decided curva¬
ture at the point of the lesion.
Phomopsis filicina sp nov.
Maculis i'ufo-brunneis obscuris, in pinnulis partim vel absolute;
pycnidiis sparsis vel gregariis, immersis, pallido-brunneis, muris
tenuibus, pellucidis, subglobosis, ca. 115-140 y diam. ; scolecosporis
curvis vel laxe sigmoideis, hyalinis, continuis, 25-45 x .8-1.5 /x;
P/toma-conidiis hyalinis, subcylindraceis vel subfusoideis, 8-10 x
(2-) 2.5 (-3) /X.
Lesions dark reddish-brown, involving portions of pinnules or
entire pinnules; pycnidia scattered to gregarious, immersed, light
brown, thin-walled and translucent, subglobose, approx. 115-140 /x
diam.; scolecospores curved to laxly sigmoid, hyaline, continuous,
25-45 X .8-1.5 /x; Phoma-type conidia hyaline, subcylindric to sub-
fusoid, 8-10 X (2-) 2.5 (-3) /x.
On living leaves of Athyrium angustum. Madison School Forest
near Verona, Dane County, Wisconsin, U. S. A., June 5, 1962. The
lesions are very sharply dehned with reference to the individual
pinna and there seems no doubt of parasitism. A small collection of
what is probably the same fungus was commented on in my Notes
19 (Amer. Midi, Nat. 50: 502. 1953).
Ascochyta osmundae sp. nov.
Maculis cinereo-brunneis vel virido-brunneis obscuris, in pin¬
nulis, irregularibus ; pycnidiis sparsis vel gregariis, muris tenuibus,
pallido-brunneis, subglobosis, magnitudinibus variabilibus, ca.
(90-) 115-165 (-200) diam. /x; conidiis hyalinis, uniseptatis ordi¬
nate, subfusoideis vel subcylindraceis, (9-) 11-13 (-16) x 2.8-3. 5 /x.
Lesions ashen-brown or dull greenish-brown, often involving
many pinnules, irregular in size and shape; pycnidia scattered to
gregarious, thin-walled, pale brownish, subglobose, variable in size,
approx. (90-) 115-165 (-200) /x diam.; conidia hyaline, uniformly
uniseptate, subfusoid or subcylindric, (9-) 11-13 (-16) x 2.8-3. 5 /x
1963]
Greene — Wisconsin Parasitic Fungi XXIX
253
On living leaves of the Interrupted Fern, Osmunda claytoniana.
Adjacent to Decatur Lake, Sect. 15, Town of Decatur, near Brod-
head. Green County, Wisconsin, U. S. A., August 28, 1962.
Numerous plants over a sizeable area were infected. Where many
pinnules are involved, the pinna may show considerable curvature
and distortion. A strong parasite on a host previously known only
to bear a rust in Wisconsin.
Septoria dianthicola Sacc. on Dianthus barbatus. Sauk Co.,
Town of Greenfield, June 1961. Coll. H. M. Clarke. (U. W. Phan.).
The spores are shorter and narrower than in Septoria dianthi
Desm.
Rhabdospora hyperici sp. nov.
Pycnidiis in caulibus, erumpentibus, seriebus comminus, nigris,
muris crassis, subglobosis, applanatis infra, ostiolis parvis, (100~)
110--125 (-135) jii diam; conidiis hyalinis, tenuibus, curvis plusve
minusve, obscure multiseptatis, 35-75 x 1.2-1. 7 ju.
Pycnidia on stems, deeply imbedded but erumpent, closely seri¬
ate, black, thick-walled, subglobose, somewhat flattened at base,
ostiole small, (100-) 110-125 (-135) ji diam.; conidia hyaline,
slender, more or less strongly curved, obscurely multiseptate, vari¬
able in length, 35-75 x 1.2-1.7 ju.
On Hypericum gentianoides. Columbia County, Dells of the Wis¬
consin River, 3 miles northwest of Portage, Wisconsin, U. S. A.,
October 9, 1960. Coll. H. H. litis (17055) .
This species has pycnidia which are much larger and spores
which are completely out of the range of Septoria sphaerelloides
Ell. & Kell. (Rhabdospora sphaerelloides (E. & K.) Sacc.) which
occurs on Hypericum punctatum in Wisconsin.
Cercospora FUKUSHIANA (Matsuura) Yamamoto (C, balsaminae
Kell. & Sw. in litt.) on Impatiens balsamina (cult.). Dane Co.,
Madison, August 27, 1962. The sharply defined circular grayish
spots seem characteristic for the species as it is treated by Chupp
in his monograph.
Cercospora oenotherae Ell. & Ev. on Oenothera serruMa. Buf¬
falo Co., near Mondovi, August 25, 1956. Coll. H. H. litis (8078).
(U. W. Phan.).
Alternaria zinniae Pape on Zinnia elegans (cult.). Monroe
Co., Kendall, September 1, 1962, Comm. E. K. Wade. This species
has spores which are distinctive in having extremely long, slender
beaks.
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN
NO. 48.’ COMPOSITAE I— COMPOSITE FAMILY I
(Tribes Eupatorieae, Vernonieae, Cynarieae,
AND ClCHORIEAE)
Miles F. Johnson and Hugh H. litis
In Wisconsin, as well as in the world as a whole, the family with
the largest number of species is the Compositae, the family of daisy
and dandelion, of lettuce and chrysanthemum. Highly specialized,
its flowers are not borne singly but in groups of several to hundreds,
telescoped into tight heads in such a way as to simulate the solitary
flowers of other families. While the bee and butterfly visitor, and
many a layman, look upon a daisy as one single ''flower”, which
functionally it is, the botanist knows that each head is structurally
a bouquet of flowers, sometimes all alike as in Joe-Pye-Weed or
dandelion, sometimes of two sorts as in the daisy, where the ishowy
marginal ray flowers (or rays) resemble white petals and the many
individual yellow disk flowers composing the central disk resemble
yellow stamens. Surrounding all the flowers of each head are one
or several series of variously modified, often green, involucral
bracts. Sepals are rarely visible except in fruit, where, as the pap¬
pus, they are found on top of the achene (“seed’’), sometimes as
scales, hairs or barbed spines. In a few species, the pappus is
lacking.
The arrangement of flowers into heads has evidently been a very
successful evolutionary venture a success reflected in the very large
number of species (some 20,000) and in the ecological predomi¬
nance of Compositae in the vegetation of many parts of the world,
as in some prairies and sedge meadows of Wisconsin. The species
and genera of Compositae are legendary for the difficulty with
which they are told apart, partly because of the minuteness of the
morphological characters which have to be examined, but mainly
because of the large number of similar species and genera, many of
which have evolved recently or are still actively evolving, and as a
consequence often hybridize. It should be borne in mind, therefore,
that parts of the present treatment, as those of the Liatris and
1 Publication of this lengthy paper was made possible only through direct financial
support of the J. J. Davis Memorial Fund, the N. C. Fassett Memorial Fund, both
administered by the Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, and of the Dean
of the College of Letters and Science. To all of these, our most sincere thanks !
255
256 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Hieracium hybrids, are highly tentative. A great deal of field work
and laboratory analysis is yet needed before we can have an ade¬
quate taxonomic understanding of many of our Compositae.
This study includes the species of only four tribes, though two
difficult genera, Solidago, the goldenrods, and Senecio, the ragworts,
are dealt with further on in this volume. An unpublished master’s
study (Melchert 1960), treated members of the sunflower tribe,
the Heliantheae, while certain individual groups, such as the diffi¬
cult genus Aster, have been published on separately by Shinners
(1941) and others. The magnitude of the task, as well as the de¬
sirability of making available to botanists and naturalists the pres¬
ent work without too much delay has made it expedient to publish
this family in several parts.
This study is based on specimens in the herbaria of the Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin (WIS), Milwaukee Public Museum (MIL), Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (WISM), University of Minnesota
(MIN), Chicago Natural History Museum (F), Northland College,
Ashland, Platteville State College and St. Norbert’s College, De
Pere, Wisconsin.
Map dots represent exact locations, triangles represent county
records. Small dots in Lincoln Co. represent sight records of F. C.
Seymour (ms.), those in Central Wisconsin of J. W. Thomson
(ms.). The numbers in the map corner insets indicate the amount
of flowering and fruiting material available for this study as well as
when the species may be expected to flower or fruit in Wisconsin.
Plants with vegetative growth only, in bud, or with dispersed fruits
are not included. Nomenclature and general descriptions generally
follow those of Cronquist in “The New Britton and Brown Illus¬
trated Flora” (Gleason 1952) and “Gray’s Manual of Botany, ed. 8”
(Fernald 1950), The order of tribes and genera follows that of
Cronquist (Gleason 1952), to whom we are obliged for permission
to modify his key to genera and illustration (Fig. 1), as published
in “The New Britton and Brown Illustrated Flora”.
We gratefully acknowledge the help of A. M. Fuller and E. P. Kruschke,
Milwaukee Public Museum, as well as A. L. Throne, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, Gerald B. Ownbey, University of Minnesota, John R, Millar, Chi¬
cago Natural History Museum, Russell D. Wagner, Platteville State College,
Eugene Hsi, Northland College, A. M. Keefe, St. Norbert’s College, and H. C.
Greene, Cryptogamic Herbarium, University of Wisconsin, for the loan of
their specimens.
Mrs. Katharine S. Snell, our ever-busy Herbarium Assistant, deserves spe¬
cial thanks for aid and encouragement beyond the call of duty, Mrs. Kathryn
Haberman and Mr. Steven Gilson for aid in preparation of maps, Mrs. Russell
Rill for the loan of her excellent private herbarium of the Waupaca Co. region.
Father Ernest Lepage, Rimouski, Ontario, Canada, for providing in¬
formation concerning Hieracium, Dr. Gerald B. Ownbey, University of Min-
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, Jf^8
257
nesota, for carefully reading and criticizing the treatment of Cirsium and
Carduus, Mr. Wayne L. Milstead, Purdue University, for preparing a key
and descriptions of Prenanthes, Mr, Frank S. Crosswhite for critically reading
the manuscript, and finally Drs. Virginia Akins and Catherine Lieneman, Wis¬
consin State College, River Falls, for introducing the first author to the science
of Botany.
This study was supported during 1961-1962 by a grant to the
second author of the Research Committee of the University of
Wisconsin on funds from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Founda¬
tion. For their very generous support we express our sincere thanks.
ARTIFICIAL KEY TO TRIBES OF WISCONSIN COMPOSITAE
Based on flowering plants
After L. H. Shinners (May, 1941, unpublished)
A. Some or all of the flowers in each head tubular ; strap-shaped
(ray) flowers absent, or present only around the margin of the
head ; plants with watery juice.
B. Pappus of bristles or hairs.
C. Plants not prickly; phyllaries (involucral bracts) en¬
tire, or with ragged edges, but not deeply laciniate and
not spiny or prickly.
D. Phyllaries in 2-5 rows, equal or unequal; or in 1
row, but conspicuous white, pink, purple, or blue
rays present.
E. Phyllaries not scarious, or scarious only on the
margins.
F. Rays absent; flowers white, pink, or purple.
G. Heads purple-flowered, corymbose; leaves
alternate —Tribe VIII. VERNONIEAE.
GG. Plants not with all the above characters at
once _ Tribe VII. EUPATORIEAE.
FF. Rays present or absent; tubular flowers yel¬
low, orange, or brown; or purple- or red-
brown, but conspicuous rays present.
H. Disks less than 25 mm wide _
_ Tribe V. ASTEREAE.
HH. Disks more than 25 mm wide _
_ tribe VI. INULEAE,
EE, Phyllaries either entirely scarious except for a
central green line not extending to the tip, or
with scarious tips 1% or more their length.
I. Involucres 10-16 mm high.
258 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
J. Phyllaries loose, crisped, and rounded;
heads spicate or racemose _
Tribe VII. EUPATORIEAE (Liatris sp.).
JJ. Phyllaries appressed, acute; heads loosely
corymbose-paniculate _
Tribe IX. CYNAREAE (Centaurea
repens).
II. Involucres 3-8 mm high _
..Tribe VI. INULEAE. (GNAPHALIEAE).
DD. Phyllaries equal and in 1 row (sometimes with a
few slender recurved bractlets below them) ; rays
yellow, or rays absent.
K. Leaves opposite __ .Tribe VII. EUPATORIEAE
(Eupatorium rugosiim).
KK. Leaves alternate, or all basal _
_ Tribe IV. SENECIONEAE.
CC. Plants prickly, or with deeply laciniate, spiny, or prickly
phyllaries _ Tribe IX. CYNAREAE.
BB. Pappus of awns, scales, or teeth; or pappus absent.
L. Phyllaries not at all scarious.
M. Anthers not united; rays absent, flowers not showy
_ Tribe I. HELIANTHEAE (AMBROSIEAE) .
MM. Anthers united; rays present or absent, flowers
often showy.
N. Rays absent ; or rays present and pointed, ragged,
or sharply 2-toothed at the apex, widest near the
middle or about the same width throughout _
_ Tribe I. HELIANTHEAE.
NN. Rays present, widest at the 3- to 5-lobed apex.
0. Leaves opposite ..Tribe I. HELIANTHEAE
(Polymnia & Coreopsis) .
00. Leaves alternate _ Tribe H. HELENIEAE.
LL.Phyllaries scarious, at least around the margins.
P. Leaves opposite _ Tribe I. HELIANTHEAE
(Cosmos & Coreopsis) .
PP. Leaves alternate.
Q. Leaves toothed, lobed, or finely divided _
_ Tribe HI. ANTHEMIDEAE.
QQ. Leaves not toothed or divided _
_ Tribe V. ASTEREAE (Boltonia).
A A. Flowers all strap-shaped; plants with milky juice _
_ Tribe X, CICHORIEAE.
1963] Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. ^8 259
Vernonieae Astereae Inuleae Heliantheae & Helenieae Eupatorieae Anmemideae t
Senecioneae
Fig. 1. Characteristic style-branches and anther-bases in the compositae.
(From A. J. Cronquist, in Gleason 1952, 3: 324, with permission).
DESCRIPTIVE KEY TO THE TRIBES OF
COMPOSITAE IN WISCONSIN^
(Wisconsin Genera grouped accordingly)
A. Flowers, or some of them, tubular and eligulate; juice watery,
very rarely milky.
B. Style without any ring of hairs or distinct thickened ring
below the branches; anthers (except in Inuleae) not tailed;
plants seldom prickly; receptacle chaffy or naked, rarely
somewhat bristly.
C. Style-branches more or less flattened, commonly but
not always stigmatic to the middle or beyond, the stig-
matic portion often conspicuously defined; flowers gen¬
erally not all alike, some of them tubular and herma¬
phrodite (sometimes sterile), others pistillate or neu¬
tral and usually also ligulate, or, if occasionally all tubu¬
lar and hermaphrodite, then yellow.
D. Anthers truncate to sagittate at base, but scarcely
tailed ; style-branches often but not always with ter¬
minal appendages.
E. Style-branches either exappendiculate and with
a ring of hairs at the end, or with the append¬
ages hairy on both sides.
3 Modified after A. J. Cronquist’s key in Gleason (1952).
260 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
F. Pappus chaffy or of awns or none, never cap¬
illary; style-branches chiefly with append¬
ages, but sometimes without them.
G. Involucral bracts without scarious or hya¬
line margins, commonly green and some¬
what herbaceous, seldom much imbricate ;
leaves, or the lower ones, often but not
always opposite ; style-branches usually
but not always with appendages.
H. Receptacle chaffy _
_ Tribe L HELIANTHEAE.
1. Helianthus
2. Eclipta
3. Heliopsis
4. Rudbeckia
5. Echinacea
6. Ratibida
7. Bidens
8. Megalodonta
9. Coreopsis
10. Galinsoga
11. Polymnia
12. Silphium
13. Parthenium
14. Iva
15. Ambrosia
16. Xanthium
17. Madia
HH. Receptacle naked _
_ Tribe II. HELENIEAE.
18. Helenium
GG. Involucral bracts with scarious or hyaline
margins, scarcely herbaceous, usually well
imbricate ; leaves alternate ; receptacle
chaffy or naked; style-branches exap-
pendiculate, as in the Senecioneae _
_ Tribe III. ANTHEMIDEAE.
19. Anthemis 22. Tanacetum
20. Achillea 23. Matricaria
21. Chrysanthemum 24. Artemisia
FF. Pappus of capillary bristles; style-branches
mostly truncate, exappendiculate, with a ring
of hairs at the end ; leaves alternate or oppo¬
site; receptacle naked; involucre chiefly of
equal uniseriate bracts, often with a few
much smaller ones at the base _
_ Tribe IV. SENECIONEAE.
25. Arnica 28. Cacalia
26. Senecio 29. Tussilago
27. Erechtites 30, Petasites
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, U8
261
EE. Style branches with the appendages glabrous
within; leaves alternate; receptacle naked; in-
volucral bracts commonly but not always in sev¬
eral series and partly or wholly herbaceous —
_ Tribe V. ASTEREAE,
31. Solidago 35. Aster
32. Chrysopsis 36. Conyza
33. Grindelia 37. Boltonia
34. Erigeron
DD. Anthers tailed at base; style-branches rounded or
truncate, exappendiculate ; leaves alternate ; recepta¬
cle naked or chaffy; corollas all tubular, or, in the
large yellow heads of Inula, the outer ligulate;
plants more or less white-woolly ; leaves alternate _
_ Tribe VI. INULEAE.
38. Antennaria 40. Gnaphalium
39. Anaphalis 41. Inula
CC. Style-branches terete, clavate, or filiform, seldom
strongly flattened, stigmatic only near the base, the stig-
matic portion usually not sharply differentiated in ap¬
pearance ; flowers all tubular and perfect, never yellow ;
receptacle naked.
I. Style-branches terete or clavate, obtuse to acutish,
papillate, not hairy; anthers rounded at the base;
leaves opposite, alternate, or whorled _
_ _ _ Tribe VII. EUPATORIEAE.
42. Eupatorium 44. Liatris
43. Kuhnia
II. Style-branches filiform, acute or acuminate, hispidu-
lous ; anthers distinctly sagittate ; leaves alternate _
_ Tribe VIII. VERNONIEAE.
45. Vernonia
BB. Stype with a ring of hairs, or sometimes merely with a
thickened ring, below the branches, papillate thence to the
tip, the branches apparently stigmatic to the tip ; anthers
tailed at the base ; plants often prickly or spiny ; receptacle
densely bristly or sometimes naked ; leaves alternate. _
_ Tribe IX, CYNAREAE.
46. Arctium 49. Onopordium
47. Carduus 50. Centaurea
48. Cirsium
262 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
AA. Flowers all ligulate and perfect; juice milky or colored _
_ Tribe X. CICHORIEAE.
51. Prenanthes
52. Hieracium
53. Crepis
54. Taraxacum
55. Sonchus
56. Lactuca
57. Cichorium
58. Microseris
59. Krigia
60. Lapsana
61. Leontodon
62. Tragopogon
NOTE: ONLY TRIBES VII-X ARE TREATED IN THIS
PRELIMINARY REPORT.
TRIBE VII. EUPATORIEAE Cass.
Perennials with watery juice; flowers all tubular, perfect, purple,
rose, white or whitish. Style branches clavate. Leaves alternate, op¬
posite or whorled. Pappus bristly.
KEY TO GENERA
A. Leaves opposite or whorled; roots fibrous; achenes 5-angled;
pappus of capillary bristles; involucral bracts not ribbed _
_ 42. EUPATORIUM.
AA. Leaves alternate; plants from a stout taproot or enlarged
corm; achenes 10-ribbed; pappus of plumose or barbellate
bristles ; involucral bracts weakly or strongly ribbed.
B. Plants from stout taproots; pappus plumose; involucral
bracts strongly ribbed; inflorescence corymbiform, the
heads creamy-white _ 43. KUHNIA.
BB, Plants from enlarged corms ; pappus plumose or barbellate;
involucral bracts strongly imbricate, weakly ribbed; in¬
florescence spicate or racemose, the heads purple and often
very showy. _ 44. LIATRIS.
42. EUPATORIUM L. Thoroughwort ; Joe-Pye-Weed
Perennials with opposite or whorled leaves, often resin-dotted on
involucre and undersides of leaves. Heads small, usually many, in
corymbiform inflorescences, the flowers all tubular, white, pink or
purple. Involucre cylindrical-campanulate, the bracts imbricate, un¬
equal. Achenes 5-ribbed. Pappus bristles uniseriate, capillary.
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. J^8
263
Key to Species
A. Leaves in whorls of 3, 4, or 5 ; heads purple or dull rose, cylin-
dric.
B. Stem purple throughout or purple spotted; flowers 9-21^
per head; very common throughout, wet habitats -
_ 1. E. MACULATUM.
BB. Stem green, purple only at nodes, not spotted; flowers 3-6
(-8) per head; dry woods _ 2. E. PURPUREUM.
AA, Leaves opposite (rarely in 3’s in No. 5) ; heads white (rarely
purple in No. 5).
C. Leaves sessile or very short-petioled, narrowly lanceolate.
D. Leaves free at base and not fused.
E. Leaves attenuate to the winged petiole, broadest
near middle, with 3 prominent veins beneath; plants
pubescent; SW Wisconsin _ 3. E. ALTISSIMUM.
EE. Leaves sessile, broadest at the rounded base.
F. Plants glabrous; leaves with very prominent
white midrib beneath; S. Wisconsin _
_ 4. E. SESSILIFOLIUM.
FF. Plants pubescent; leaves with midrib not very
prominent beneath _
-5c. E. PERFOLIATUM forma TRUNCATUM.
DD. Leaves perfoliate, their bases fused around the stem;
very common throughout _ 5. E. PERFOLIATUM.
CC. Leaves long-petioled, broadly lanceolate to ovate.
G. Leaves lanceolate, scabrous-pilose, thickish; plants
branched above; rare in S. Wisconsin _
_ 6. E. SEROTINUM.
GG. Leaves ovate, glabrous, membranaceous; plants
branched at inflorescence, rarely below ; throughout
Wisconsin, except the Northwest _ 7. E. RUGOSUM.
1. Eupatorium MACULATUM L. Joe-Pye-Weed. Map 1.
Perennial 1-2 m or more tall. Stem unbranched, glabrous, mottled
with purple or purple throughout. Leaves in whorls or U or 5, rarely
2 or 3, lanceolate to elliptic, gradually tapering to the petiole, the
lower (8-) 12-22 (-26) cm long, 3-7 cm wide, with coarsely serrate
margins, the teeth usually incurved, glabrous above, with bright
orange resin dots (atoms) beneath (lOX).^ Inflorescences usually
flat-topped; heads numerous, 7-10 mm high, with 9-16 (-24)
flowers of varying shades of reddish-purple; bracts obtuse, purple
3 According- to Fernald (1950:1365), leaves of E. maculatum are “rarely atomifer-
ous.” In Wisconsin, however, they are rarely, if ever, without resinous dots!
264 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
to green. Peduncles bright purple. Pappus of numerous capillary
bristles, dull white to brown.
Throughout Wisconsin, characteristic of wet prairies (Curtis
1955) and especially the northern sedge meadows (Curtis 1959), in
marshes, wet woods, low lands, and along streams and lakes, less
commonly in bogs or drier habitats. Flowering from (early) mid-
July through September (peak in early August) ; fruiting from late
July into October. Very similar to E. purpureum.
2. Eupatorium purpureum L, Sweet or Green-stemmed Joe-Pye-
Weed, Map 2.
Perennial 1-2 m tall. Stem unbranched, glabrous, purple only at
nodes or green throughout. Leaves, in whorls of 4, rarely 3 or 5,
lanceolate to oblanceolate, coarsely crenate, abruptly tapering to
tvinged petiole, 14-25 cm long, glabrous to sparsely pubescent above,
with bright orange dots (atoms) below (lOx). Inflorescences
rounded, the numerous narrowly cylindric heads 8-13 mm long, each
with (Jf~)5-6(-8) pink to pale purple (rarely cream or whitish)
floivers; bracts light purple to tawny, with bright green to brown
nerves. Peduncles tan, pubescent. Pappus of numerous tawny capil¬
lary bristles. 2n=20, 40 (Grant 1953, ex Darlington 1955) ; 2n=20
(Cooper & Mahoney 1935, presumably from Wisconsin material).
Southern Wisconsin, mainly in the southern dry-mesic oak for¬
ests (Curtis 1959) and in mesic to damp maple, basswood, and elm
woods south of the “Tension Zone,” less common in white cedar-
hardwoods, on bluffs, damp lake shores, marshes, and in the Wis¬
consin river bottoms in dense underbrush of moist sloughs subject
to occasional inundation to a depth of 4-8 feet (Adams Co.), seem¬
ingly completely lacking from the region of the Central Sand Plains.
The Wood Co. collection, “high dry woods, Arpin, Sept. 22, 1915
C. Goessl” (MIL, WIS), needs verification. Wiegand (1920b) cites
albino-flowered specimens (corollas white) from Brown Co. and
Kaukauna, Outagamie Co. Flowering from (mid-) late July to
mid-August; fruiting from August through September.
Eupatorium purpureum and E. maculatum are often confused in
field and herbarium. Distinguishing field characters include stem
color (green with purple nodes in E. purpureum, purple or purple-
spotted in E. maculatum) , head color (pale in E. purpureum, more
purple in E. maculatum) , number of flowers per head, as well as
habitat preference (E. purpureum in mesic or drier woods; E. mac¬
ulatum in moist to wet thickets, wet prairies, and meadows).
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. 1^8
265
266 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
3. Eupatorium altissimum L. Map 3.
Leafy perennial somewhat resembling Kuhnia eupatorioides, 6-10
dm tall, pubescent throughout. Leaves opposite, narrowly lanceo¬
late, 6-11 cm long, 1-1.4 cm wide, tapering to winged petioles,
coarsely toothed along the upper half, pilose-punctate and with
three prominent veins beneath. Heads numerous, white. Involucral
bracts and achenes with light yellow resin dots.
Rather infrequent in SW. Wisconsin on dry rocky limestone
(dolomite) prairies, less often on mesic prairies (Curtis 1959) and
on bluffs ; according to Dr. H. C. Greene, locally abundant at Ben¬
ton, Lafayette Co., on bare sterile mine talings. Flowering from late
July into early September; fruiting from mid- August through
September.
4. Eupatorium sessilifolium L. var. brittonianum Porter.
Upland Boneset. Map 4.
Perennials 7-10 dm tall, glabrous except in the upper branches.
Leaves opposite, sessile, lanceolate, 9-13 cm long, the rounded base
2-4.5 cm wide, long acuminate, denticulate to dentate, the lower
midrib white and very prominent. Corymb spreading; heads num¬
erous, white, the bracts obtuse, densely white pubescent with in¬
termixed golden resin “atoms”; achenes also atomiferous (lOX).
Uncommon in southern Wisconsin in dry, open, often sandy up¬
land woods on tops and slopes of bluffs, mainly in the “Driftless
Area”, rarely in prairie relics. Flowering in early or mid-August;
fruiting in September.
Because of pubescent inflorescence branches, our specimens all
belong with var. Brittonianum, the glabrous typical variety occur¬
ring in the eastern and southern U.S,
5. Eupatorium perfoliatum L. Boneset; Throughwort;
Thoroughwort. Map 5, 6.
Coarse to slender, villous to hairy perennials 3-9 (-11) dm tall.
Leaves opposite (rarely in 3^s), all, except sometimes the upper,
perfoliate (i.e., fused at the base and thus surrounding the stem,
hence the specific epithet), lanceolate, 8-14 cm long, 1.5-4 cm wide
at the base, long-acuminate, crenate-serrate. Heads numerous, in
flat-topped inflorescences. 2n=20 (Grant 1953, ex Darlington
1955).
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Fiords No.
267
Key to Forms
a. Leaves opposite.
b. Leaves fused at the base.
c. Heads white _ 5a. forma PERFOLIATUM.
cc. Heads purplish _ 5b. forma PURPUREUM.
bb. Leaves not fused at the base, at least above, the heads white
_ 5c. forma TRUNCATUM.
aa. Leaves in 3's _ 5d. forma TRIFOLIUM.
5a. Eupatorium perfoliatum L. forma perfoliatum Map 5.
Leaves 2 at a node ; corollas white.
Throughout Wisconsin, common in open moist habitats such as
sandy lake shores, sand bars, beaches, sedge meadows, wet prairies
(Curtis 1955), fens, southern lowland forests, northern damp
Cedar-Hemlock or Tamarack-Spruce-Poplar woods, shrub carrs
with Potentilla fruticosa, swamps, marshes, streamsides, and wet
cliffs, rarer in drier habitats, though often very weedy in heavily
grazed pastures or gravelly dry hillsides. Flowering from late June
through September (peak in mid-August) ; fruiting from late July
to early October.
5b. Eupatorium perfoliatum L. forma purpureum Britt. Map 6.
Flowers purple or purplish, rather than white, the bracts, inflor¬
escences, stems and leaves sometimes purple as well, otherwise ex¬
actly as typical E. perfoliatum. Flowering and fruiting in August
and September.
In Wisconsin this form is most common on sandy shores of the
many lakes within the limits of post-glacial “Lake Barrens’’ (see
Map 6; cf. McLaughlin 1932), which extended over much of the
present-day sand barrens of NW. Wisconsin and adjacent Minne¬
sota. Bidens connata Muhl. var. pinnata Wats. (Melchert 1960;
Sherff 1962) and Polygonum punctatum L. var. littorale Fassett
(Fassett 1948), minor endemics of the “Lake Barrens” region, have
similar distributions, as do many of Wisconsin’s otherwise local
“Atlantic Coastal Plain Elements”, e.g. Xyris torta and Lycopodium
inundatum, and certain European weeds, e.g. Crepis tectorum (Map
49). For some, this area does represent an ideal “Coastal Plain”
habitat. It is likely that post-glacially this area was a large “open
habitat” in which plants adapted to moist, sandy, acid “Coastal
Plain” conditions could find an ideal situation for rapid population
expansion. The reasons for the many peculiarities found here may
include the greatly expanded evolutionary opportunity that such an
open habitat offers. Here, under low competition, an otherwise rare
268 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
genotype could, on chance introductions, produce relatively large
and uniform populations. Mutations causing anthocyanin accumula¬
tion in E, perfoliatum, thus, have no doubt occurred elsewhere too
(see Map 6), but conditions for an extensive population buildup
were particularly favorable only here. What we have been describing
here, in short, is the operation of the '‘founder principle’' of E. Mayr
(cf. Goodhart 1963), where large and distinctive populations owe
their peculiarities to being originally founded by only one or very
few seeds selected by chance, the populations therefore genotypic¬
ally poor, and hence uniform and distinctive. The "founder princi¬
ple” would seem to apply also to the origin of the micros or neo¬
endemics of the Great Lakes, discussed elsewhere in this paper (cf.
Cirsium pitcheri, pp. 291-292).
5c. Eupatorium perfoliatum L. forma truncatum (Muhl.)
Fassett.
Leaves free at base, or only the lower fused, sometimes alternate
above, thus not perfoliate. A rather meaningless taxon including
occasional abnormal plants of the typical variety, e.g. : Grant Co. :
Mississippi River bottoms, Bagley, September 10, 1930, Fassett
(WIS). In most plants of forma perfoliatum the upper-most
leaves and sometimes those of side branches are free at the base !
5d. Eupatorium perfoliatum L. forma trifolium Fassett. Map 6.
Leaves S at a node, their bases fused, otherwise as forma perfolia¬
tum.
Rare and sporadic in Wisconsin on river bottoms, meadows, lake
shores and low woods. Originally described from Maine. Flowering
from July to September; fruiting in September.
Cronquist (1952) thinks that these and other oddities in E. per¬
foliatum may be the result of hybridization with some other species.
In Wisconsin there is no support whatever for this supposition.
6. Eupatorium serotinum Michx.
Leafy, tall perennials. Stem ribbed, pilose at least above. Leaves
opposite, petioled, broadly lanceolate, prominently irregularly
toothed, the lower surface pilose, the upper essentially glabrous.
Corollas pale violet to white.
Native of the eastern and southern United States, very rarely in¬
troduced in southern Wisconsin. Collected three times : Dane Co. :
Madison, drainage ditch, Olbrich Park, Aug. 1956 (fr). Richards
s.n. (WIS). Grant Co.: Potosi^ Sept. 1862 (fr), George Engelmann
s.n. (WIS). Milwaukee Co.: Grant Park Nursery, Oct. 18, 1933
(fr), Wolf s.n. (MIL).
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. Jp8
269
7. Eupatorium rugosum Houtt. var. tomentellum (Robinson)
Blake White Snakeroot. Map 7.
Perennial 3-7 (-10 ) dm tall. Leaves opposite, petioled, broadly
ovate to deltoid, 7-12 cm long, 5-9 cm wide, the margins crenate-
dentate. Inflorescence cymose, the numerous heads borne on tomen-
tose peduncles; corrollas white. 2n=34 (Grant 1953) ; 2n=36
(Cooper and Mahoney 1935, presumably from Wisconsin material).
Abundant throughout Wisconsin, except in the extreme north¬
west, in rich, dry, mesic or moist woods, most prevalent in the
southern dry-mesic forest (Curtis 1959), on shady river banks, in
thickets, less commonly on lake shores, bluffs, and limestone cliffs.
Flowering from late July through September; fruiting from (late
July-) August to early October.
All Wisconsin specimens have tomentose peduncles (var. tomen¬
tellum), the typical variety with glabrous peduncles occuring south
and east of Wisconsin.
White Snakeroot may cause a sometimes fatal disease of cattle, “trembles,’’
caused by tremetol, one of the higher alcohols found in its leaves and stems.
Tremetol is soluble in milk fat, and, transmitted to other animals or humans,
may cause “milk sickness” (Muenscher 1951), which in the early days of
settlement of the Middle West reached near-epidemic proportions (Blake 1941).
43. KUHNIA L. False Boneset
[Shinners, L. H. Revision of the genus Kuhnia L. Wrightia 1 :122-
144. 1947.]
1. Kuhnia eupatorioides L. var. corymbulosa T. & G.
False Boneset. Map 8.
Densely and finely puberulent leafy perennials 6-10 dm tall.
Leaves mostly alternate, subsessile to sessile, linear to lanceolate,
3-7 (-8.5) cm long, 0.7-2. 5 cm wide, variously toothed, villous be¬
neath, abundantly black resin-dotted (lOX). Inflorescences dense to
open corymbs. Involucral bracts (7-) 8-10 mm high, oblong to
lanceolate, strongly 3-5 nerved, flnely pubescent with scattered yel¬
low resinous dots (lOX). Pappus of white to brown plumose bris¬
tles. Achenes cylindrical, 10-ribbed, finely pubescent, ivithout resin¬
ous atoms.
In Wisconsin a widespread prairie species south of the “Tension
Zone”, most common in dry and dry-mesic prairies (Curtis 1959),
in prairie relics on bluffs, roadsides or railroads, and sand dunes.
Flowering from (July-) August through October; fruiting from
late August through September (-October) .
Shinners divided the species into four geographic varieties, of
which only the common “prairies and plains” variety corymbulosa
270 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
occurs in Wisconsin. Scatter diagrams and graphs based on Wis¬
consin plants indicate that tightly packed corymbs are more abun¬
dant than open ones, and that the number of flowers per head ranges
from 13-24 (mode 18-19), all clearly within the limits of var.
corymhulosa. Some correlation exists between inflorescence form
and leaf denticulation, plants with compact inflorescences having
leaves more nearly entire, the open inflorescence, toothed-leaved
forms perhaps representing shade plants.
44. LIATRIS Schreb. Blazing Star
[Gaiser, L. 0., The Genus Liatris. Rhodora 48: Aug.-Dee. 1946]^
North American perennials from enlarged underground stems.
Leaves alternate, narrow, entire. Inflorescences spicate or race¬
mose, the rose-purple heads showy. Involucral bracts strongly im¬
bricated, at times with reflexed tips or margins. Achenes conical,
10-ribbed, pubescent. Pappus barbellate or plumose.
Key to Species
A. Pappus barbellate, not plumose, the lateral cilia 3-6 times the
diameter of the bristle.
B. Inflorescence a usually dense spike ; heads sessile, small, the
involucre 7-11 mm high.
C. Inflorescence rachis glabrous; involucral bracts obtuse,
erect, appressed, the tips not re flexed, 7-8 mm high;
SE-most Wisconsin _ 1. L, SPICATA.^
CC. Inflorescence rachis pilose-hirsute; involucral bracts
acute, the acuminate tips re flexed, 9-11 mm high _
_ 2. L. PYCNOSTACHYA.^
BB. Inflorescence an open spike or raceme ; heads larger, the in¬
volucre 9-20 mm high.
D. Inflorescence a raceme, rarely spiciform, long-peduncu¬
late; corolla glabrous within; involucres 12-20 mm
high, the terminal head often much larger; leaves scab¬
rous-pubescent, the margins harshly ciliate _
_ 3. L. LIGULISTYLIS.^
^Wisconsin specimens cited by Dr. Gaiser, though not examined, have been mapped,
s Plants intermediate between 1 and 2 are known from SB Wisconsin (see note under
L. pycnostachya) .
® Plants intermediate between 3 and 4 are known from NW. Wisconsin (see discus¬
sion under L. ligulistylis) .
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. A8
271
DD. Inflorescence spicate, rarely racemose, the heads short-
pedunculate or sessile ; corolla pilose within; involucres
9-15 mm high; leaves scabrous to glabrous, the mar¬
gins not harsh _ 4. L, ASPERA.^
A A. Pappus plumose, the lateral cilia 15 or more times the diameter
of the bristle,
E, Heads campanulate, the bracts rounded, glabrous with
scarious margins; a rare hybrid of 4 and 6 _
_ _ 5, L. X GLADEWITZIL
EE. Heads cylindrical ; involucral bracts mucronate to acumin¬
ate, the margins ciliate.
F. Inflorescence racemose, the heads 15-60 flowered;
bracts mucronate ; leaves not crowded, more lax, weakly
punctate, not ciliate, 9-22 cm long, 3-7 mm wide; dry
prairies, southern Wisconsin _ 6. L. CYLINDRACEA.
FF, Inflorescence a dense to loose spike, the heads 3-8 flow¬
ered ; bracts acuminate ; leaves crowded, rigid, conspic¬
uously punctate, ciliate, 6-15 cm long, 1-2 mm wide;
prairies of Pierce and St. Croix counties _
_ 7. L. PUNCTATA.
1. Liatris spicata (L.) Wind. Blazing Star. Map 9,
Stems stiffly erect, glabrous, 4-12 dm tall. Leaves numerous,
linear-lanceolate to linear, the lower ones 12-20 cm long,
4-9 mm wide, glabrous to sparingly pilose on lower veins,
the upper reduced and bractlike, all punctate. Inflorescence a dense
spike, the heads cylindric to subcylindric. Corollas glabrous within,
rich purple (white in forma albiflora Britt.). Involucral bracts
appressed, oblong to elliptic-oblong, the obtuse tips not spreading,
7-8 mm high, green to purple, often with a scarious purple margin.
Achenes 3. 5-4.5 mm long, 2n=20 (Gaiser 1949).
Eastern United States, in Wisconsin rare, only in the extreme
southeast, in sandy, moist, rather calcareous prairies, often with
other rare plants, as on the Kenosha prairie with Phlox glaberrima,
Calamintha glabella and Allium cernuum, and with Ly thrum '‘ala-
tum”, Pycnanthemum virginianum, Solidago rigida, S. ohioensis, S.
ridellii, S. graminifolia. Aster ptarmicoides , Dodecatheon meadii,
Lespedeza capitata, and Ratibida pinnata. Flowering in late July
and early August ; fruiting in August.
Similar to Liatris pycnostachya, with which it may hybridize in
Wisconsin, but glabrous and with appressed involucral bracts.
2, Liatris pycnostachya Michx. Gay Feather. Map 10.
Stiffly erect perennials (5-) 7-9 dm tall, from an enlarged woody
corm, pilose-hirsute (especially on inflorescence rachis). Leaves
272 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1963] Johnson litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. k8 273
numerous, crowded, linear-lanceolate to linear, punctate-pilose be-
neatli to glabrous, the lower 13-35 cm long, 7-11 mm wide, the
upper reduced. Inflorescence a crowded (rarely loose) spike, the
heads cylindric. Corollas usually non-pilose within, rose-purple
(white in forma hubrichti E. Anderson). Involucral bracts green
or purplish, oblong to oblong -lanceolate with ciliate margins, the
acute tips pronouncedly spreading, 9-11 mm high. Achenes 3.5-
4.5 mm long. 2n=20 (Gaiser 1949) .
Typical of low (wet and wet-mesic) prairies (Curtis 1955),
locally common on mesic prairies, in wet, sometimes rather calcare¬
ous sedge-grass meadows (fens), peat marshes, bogs, wet roadsides
and wet railroad prairie relics south of the ‘Tension Zone”, some¬
times with Liatris aspera, L. ligulistylis, L. spicata, and Cirsium
muticum. Often growing with many very rare species, the prairie
habitat of this, one of our most showy species is in desperate need
of protection! Flowering from July to early September; fruiting
from (mid-July-) August through September.
Plants of Liatris pycnostachya from within the range of L.
spicata are atypical, their inflorescence rachis less pilose and in¬
volucral bracts more often only slightly reflexed, all variations sug¬
gesting introgression from L. spicata. Natural hybridization is
known to occur, the species sometimes growing together (e.g. Runge
6331 & 6332, Milwaukee Co. [MIL] ) , but the offspring are so vari¬
able that no attempt has been made to describe or name them.
Gaiser (1946:245) treats these forms simply as intermediates be¬
tween L. pycnostachya and L. spicata.
Though preferring more moist prairies, Liatris pycnostachya
often grows with L. aspera. The two species are not known to hy¬
bridize in Wisconsin probably because of seasonal isolation, the
flowering period of L. pycnostachya only exceptionally, if at all,
overlapping that of L. aspera.
3. Liatris ligulistylis (Nels) K. Sch. Showy Blazing Star.
Map 13.
Robust to slender, 8-10 dm tall; stems glabrous below, pilose on
the reddish inflorescence branches, single or numerous from a shal¬
low globose corm. Leaves glabrous to pilose, nearly always ciliate
on margins, the lower broadly spatulate to oblanceolate, 14-36 cm
long, 1.5-4 cm wide, tapering to a long petiole, the upper lanceolate
to linear-lanceolate, sessile. Inflorescence racemose, the heads on
peduncles 1~6 (-12) cm long. Corolla purple, glabrous within. In¬
volucre campanulate, 1.2-2 cm high, 2-2.8 cm wide ( terr/iinal head
sometimes larger), the bracts glabrous, or ciliate on margin, erect.
274 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ovate to spatulate with irregular erose margins, usually purple.
Achenes 4.5-5. 5 mm long. 2n=20 (Gaiser 1951).
Native to Wisconsin but rather sporadic, most abundant in mesic
prairies (Curtis 1959), especially deep soil railroad prairies with
Stipa spartea, Andropogon scoparius, A. gerardi, Danthonia spicata,
and Ambrosia psilostachya, on roadsides with Aster and Solidago
spp., less common on shores of lakes and swamps, low prairies and
in sandy soils, in N. Wisconsin adventive on sandy roadsides and
railroad embankments (Shinners 1943). Flowering in July and
August ; fruiting from August to early September.
Liatris aspera and L. ligulistylis seem to hybridize (introgress) freely in
Wisconsin. These hybrids include L. X sphaeroidea Michx. as recognized by
Gaiser for plants rather close to L. aspera and L. X nieuwlandii (Lunnell)
Gaiser for plants close to L. ligulistylis. These hybrids in turn reportedly back-
cross to either parent, as well as to L. spicata or L. cylindracea, producing a
veritable continuum of forms. In Wisconsin, where L. aspera is very common
and L. ligulistylis not rare, many specimens show indications, sometimes in
one, sometimes in several characters, of hybridization. Clear intermediates, as
well as those listed by Gaiser (pp. 314, 326), are shown on Map 14. Many speci¬
mens of either species apparently contain minute amounts of the other’s germ
plasm; these are mapped with the species they most resemble, for it was not
possible to formally recognize these hybrids, or to include them in a workable
key. This problem is very complex and detailed population analyses are needed
in areas where this hybridity is known, such as near Eagle, Waukesha County,
or in NW. Wisconsin. With some plants, as those that have corollas pilose
within and squarrose bracts (as in L. aspera), yet have heads on long ped¬
uncles in large inflorescences (as in L. ligulistylis) , we have arbitrarily em¬
phasized floral characters, placing them with L. aspera.
4. Liatris aspera Michx. Rough Blazing Star. Maps 11, 12.
Liatris sphaeroidea sensu Shinners, not Michx.
Stems islender to stout, glabrous to hirsute in the inflorescence,
4-8 (-12) dm tall, singly from a rounded to irregularly elongate
corm. Basal leaves lanceolate to linear, long petioled to sessile, 10-
16 (-27) cm long (inch petiole), 6-17 (-34) mm wide, scabrous
[var. ASPERA] to glabrous [var. intermedia (Lunn.) Gaiser], the
upper sessile, reduced. Inflorescence a loose spike of sessile to short-
(rarely long-) pedunculate, globose to campanulate heads. Corollas
purple [rarely white in forma Benkii Macbr., as in Finger s.n.
(MIL) , Sparta, or Fassett Uh82 (GH, WIS) , Pepin Co.], pilose ivith-
in at base of filaments. Involucre glabrous, green to purple, 9-15 mm
high, the outer bracts oblong to spatulate ivith broadly scarious,
sometimes laciniate, purple margins, the inner ones elongate, all
appearing more or less blister-like and inflated (squarrose).
Achenes 4-5 (-5.5) mm long. 2n=20(22) (Gaiser 1951).
Throughout most of Wisconsin except the ''Northern Highland,”
but most common on mesic prairies (Curtis 1959) and sandy prai-
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. k8
275
ries with Selaginella ruprestris, Polygala polygama, Hieracium
longipilum, Monarda punctata, Solidago missouriensis, Artemisia
ludoviciana and Cladonia spp., along mesic railroad prairies with
Andropogon gerardi, Leptoloma cognatum, Solidago rigida, Heli-
anthus. Aster and Stipa spartea, on dry prairie relics with Boutel-
oua curtipendula, B. hirsuta, Silphium laciniatum, Scutellaria leon-
ardii, Castilleja sessili flora and Sporoholus spp., becoming less com¬
mon in open woods, on bluffs and river banks, and in willow thick¬
ets, often associated with Jack Pine and Scrub Oak. Flowering from
mid-July to mid-September (-October) ; fruiting from (late July-)
August through September (-October). Apparently hybridizes
readily with L. ligulistylis (which see) .
5. Liatris X GLADEWiTZii (Farwell) Shinners
Liatris asperaMicYvK. {oY Liatris X sphaeroideaMichyi.) X
Liatris cylindracea Michx.
Stems slender, pilose-hirsute, 3-5 dm tall, single or many from
an irregular corm. Leaves numerous, lanceolate to linear, the lower
13-15 cm long, 6-8 mm wide, sessile, glabrous to pilose beneath,
glabrous above, the upper similar but reduced and linear. Inflores¬
cence loosely racemose, the short-pedunculate heads cylindrical to
campanulate, Involucral bracts glabrous, oblong to spatulate, with
erose purple scarious margins, the lowest bracts with ciliate mar¬
gin. Corolla purple, the lobes and tube pilose. Achenes 5-6 mm long.
Pappus short-plumose, midway between the barbellate pappus of
L. aspera and the plumose one of L. cylindracea. 2n=20 (Gaiser
1951),
Reported from Ontario, Michigan and Wisconsin, here apparently
rare, collected once : Crawford Co. : Dry summit of limestone bluff.
Prairie du Chien, Aug. 20, 1927 [fr], Fassett W8 (WIS), there
collected with L, cylindracea, Fassett Uh79 (WIS) .
Though often growing together (e.g. Oliver Prairie Scientific Area, Green
Co.), the parental species of this hybrid only very rarely hybridize. It may be
significant that they are somewhat ecologically isolated, L. cylindracea grow¬
ing in dry, L. aspera more in mesic prairies (cf. Curtis 1955, graph p. 563),
with the latter species blooming somewhat later, though blooming dates over¬
lap considerably.
6. Liatris cylindracea Michx. Blazing Star. Map 15.
Stems slender, usually unbranched, glabrous to very sparsely
puberulent, 2-5 (-6) dm tall, from a globose corm. Leaves glabrous
to sparsely ciliate beneath or on the basal margin, 9-22 cm long,
3-5 (-7) mm wide, numerous and ascending. Inflorescence race¬
mose, the cylindrical heads short pedunculate, subtended by a leafy
bract. Corollas purple (rarely pink or white), pubescent on the
276 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
inner surface. Involucre 1-2 cm high, 6-11 mm wide, the bracts
purple to green with closely oppressed, ovate, mucronate tips.
Achenes (4.5-) 5-7.5 mm long. Pappus gray, plumose. 2n=20
(Gaiser 1951).
A species of dry sandy soils, extending from the East Coast to
the Mississippi River, in Wisconsin reaching greatest prevalence on
dry prairies south of the “Tension Zone'' (Curtis 1959), also on dry
limestone bluffs, sandy river banks, rarely on roadsides on rail¬
roads, the range extensions north into Burnett County [there with
Petalostemum villosum at its eastern-most extension (Fassett
1939)] and Marinette County correlated with the presence of dry
sandy areas. Flowering from mid- July to early September (-Octo¬
ber) ; fruiting from August to September (-October) .
7. Liatris punctata Hook. var. nebraskana Gaiser Map 14.
Stems slender, glabrous, 3-5 dm tall, several to many from a
stout vertical underground stem. Leaves numerous, stiffly ascend¬
ing, glabrous to sparingly ciliate on the margins, the lower ones
6-15 cm long, 1-2 mm wide, conspicuously punctate. Inflorescence
a dense to loose spike, the heads narrowly cylindric. Involucral
bracts ovate-acuminate, appressed except for the spreading acumin¬
ate tip, densely punctae, 1-1.5 cm high, the margins usually long
ciliate, Achenes (4-) 6-8 mm long. Pappus plumose. 2n=20 (30)
(Gaiser 1950).
Rare in the state in sand prairie relics and on sandstone bluffs
and terraces along the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers in St. Croix
and Pierce Counties. Flowering in August; fruiting in August and
September, The typical variety, to the west and south, has broader
leaves with conspicuous ciliate margins.
TRIBE VIIL VERNONIEAE Cass.
Perennials with watery juice. Flowers all tubular, perfect, pur¬
ple; style branches filiform, acute or acuminate, hispidulous.
Leaves alternate. Pappus bristly, brown.
45. VERNONIA Schreb. Ironweed
1. Vernonia fasciculata Michx. Ironweed. Map 16.
Perennials 9-16 dm tall, with scaley underground offshoots,
glabrous throughout, the stems often purplish. Leaves numerous,
1963]
Johnson ■& Iltis—Wisconsin Florm, No. 1^8
277
lanceolate to lancelinear, long-acuminate, sharply and finely toothed,
9-15 cm long, 1-3 cm wide, the underside densely punctate (lOX).
Inflorescences dense, flattopped, the numerous heads on short, thin,
tomentose peduncles, Involucral bracts numerous, green or purple,
closely appressed and imbricate. Heads 18-25 flowered, the corolla
rich purple. Achenes cylindrical, farinose between ribs. Pappus bris¬
tles purple when young, becoming brown, 6-7 mm long.
Locally abundant south of the “Tension Zone'', occasional in the
North, especially in weLmesic prairies (Curtis 1959), tall forb
communities along railroads, open lake shores and river banks, open
river bottom forests, swamps and marshes, and often a prominent
weed in low overgrazed pastures. Flowering from mid- July into
September (peak in early August) ; fruiting from late July through
September (peak in late August),
Vernonia crinita Eaf., a perennial, whose large round heads have loose
involucral bracts with elongate linear tips, a native of Missouri, Kansas, Ar¬
kansas and Oklahoma, reputedly has been collected once in Wisconsin; Mani¬
towoc Co.: Cleveland, along railroad, August, 1907 [fl] Goessl s.n. (WIS), a
record possibly based on error. Vernonia altissima Nutt, and V. missurica Eaf.
have been collected from the Illinois counties bordering Wisconsin within the
past five years, and may soon be expected in southern Wisconsin,
TRIBE XL CYNAREAE Spreng.
Annuals, biennials or perennials with basal rosettes or alternate
cauline leaves. Corollas all tubular, often deeply cleft, purple, rarely
blue, yellow or white. Style hearing ring of hairs or thickened ring,
above tvhich the branches are papillate and stigmatic to the tip.
Anther bases tailed. Heads globose to campanulate, the involucre
imbricated, the bracts tipped with spines, hooks, or appendages,
Achenes stout, truncate, the pappus bristly.
KEY TO GENERA
A. Achenes attached by the base to the receptacle; flowers all
alike; bracts entire, sometimes hooked or spiny, not laciniate
at tip ; pappus various, usually more than 5 mm long,
B. Leaves broadly rounded at base, unarmed; involucral
bracts terminated by a hook (Burdocks) _ _
_ _ _ _ 46, ARCTIUM,
BB. Leaves lanceolate to ovate, prickly, the bases decurrent or
not; involucral bract each terminated by a rounded or
flattened straight spine or merely mucronate (Thistles).
C. Involucral bracts with needle-like spiny tips or merely
mucronate, often with a glutinous ridge on back; pap¬
pus plumose _ 48, CIRSIUM,
278
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [VoL 52
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf8
279
CC. Involucral bracts with flattened spiny tips, not glutin¬
ous ; pappus barbellate to capillary.
D. Leaves and stem wings glabrous or nearly so ; pap¬
pus capillary; receptacle bristly — 47. CARDUUS.
DD. Leaves and stem wings densely cottony-velutinous ;
pappus barbellate ; receptacle fleshy, not bristly —
_ 49. ONOPORDUM.
A A. Achenes obliquely attached to the receptacle ; marginal flowers
often enlarged and ray-like ; bracts often deeply cleft on mar¬
gins of tip (laciniate), the tip occasionally spiny; pappus
mostly less than 3 mm long or lacking _ 50. CENTAUREA.
46. ARCTIUM L. Burdock
Robust biennials with large long-petioled ovate-cordate leaves
pilose-villous and atomiferous beneath. Heads numerous, the purple
flowers tubular and perfect, the involucre globose with the Arm,
lanceolate bracts terminated by a hook, the whole head breaking
off as a bur. Achenes flattened, irregularly furrowed; pappus of
minute coarse bristles. Old World genus; all our species introduced
weeds.
Key to Species
A. Heads 1-1.6 cm high, (1. 5-) 2-2,5 cm wide, subsessile or short
pedunculate, in a racemose inflorescence; common weed _
_ _ _ 1. A. MINUS.
AA. Heads 1.5-2. 5 cm high, 1.5-2. 5 cm wide, long pedunculate, in
a corymbose inflorescence; rare weeds.
B. Heads 1. 5-1.7 cm high. 1. 5-2.1 cm wide, the bracts densely
cottony-pubescent _ 2. A. TOMENTOSUM.
BB. Heads ca. 2.5 cm high, 3-3.5 cm wide, the bracts glabrous
_ 3. A. LAPPA.
1. Arctium minus (Hill) Bernh. Common Burdock. Map 17.
Coarse robust biennials, 2 m tall or more, branched above. Basal
rosette leaves large, broadly ovate-cordate, cottony and frequently
atomiferous to glabrate beneath, glabrous to floccose above, entire.
Heads numerous, crowded on mostly very short peduncles; corolla
rose to purple. Involucre 1-1.6 cm high, (1.5-) 2-2.5 cm. wide (from
tip to tip of bracts) ; bracts glabrous or arachnoid, linear, rigid,
with hooked tips, usually exceeding the corollas. Achenes 4.5-5 mm
long, irregularly rugulose. 2n=32 (Wulff 1937, ex Darlington
1955).
280 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Native to temperate Europe and east to the Caucasus, naturalized
in Wisconsin as a weed indicative of nitrogenous soils (Curtis
1959), common in roadside communities, abandoned fields, heavily
grazed pasture, and often along cow paths and other disturbed habi¬
tats where relatively free from competition. Flowering from July
through September (-November), fruiting from August through
November.
Arctium minus forma laciniatum Clute, rare in Wisconsin,
has abnormal leaves variously lobed, cleft, irregularly toothed, or
reduced to the midrib, and immature sterile heads, and is evidently
caused by a virus infection. That such plants may reoccur in the
same area for consecutive seasons is shown by Wadmond s.n., Sept.
3, 1940 and August 9, 1942, both from the same vacant lot in
Delavan,
2, Arctium tomentosum Mill. Hairy Burdock,
Similar to A, minus, but inflorescences corymbose, the bracts
densely cottony-pubescent, 2n=36 (Poddubnaja 1944, ex Darling¬
ton 1955).
Native to temperature Europe, Caucasus and Siberia (Hegi), in
the United States more common to the south and east. Collected
three times in Wisconsin : Ashland Co. : Weed at Berkshire Mine,
Mellen, Sept. 7, 1927 [fr], Fassett 1008 (WIS) ; Town of Morse,
Aug. 31, 1939 [fl], McIntosh c-812 (MIL, WISM). Fond du Lac Co. :
Campbellsport, near railroad sta., Aug. 1911 [fr], Ogden 2U99U
(MIL).
3. Arctium lappa L, Great Burdock.
Similar to A, minus, hut with larger glabrous heads 3-3,5 cm
wide,, 2.5—3 cm high, on long peduncles in corymbose inflorescences.
2n=32 (Darlington 1955).
Native of temperate Eurasia, collected but twice in Wisconsin:
Iowa Co.: Roadside, July 27, 1961 [fl], Brady & Maduewesi s.n.
(WIS), Lincoln Co.: Abandoned farm, Harrison Twp. Seymour
12693 (WIS).
47. CARDUUS L. Plumeless Thistle
Spiny-leaved herbs closely resembling Cirsium, but distinguished
by the non-plumose, capillary pappus.
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. 48
281
Key to Species
A. Involucre 2.8-3 cm high, the heads solitary; peduncles wing¬
less immediately beneath the head -
_ 1. C. NUTANS var. LEIOPHYLLUS.
AA. Involucre 1. 5-1.7 cm high, the heads clustered; peduncles
winged immediately beneath head _ 2. C. AC ANT HOWES.
1. Carduus nutans L. var. leiophyllus (Petrovic) Arenes
Smooth Nodding Thistle; Musk Thistle. Map 18.
Robust biennial 1-2 m tall, the large solitary heads with showy
purple corollas. Leaves lanceolate to oblanceolate, shallowly to
deeply undulate-pinnatifid, the primary and secondary lobes obtuse,
armed with stout, white spines, glabrous, the bases decurrent form¬
ing spiny wings along the stem except on the cottony peduncles.
Heads 5-8 cm wide; involucre 1.5-3 cm high; bracts glabrous, ivide
above, contracted near the base and reflexed, tapering to a stout
spine. Achenes ca 3.5 mm long, yellowish, slightly furrowed. 2n=
16 (Poddubnaja 1931, ex Darlington 1955).
Native to Europe, Asia and Northern Africa, in SE Wisconsin a
recent introduction (see map), rare though locally abundant in Jef¬
ferson, Waukesha and Walworth counties, where it may produce
impenetrable stands in abandoned hog pastures [cf. Johnson, Beery,
& F. S. litis 27-61 (WIS) from near Troy], and sporadic in dis¬
turbed fields or roadsides. Flowering from mid-June to early July;
fruiting from mid- June to August.
The typical variety, not known from Wisconsin, has pubescent
leaves, smaller heads and cobwebby involucral bracts.
2. Carduus acanthoides L. Plumeless Thistle. Map 18.
Very spiny annuals or biennials, usually less than 1 m tall. Leaves
lanceolate, deeply undulate-pinnatifid, the acuminate lobes armed
with stiff yellowish spines, glabrous to sparsely pilose beneath, the
bases decurrent, forming several conspicuous spiny wings along the
entire stem. Heads clustered; involucres 1.5-1. 7 cm high, the bracts
narrow, erect, the corollas bright rose-purple. Achenes 2.5-2.7 mm
long, tannish and shallowly furrowed. 2n=22 (Poddubnaja 1931,
ex Darlington 1955).
Native of Europe and Southern Russia (Hegi), very recently in¬
troduced and only locally abundant in south-central Wisconsin
where becoming a serious pest, mainly in valley bottom pastures
and grazed calcareous hillsides in Iowa and Green Go’s., on railroads
and prairies in Dane Co., and near Marquette [Green Lake Co. :
282 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Ugent s.n. (WIS)] in open oak-maple woods, on thin soil at base of
granite outcrops, with Oenothera biennis, Celastrus scandens, Cir-
caea quadrisulcata, and Geum canadense! Flowering from mid- July
to early August ; fruiting to September.
Resembling Cirsium vulgare and C, palustre in the spiny stem
wings, but differing from C. vulgare by less spiny involucres and
the capillary pappus, and from C. palustre by larger, less clustered
heads and the capillary pappus.
3. Carduus acanthoides L. X Carduus nutans L. Map 18,
Plants pilose to cottony above, the leaves sparsely pilose at least
on the lower midrib, deeply pinnatified, the lobes terminated by yel¬
lowish spines, the bases decurrent, forming wings immediately he-
lotv the head on one peduncle (branch), but ivith wings absent be¬
low the other heads of the plant; heads somewhat clustered, the
involucre ca. 2 cm high.
This description is based on Zimmerman 1879 from a Dane Co.
pasture (T6N, R9E, S.3), Aug. 3, 1947 (WIS), the only Wisconsin
collection.
Moore and Mulligan (1956) determined hybrid populations naturally oc¬
curring in Canada by evaluating morphological variation and erecting the
following hybrid index:
Carduus acanthoides Zimmerman 1879 Carduus nutans
Heads clustered - 0 1
Heads erect - 0 2
Peduncles spiny-
winged - 0 2
Phyllaries spreading — 0 2
Phyllaries marked - 0 1
Phyllaries not
contracted _ 0 2
0 10
Heads solitary - 2
Heads nodding _ 4
Peduncles not spiny winged - 4
Phyllaries reflexed - 4
Phyllaries unmarked - 1
Phyllaries contracted at base 4
19
Using this hybrid index, “typical C. acanthoides has an index of O and typi¬
cal C. nutans has an index of 19 points. Hybrids would have intermediate
values. First generation hybrids might be expected to have an index in the
middle of the range, for example 7-11; later generations or backcross hybrids
might have an index approaching that of one of the parental species.’' The
hybrid index value suggests that the Wisconsin specimen is a first generation
hybrid.
48. CIRSIUM Mill. Thistles
Spiny biennials or perennials. Leaves alternate, sessile, usually
pinnatifid and spiny. Flowers all tubular, perfect, or (in C. arvense)
dioecious, rose to purple, rarely white or cream. Involucral bracts
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No, k8
283
imbricated in many rows, at least the outer ones tipped with a spine
or mucro, often with a glutinous dorsal ridge. Pappus plumose.
Name from the Greek, applied by Dioscorides to a thistle used as a
reputed remedy for varicose veins.
Key to Species*
A. Involucral bracts distinctly spine-tipped (at least the outer
and middle) , the spine usually more than 2 mm long, but when
very short the larger involucres 20 mm or more in diameter.
B. Leaves scabrous-hispid or crisped-hispid and also some¬
times silky-pubescent above, more or less cobwebby and
sometimes crisped-hispid or tomentose beneath.
C. Leaves scabrous-hispid above, sparsely to densely cob¬
webby beneath, the cauline conspicuously decurrent
involucral bracts herbaceous, spreading, gradually
tapered into elongate spiny tips, lacking a dorsal glutin¬
ous ridge; common introduced weed _ 1. C. VULGARE.
CC. Leaves crisped-hispid with multicellular hairs and also
sometimes sparingly silky-pubescent above, not decur¬
rent, the stems not winged; involucral bracts not her¬
baceous, appressed, with a dorsal glutinous ridge.
D. Leaves crisped-hispid on both surfaces, green; in¬
volucral bracts with an erect apical spine; involu¬
cres 30-50 mm high; stem 3-5 dm tall, from per¬
sistent basal rosettes; dry or mesic prairies, rare.
_ 2. C. PUMILUM
DD. Leaves crisped-hispid above, white-tomentose be¬
neath; involucral bracts with an abruptly spread¬
ing apical spine; involucres 25-35 mm high; stem
mostly 6-15 dm tall, the basal rosettes not persis¬
tent.
E. All leaves deeply lobed (except in juvenile
forms), the lobes linear-acuminate, terminating
in stout spines, the thickish margins involute ; in¬
volucral spines 3-7 mm long; plants mostly of
open places _ 3. C. DISCOLORN^
EE. Leaves shallowly lobed, irregularly dentate, ser¬
rate or entire, with small, weak spines, the mar¬
gins thin, not involute, the lower leaves (and
In the construction of this key, the help of Dr. Gerald Ownbey is gratefully
acknowledged.
See also Carduus acanthoides.
8 hybrids with G. muticiim have involucral spines averaging 1.3 mm long, inter¬
mediate corolla color, and very low fertility (see text).
^•Cirsium discolor also hybridizes with C. altissimum (see text).
284 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
those of juvenile forms) sometimes deeply lobed,
then lobes wide, broadly acute ; involucral spines
2.5~4.5 mm long; plants mostly of woods _
_ 4. C. ALTISSIMUM.^
BB. Leaves white-tomentose on both surfaces, often more thinly
so above, totally lacking hispidity; dorsal glutinous ridge
present on involucral bracts.
F. Leaves not decurrent on stem or only very shortly so
(to 1 cm) , the lobes lanceolate or deltoid ; corollas pur¬
ple or lavender, rarely white ; rare introduced weeds.
G. Leaves narrowed to the base, rarely clasping; an¬
thers 6.5-11.8 mm, florets 21--36 mm long, achenes
3.5-5 mm long, yellowish brown with apical yellow
band ca % wide ; involucres 20-27 mm high, the
bracts narrow and slender; leaves lobed nearly to
midrib, the lobes narrowly triangular, usually less
than 7 mm wide at base ; plants strongly perennat-
ing by root sprouts. _ 5. C, FLODMANIL
GG. Leaves broadest near the base, partially clasping;
anthers 9.4-13.3 mm, florets 27-40 mm long, achenes
5-7 mm long, brown, the yellow apical band lacking
or very narrow; involucres 30-35 mm high, the
bracts broad and stout; leaves shallowly lobed, the
lobes broadly triangular, usually more than 7 mm
wide at base; plants weakly perennating by root
sprouts. _ 6. C. UNDULATUM,
FF. Middle cauline leaves conspicuously decurrent, the nar¬
rowly linear to oblong lobes very distant, the leaf blade
divided nearly to the midrib, the decurrent wing often
similarly lobed ; corollas cream-colored ; plants not con¬
spicuously spinescent; dunes of Lake Michigan _
_ 7. C. PITCHERL
AA. Outer and middle involucral bracts with at most a short spine
or mucro, this up to 1 mm long (and then involucre about 10
mm in diameter).
I, Biennials (at least monocarpic) ; flowers perfect; plants of
moist habitats.
J. Leaf bases strongly decurrent into prominent wings on
stem; heads many, sessile or sub-sessile, crowded into a
dense terminal inflorescence; involucre 9-12 mm high,
the bracts neither conspicuously glutinous nor cobwebby ;
rare, N. Wisconsin _ 10. C. PALUSTRE.
JJ. Leaf bases not decurrent; heads solitary or several, pedi¬
cellate, not crowded; involucre 22-27 mm high, 12-19
1963]
Johnson <& litis— -Wisconsin Flora, No.
285
mm wide at base when in flower, cobwebby with promi¬
nent glutinous dorsal ridge; wet prairies and sedge
meadows, common _ 9. C. MUTICUM.^
IL Perennials from proliferating underground parts; heads
numerous, crowded in 2's to 4's or short pedunculate; in¬
volucre 10™20 (-26) mm high, 8-11 mm wide at base when
in flower, the bracts usually glabrous and with a narrow
dorsal glutinous ridge ; very common weed _
_ 11. C. ARVENSE.
1. CiRSiUM VULGARE (Savi) Airy-Shaw Bull Thistle. Map 19.
Cirsium lanceolatum (L.) Scop.
Very spiny robust biennials 1-2 m tall, with taproots. Leaves
oblong-lanceolate to obovate, white-arachnoid to subglabrous and
green beneath, scabrous-hispid and appressed-spinulose above, uru-
dulate-pinnatifid, the lobes and tip acuminate with firm, straw-
colored spines, the bases decurrent into conspicuous spiny wings.
Corollas deep rose-purple; involucre 2.5-3. 5 (-4) cm high, the her-
baceous bracts widely divergent from near or below the middle, all
long-attenuate into a stout spine. Achenes 3-4 mm long, yellow-
brown, finely striped with black. 2n=68 (L5ve & Love 1948).
An abundant aggressive weed throughout Wisconsin, on road¬
sides, grazed pastures, and disturbed open or wooded areas, becom¬
ing less abundant in wet to mesic prairies, marshes, bogs or swampy
woods. Flowering from mid-July to early October; fruiting from
late July to mid-October.
2. Cirsium pumilum (Nutt.) Spreng. Small Prairie Thistle;
HilFs Thistle. Map 20.
Cirsium Hillii (Canby) Fernald
Stout stocky spiny perennials 2-5 dm tall, from a deep, hollow
taproot, to 7 dm long. Stem prominently and densely white-pilose,
each of the 1-3 (-5) branches terminated by a single large purple-
flotvered head. Cauline and basal rosette leaves green, sparsely
crisped-hispid above and beneath, oblanceolate, repand to shallowly
or deeply undulate-pinnatifid, the lobes oblong, rounded to acute
with spiny margins. Heads light rose-purple; involucre (3~) 3. 5-4.6
cm high, the bracts lanceolate, with a dark glutinous dorsal ridge
(difficult to determine in old heads), loosely appressed, the outer
tipped by short spines. Achenes (3-) 3.5-5 mm long, light brown,
yellow at the base of pappus. 2n = 30 (Ownbey and Hsi 1963).
S. and SW. Wisconsin, now rare and local on dry, steep, calcare¬
ous hill prairies, as well as in deep soil or sandy prairie relics along
286 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
railroads, apparently introduced in Douglas and Racine Counties
and probably also in Marinette County. Flowering from mid-June
through July (-August) ; fruiting from late July to mid- August
(-September) . This beautiful and very characteristic species of dry
prairies needs protection from extinction.
C. pumilum, the name long applied to the eastern population, has
been adopted for ours as well, since the supposed differences be¬
tween it and C. hillii seem rather trivial, Frankton and Moore
annotated all our material in 1962 with this name. However, Own-
bey and Hsi (1963) state that ‘‘C. hillii is perennial by means of
root and crown spouts and this has been and still remains the most
useful way to distinguish it from its closest relative, C. pumilum
(Nutt.) Spreng., a biennial.” Whether these differences are ecotypic
(genetic) or phenotypic (enviromental) remains to be seen. It is
of interest to compare this situation with that in C. canescens (cf.
Ownbey and Hsi 1963), where the monocarpic form (C. plattense,
which blooms once after two or three years and then dies) is re¬
stricted to the open, unstable sandy habitats of Nebraska’s ‘‘Sand-
hills”, while the perennial form (C, canescens s.s.) is more wide¬
spread westward and north ; i.e. the monocarpic form occurs in the
ecologically open habitat, while the perennial form in the more
closed prairie communities, communities which are characterized
by plants of perennial habit, and have very few annuals or bienni¬
als. Perhaps C. pumila exhibits a homologous variation in growth
form, in that the plants (ecotypes) adapted to the prairie habitat
(i.e. C. hillii) have been selected towards the perennial habit, thus
circumventing the yearly difficulties of establishment in a closed
community, while the mostly eastern populations ( C. pumilum sensu
stricto)', growing in sand, fields or other ecologically open habitats,
can “afford” to be biennial (monocarpic).
3. CiRSlUM DISCOLOR (Muhl.) Spreng. Prairie Thistle Map 21.
Very spiny biennials 1-3 m tall, with taproot and spreading
fibrous lateral roots. Stem deeply ridged, sub-glabrous to glabrous,
much branched. Leaves ovate to lanceolate, 11-40 cm long, all
deeply undulate-pinnatifid, the caudate-acuminate primary and sec¬
ondary lobes tipped by elongate yellow spines, the margins more or
less strongly revolute, densely white-woolly beneath, crisped-hispid
to subglabrous above. Heads with rather light rose-purple corollas
[white in the rare forma albiflorum (Britt.) House], usually soli¬
tary at the end of leafy branches. Involucre 2-3.5 cm long, the
bracts lanceolate with narrow glutinous ridge, acute, the outer
abruptly contracted into slightly reflexed or divergent slender
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf8
287
288 Wisconsin Academy of ScienceSy Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
spines 3~7 mm long, the inner with erose-scarious tips. Achenes 4-5
mm long. 2n=20 (Ownbey 1951).
Not uncommon in S and SW Wisconsin in sunny habitats, in wet
to mesic-dry-prairies, an indicator of mesic prairie (Curtis 1955,
1959), often on railroads, lake shores, in sedge meadows, and occa¬
sionally weedy in roadside ditches and well-drained, light soil. Flow¬
ering from mid-July to early September; fruiting from early Au¬
gust through September.
This species hybridizes with Cirsium altissimum.
4. Cirsium altissimum (L.) Spreng. Wood Thistle. Map 22.
Robust biennials 1-3 m tall, the stems pilose-puberulent, weakly
ridged, mostly unbranched except in the inflorescense. Leaves
broadly ohlanceolate to elliptic, unlohed and serrate or shallowly
lobed, the large lower basal ones rarely pinnatifid, especially at the
base of blade, the lobes wide and broadly acute, 9-40 (-70) cm long
(including long petiole of basal leaves), 3-19 cm wide, the margins
with tveak prickles, densely white-tomentose beneath, glabrate to
pilose and crisped-hispid above. Heads nearly identical to those of
Cirsium discolor, one to several on leafy peduncles; corollas pink-
purple ; involucre 2-2.7 cm high, each outer bract ivith a dark gland¬
ular ridge, obtuse, abruptly contracted into a slender spine 2~U mm
long, the inner-most bracts attenuate, with scarious, entire tip.
Achenes 3.5-5 mm long. 2n == 18, 20 (Ownbey and Hsi 1963) .
Mostly in the southern Wisconsin hardwood forests, reaching
greatest abundance in the southern dry-mesic forest (Curtis 1959),
in Red, Black and White Oak communities, in E. Wisconsin fre¬
quently in maple-beech woods and shady wooded ravines, occasion¬
ally along roadsides and railroads. Flowering from (mid-July)
August through September; fruiting from mid-August through
September.
Similar to Cirsium discolor in its heads, leaf pubescence and
spine-tipped involucral bracts (which average a little shorter), but
differing in the mostly unlobed leaves (especially the upper), and
a preference for mesic woods.
The morphological intergradation between these species is prob¬
ably due to introgressive hybridization. Specimens of Cirsium altis¬
simum (Map 23) with at least some leaves pinnatifid and bearing
longer prickles resemble C. discolor, and lend support to CronquisCs
(1952) suggestion that these two species are part of one continuum.
Most floras recognize two species, however. Both Ownbey and
Davidson (1963), the latter in a very careful study, have detailed
evidence of hybridization, the former stating that he had “conclu¬
sive proof that Cirsium discolor and Cirsium altissimum hybridize
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. 48
289
in Wisconsin. On the basis of herbarium specimens one may, how¬
ever, encounter considerable difficulty in distinguishing the putative
hybrids from more extreme forms of Cirsium altissimum”
5. Cirsium flodmanii (Rydb.) Arthur Flodmaffis Thistle
Cirsium canescens sensu Gleason 1952, not Nutt. Map 24.
Slender woolly -stemmed perennial 3-6 (-9 ) dm tall, spreading
prolifically by root sprouts. Leaves lanceolate, densely permanently
white-tvoolly beneath, less iso and often glabrate above, subentire to
deeply undulate-pinnatifid (then very spiny), the lobes narrowly
lanceolate to triangular, usually less than 7 mm wide at the base
(rarely wider in rosette leaves) , ending in firm yellow spines. Heads
with bright purple corollas, the involucre 2-2.7 cm high, the nar¬
row bracts to 2.5 mm wide, glutinous-ridged and flocculose, the
outer abruptly contracted, the apical spines divergent, the inner
acuminate. Achenes 2. 5-3. 5 mm long, light brown with a distinct
yellow apical band more than I/2 mm wide. 2n=22 (D. Love, ex
Frankton 1955).
Native of the Great Plains, recently introduced in Wisconsin on
sandy roadsides, along railroads, and disturbed areas, and rarely
established in native prairie \_Shinners 1178, Dane Co. (WIS)].
Flowering from late June to early October; fruiting from August
through October. This species is very similar to the more robust
C. undulatum. A careful analysis of their differences may be found
in Frankton and Moore (1961).
6. Cirsium undulatum (Nutt.) Spreng. Map 25.
Cirsium undulatum (Nutt.) Spreng. var. megacephalum ((Iray)
Fern.
Stout, ivhite-ivoolly stemmed perennials 3-7 dm tall. Leaves lance¬
olate to oblanceolate, tomentose beneath, more thinly so above, shal¬
lowly lobed to undulate-pinnatifid, the lobes broadly triangular,
usually more than 7 mm tvide at base, ending in a short, firm spine,
the lower midrib conspicuous. Heads solitary to several with pink-
purple corollas; involucre 3-3.5 cm high; bracts 2~4 mm ivide,
glutinous-ridged, woolly on the margins, the outer obtuse with a
flattened broad-based spine, the innermost attenuate into erose tips.
Achenes with very narrow yellow apical band. 2n=26 (Frankton &
Moore 1961).
1® Using- a pollen stain technique, Ownbey recog-nized one intermediate specimen
from Wisconsin [Racine Co. : Clay soil, brush-covered bluff of “Cedar Bend” of Root
River, Aug-. 24, 1906, Heddle 279 (WIS)] as “certainly a hybrid, and probably an P^,
as all the pollen in the preparation made was abortive.”
290 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Often confused with Cirsium flodmanii, but with more shallowly
and wider lobed leaves, the middle cauline half-clasping, larger
heads, longer florets and anthers, and wider involucral bracts.
Native of the western Great Plains (cf. Frankton & Moore 1961),
rarely adventive eastward, in Wisconsin local, very sporadic mostly
along railroads and probably not anywhere permantly established.
Flowering in June and July; fruiting in August.
Cirsium ochrocentrum Gray, a western Great Plains species, is represented
by two sheets (WIS), one from “Prairie du Chien, 1921,’’ and the other from
“Marshfield, 1915,” both collected by Chas. Goessl and appearing as if they
came from the same plant. The species, a perennial, resembles C. undulatum but
with heads like C. pumilum. These collections are probably not from Wisconsin.
Cirsium canescens Nutt., another Great Plains species, was collected once,
by Chas. Goessl {s.n. & no date, in WIS), in a “R. R. yard, Sheboygan.” Like
in the above species, this collection was probably not made in Wisconsin either.
7. Cirsium pitcheri (Torr.) T. & G. Dune Thistle. Map 26.
Densely tvhite-woolly biennial (or at least monocarpic) to 7 dm
tall, from a very long straight taproot to over 20 dm long! Leaves
long-petioled, the bases at times decurrent on the stem, densely
ivoolly beneath, less so above, lobed to the midrib, the lobes distant,
linear to narrowly oblong, entire, or rarely with a lateral lobe near
base, terminated by a minute broivn bristle. Heads with pale yelloiv
or cream corollas, solitary to several crowded on the branches. In¬
volucre 2-2.5 (-3) cm high, the outer bracts ovate-lanceolate, ter¬
minated by short firm spines, the inner lanceolate, terminated by
weak spines. Achenes 6-6.6 mm long, light brown. 2n = 34 (Own-
bey and Hsi 1963).
A beautiful species, endemic to the outer dunes of the Great
Lakes, in Wisconsin restricted to those of Lake Michigan. Flower¬
ing from mid-June through July; fruiting from (late June-) July
through August (-September) .
On the loose sand of the outer dunes, Cirsium Pitcheri is often
associated with other endemics (mostly neo-endemics) of the dunes,
such as Agropyron psammophilum Senn & Gillett (=A. dasysta-
chyum of Fassett 1951) and Calamovilfa longifolia var. magna, as
well as with Elymus canadensis, Ammophila breviligulata, Agro¬
pyron trachycaulon, Artemisia caudata, Lathyrus maritimus, Oen¬
othera parviflora, Potentilla anserina, Juncus balticus and occa¬
sionally Cakile edentula, vars. edentula and lacustris (cf. Patman &
litis 1961) and Corispermum hyssopifolium, the latter two genera
more on the periodically inundated flat beach, where Cirsium Pitch¬
eri is rarely found.
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf8
291
Fig» 2/A Disteibution of Cirsium canescens and C. pitcheri. (Data courtesy
OF Des. Eugene Hsi and Gerald Ownbey) B. Distribution of Calamovilfa
longifolia and its var, magna. (Data courtesy of Dr. John W. Thieret)
292 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Cirsium Pitcheri and the endemic grasses listed above show west¬
ern affinities. Ownbey (personal communication) is of the opinion
that C. Pitcheri and certain biotypes of C. canescens are closely re¬
lated. Both have a rather similar ecology/^ the relevant monocarpic
biotypes of C. canescens (Cirsium plattense (Rydb.) Cock, ex Dan¬
iels) being mostly restricted to the rather unstable sand of the
Nebraska “Sandhills’' region, and C, Pitcheri to the dunes of the
Great Lakes. Almost exactly the same relationship holds for the
Calamovilfa varieties. As a matter of fact, in the Nebraska Sand¬
hills, Cirsium canescens commonly grows together with Calmovilfa
longifolia var. longi folia, just as their derived taxa do in Wiscon¬
sin. Both thistles die following fruiting. Assuming this relationship,
it is evident that C. Pitcheri must have evolved since the last glacia¬
tion about 10,000 years or less ago. One may postulate that a small,
isolated, inbreeding population of C. canescens, perhaps only a sin¬
gle seed, was brought to the shores of the Great Lakes sometime
after the final glacial recession and became established in this
ecologically receptive habitat. With limited genetic material, and
lacking opportunity for introgression, this “founder population”
(E, Mayr, cf. Goodhart 1963) differentiated rapidly into the strik¬
ingly distinct C. Pitcheri. The uniformity and environmental sever¬
ity, as well as the “openess” of the beach habitat need also be con¬
sidered to account for the rapid speciation and uniformity of this
species, as well as for that of the endemic Calamovilfa, Agropyron
(cf. Senn and Gillett 1961), Iris lacustris, and Hyperictim Kal-
mianum (cf. also pp. 267-268 of this study) .
Even though the historical evidence is circumstantial, consider¬
ing the glacial history of the Great Lakes and the highly peculiar
ecological situation of the lakeshores, these species do furnish the
evolutionist with the rare opportunity to evaluate accurately evolu¬
tionary rates, in this case rapid speciation. The Dune or Pitcher’s
Thistle is therefore one of Wisconsin's most interesting species, de¬
serving protection from eradication, especially from the well-mean¬
ing but botanically uneducated owners of lakeshore cabins, and
from unsophisticated weed specialists and county agents, to whom
any thistle is a “weed.” Unless protection is given to its last remain¬
ing colonies in Door County, the Dune Thistle will, like many other
of Wisconsin’s native plants, become extinct, its beauty and inter¬
est notwithstanding. And that would be a pity !
However, “There is something very peculiar about the habitat of (7, Pitcheri. Why
is it confined to the unstable dunes just back of the shore line? Cirsium canescens,
even in the sandhills, is not so restricted to actively moving sand dunes.” (Ownbey
1961, personal communication.) See also the interesting comment on C. pitcheri in
cultivation by Deam (1940: 1001). We wish to thank Dr. Eugene Hsi, Northland Col¬
lege, Ashland, for the privilege of using his manuscript map of Cirsium pitcheri. The
map in Guire and Voss’ (1963) interesting study of Great Lakes shore plants is
nearly identical.
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. U8
293
IIMUQLUCRE LENGTH IN CM
294 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
8. CiRSlUM MUTICUM (Muhl.) Spreng.
Michx.
X
CiRSIUM DISCOLOR
Morphologically intermediate between the parental species. Stem
slender, slightly ridged, subglabrous, branching above or simple.
Leaves lanceolate to oblanceolate, pinnatifid, the primary lobes
DEGREE OF LEAF TOMENTUM
NONE o
SPARSE o
DENSE o-
INVOLUCRE SPINE LENGTH IN MM
Fig. 3. Hybridization between Cirsium muticum and Cirsium discolor.
lanceolate to cuneate, usually with opposite cuneate to lanceolate
secondary lobes, all with short, firm spines, the pubescence beneath
sparsely cobwebby, sub-glabrous above. Heads lavender, intermedi¬
ate between the parental colors. Involucre 22-27 mm high, the outer
bracts glutinous, short, obtuse, terminated by spines only 1.2-1. 5
mm long, the inner ones elongate-acuminate. Achenes brown, 4-4.5
mm long.
The hybrids are intermediate between the parents in leaf pubes¬
cence, flower color, and length of involucral bract spines, as can be
seen in Fig. 3. Almost all achenes in the Wisconsin collections are
1963] Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. A8 295
aborted, indicating hybridity. Though their overall ranges overlap,
the parents are ecologically isolated, C. muticum occurring in wet
prairies, C. discolor in mesic or dry prairies. Ownbey (1951) showed
that in Minnesota the parental species (and with them numerous
hybrids) grow sympatrically only where the habitat was disturbed
by roadbuilding operations. The Wisconsin hybrids cited below
give no indication of any association with the parental forms,
though this must be assumed : Dane Co. : Dry hillside, C. & NW. RR,
4 mi. SW. of Madison, Sept. 24, 1939 [fl], Skinners 1173 (WIS,
WISM). La Crosse Co.: Moist acid meadow. Sept. 7, 1956 [fr].
Hartley SllJp (WIS). Marquette Co.: Germania, Hartwell s.n.
(WIS).
9. CIRSIUM MUTICUM Michx. Swamp Thistle. Map 27.
Robust to slender biennials 8~18(-20) dm tall, with a shallow
lateral root system and weak ephemeral taproot. Stem hollow, pubes¬
cent at base, glabrate above. Leaves thin, ovate to lanceolate, 10-30
cm long, green and sparsely crisp ed-hispid above, tomentulose be¬
neath, deeply pinnatifld, the lobes lanceolate to oblong -ovate, often
with alternate secondary lobes, tipped with short spines and with
prickly margins. Heads with deep purple corollas (white in forma
LACTIFLORUM Fern.), rather few, mostly solitary or rarely clustered
on cobwebby peduncles. Involucre 22-27 mm high, the bracts cob¬
webby with very prominent glutinous ridges and without mucro-
nate tips (or these only 0. 1-0.3 mm long [lOX]), the outer bracts
obtuse, the inner lanceolate with erose tips. Achenes 3.3-4.5 mm
long, black. 2n=20 (Ownbey 1951).
Throughout Wisconsin in open moist habitats, most prevalent,
especially in the south, in open wet prairies and rather rare in wet-
mesic and mesic prairies (Curtis 1955), common in poorly drained
soil at the edge of bogs, in wet sedge meadows, there with Carex
spp,, Solidago uliginosa, S. patula, S. gigantea and Spiraea tomen-
tosa, around springs, and in tamarack swamps, in N. Wisconsin
often in most spruce-hr- White Cedar or aspen-Paper Birch woods,
usually in highly organic, mucky soil, rarely as a roadside weed in
burned, second-growth, sandy woods. Flowering from mid- July to
mid-September; fruiting from mid- August to early October,
This species hybridizes with Cirsium discolor.
10. Cirsium palustre (L.) Scop. European Swamp Thistle.
Mostly unbranched biennials, 1-2 m tall, with decurrent leaf
bases forming conspicuous green, spiny wings on the stem. Leaves
scattered, lanceolate, pilose beneath, pilose to glabrous above, deeply
296 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
pinnatifid, the lobes obtuse to lanceolate, terminated by a short, firm
spine. Heads numerous and very crowded, usually sessile or sub-
sessile, or occasionally on cobwebby peduncles; involucres 9-12 mm
high, the bracts without spine tips, or the outer and middle with a
spine 1 mm or less long; corollas purple. Achenes 2-3 mm long,
white. 2n=34 (ex Love & Love 1948) .
Native of temperate Europe to W. Siberia, weedy in the NE.
United States, recently spread to Wisconsin, probably from North¬
ern Michigan, where it has been known since 1935 (cf. Voss 1957 :
97) . Collected once in Vilas Co. : edge of Larix laricina, Picea rnari-
ana, Ledum groenlandicum, Sarracenia purpurea, Calopogon pul-
chellus, Vaccinium oxy coccus sphagnum bog and in adjoining moist
to wet roadside ditches, east end of Lac Vieux Desert on Michigan
border at entrance to Simpson Estate, July 16, 1961 [fl & fr], litis
18212 (WIS) and seen there again in 1962.
11. CIRSIUM ARVENSE (L.) Scop. Canada Thistle ;
Creeping Thistle. Map 28.
Spiny perennials from spreading, extensively creeping under¬
ground roots. Stem slender, 5-10 dm tall, sub-pilose to glabrous.
Leaves lanceolate to oblong, generally pinnatifid, the lobes acumin¬
ate and spiny margined, tipped by a firm straw-colored spine, or
entire with few, short slender spines [in var. mite Wimm. & Grab.],
generally glabrous to woolly-pubescent beneath [in var. vestitum
(Rand & Redf.) R. Hoffm,]. Heads most often with pale purple
corollas, rarely white [in forma albiflorum (Rand & Redf.) R.
Hoffm.], usually crowded in 2’s, 3's or on cobivehby, often leafy
peduncles, imperfectly dioecious, the female heads with short corol¬
las and long pappus, the male with long corollas and shorter pappus.
Involucre 1-2 (-3) cm high, the bracts numerous, appressed, gener¬
ally spineless or the outermost with short spines. Achenes 2-3 mm
long. 2n— 34 (Ehrenberg 1945, ex Darlington 1955).
A native of Asia and Europe, not of Canada (cf. Hegi), in Wis¬
consin a terrible and ubiquitous weed especially in good, deep agri¬
cultural soil. The forms and varieties of this highly variable species
are distributed without any apparent geographic pattern. Flower¬
ing from late June to early August (to early October) ; fruiting
from early July through late October.
49. ONOPORDUM L.
1. Onopordum acanthium L. Cotton or Scotch Thistle.
Robust, sparsely branched giant biennials or perennials 1-3 m
tall, cottony-velutinous and prickly throughout. Leaves ovate-ellip-
1963] Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. 1^8 297
tic, 10-40 cm long, 4-16 cm wide, shallowly undulate-pinnatifid, the
lobes broadly triangular with firm terminal spines, the bases decur¬
rent into very prominent broad spiny wings on the stem. Heads
large and solitary, the corollas bright purplish-blue; involucre 2-3
cm high, the bracts flocculose, tapered to a spine tip. Pappus bar^
bellate, reddish, 2n=34 (ex Darlington and Wylie 1955).
Native of Europe and E. Asia, sparsely naturalized over much of
the United States, collected once in Wisconsin: Fond du Lac Co.:
pasture 2 mi, S. of Waucousta, July 11, 1941 [fl & fr], Fuller
F-Ifl^9 (MIL). Chas. Goessl (WIS) grew it in his Sheboygan gar-
den in 1919,
50, CENTAUREA L, Star Thistle; Bachelor's Button
Annuals, biennials or perennials with alternate, entire to pin-
natifid, nomspiny leaves and solitary rose-purple, blue (rarely white
or yellow) heads. Flowers all discoid and perfect, though the mar¬
ginal ones at times enlarged, ray-like and sterile. Involucre imbri¬
cated, the bracts tipped with spines or various apical appendages
with conspicuous colored or laciniate margins, Achenes attached
laterally to the bristly receptacle.
A large and difficult genus, chiefly Mediterranean, not native to
Wisconsin.
Key to Species
A. Involucral bracts tipped by long divergent spines; leaf bases
conspicuously decurrent on the more or less winged stem;
heads yellow; rare.
B. Central spines of bracts stout, 17-20 mm long, with minute
secondary spinules near the terete base _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
C, SOLSTITIALIS,
BB. Central spines of bracts very slender, 4-6 (-9) mm long,
with conspicuous secondary spines near their flattened
base C, MELITENSIS,
AA, Involucral bracts variously laciniate, but not spine-tipped;
leaf bases not decurrent; heads rose-purple, blue or white.
C, Leaves, at least lower, pinnatifid with linear-elliptic lobes;
involucral bracts longitudinally striate, the black-brown
.acute appendages fringed with 10-14 delicate white to
brown teeth; gray-green perenials with rose-purple (rarely
white) flowers; common weed C, MACULOSA.
CC. Leaves generally not pinnatifid, but repand, toothed, or en¬
tire, the lobes broad; involucral bracts not striate, stram¬
ineous to brown, variously fringed.
298 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
D. Plants annual ; flowers blue or rose^purple.
E. Flowers usually deep blue; involucres 10-15 mm
high, ovoid to cylindrical, on slender, mostly leaf¬
less peduncles ; upper leaves linear, flocculose-pubes-
cent. entire; pappus only 2-3 mm long; common in
cultivation _ 3. C. CYANUS.
EE. Flowers rose-purple; involucre 15-30 mm high, sub-
globose, on very leafy peduncles pronouncedly in¬
flated at the top; leaves broadly lanceolate to ob-
long-lancelate, scabrous-puberulent, subentire to
entire; pappus well developed, 6-10 mm long; rare
adventive _ 9. C, AMERICANA,
DD. Plants perennial; flowers rose-purple.
F. Involucre yellowish-white or yellowish-green, the
outer bracts entire, orbicular, the inner linear-
lanceolate with soft plumose tips ; pappus capillary,
generally 5-11 mm long; involucre 9-12 mm high __
_ 4. C, REPENS.
FF. Involucre brown to black, the outer bracts laciniate
to pectinate, the inner various, but not plumose;
pappus of very short bristles or none; involucre
(10-) 13-18 mm high.
G. Outermost involucral bracts deltoid to deltoid-
ovate, the dark appendages deeply and regularly
cut (pectinate) ; pappus very short (ca 1 mm)
or none.
H. Outer involucral bracts green, the dark tri¬
angular pectinate appendage ca 1-3 mm long,
not obscuring the inner bracts _
_ 7. C. VOCHINENSIS.
HH. Outer involucral bracts dark brown to nearly
black, the dark broadly triangular pectinate
appendage 3-4 mm long, obscuring the inner
bracts _ 6. C. NIGRA.
GG. Outermost involucral bracts rounded to rounded
ovate, the light brown scarious appendages en¬
tire or irregularly toothed to laciniate with very
fine irregular cilia; pappus none __5. C. JACEA.
1. Centaurea solstitialis L. Yellow Star Thistle; St. Barnaby’s
Thistle.
Coarse, canescent biennials (or annuals) ca. 5 dm or more tall.
Basal leaves repand to pinnatifid, the upper entire, cottony above
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, k8
299
and beneath, the winged bases decurrent into undulate ivings on
stem and smaller branches. Heads yellow; involucre globose, 12-15
mm high; outer bracts each terminated by a stiff yellowish spine
17-20 mm long. 2n=16 (Heiser & Whitaker 1948, ex Darlington
1955).
Native of S. and SW. Europe to W. and central Asia (Mediter-
ranian- Asiatic steppe element, fide Hegi), local in the United States
along both coasts and inland as far as Iowa. Collected once in Wis¬
consin : Crawford Co. : East of De Soto, Freeman Township, Sect.
24, W. L. Hanson farm, ‘The only plant the farmer saw,” Aug. 1958
[fl & fr], Richards s.n. (WIS) .
2. Centaurea melitensis L.
Branched, gray-villous annual resembling C. solstitialis, but with
more slender involcural spines Jf-6(-9) mm long, these with con¬
spicuous paired secondary spines at the base. Collected once in a
meadow near Falk's Brewery, Milwaukee County [ca. 1900],
Runge s. n. (MIL). Native to Europe and the Mediterranean area,
established in California. 2n=22 (Darlington 1955).
3. Centaurea cyanus L. Blue Bottle; Bachelor's Button; Corn
Flower. Map 29.
Slender, gray-villous to cottony annuals 2-8 dm tall. Leaves ses¬
sile, the upper lanceolate to linear-elliptic, the lowest lyrate-pin-
natifid, entire, tvoolly beneath, cottony to sub-glabrous above. Heads
showy, the outer flowers deep blue (rarely pink or white) , large and
ray-like, the inner reddish-purple and more discoid. Involucre ovoid
to cylindrical, 11-15 mm high; outer bracts acute and with a decur¬
rent tip cut into sharp silvery to black scarious marginal teeth, the
inner with erose scarious tips and entire margins. Achenes ca 3.5
mm long, grayish to brown, the pappus shorter, reddish-brown to
white. 2n=24 (Clapham et al. 1952) .
Native to Europe and the Middle East (a common weed in rye
fields, hence “Corn Flower,'' ''Korn” being commonly applied to
rye in German), now often cultivated as “Bachelor's Button,'' in
Wisconsin rarely escaping and temporarily established especially on
weedy railroad embankments.
4. Centaurea repens L. Russian Knapweed.
Pilose to sub-glabrous perennials ca 1 m tall, from a deep root.
Lower leaves petioled, lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, coarsely lobed,
the upper sessile, toothed to entire, all pilose when young, glabrate.
Heads rose to purple, terminating the numerous stiffly ascending
300 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
leafy branches. Involucre ovoid to cylindrical, 9-12 mm high, the
outer bracts broadly rounded, light green with broad, scarious,
eroise to entire, yellowish margins, the inner with white-plumose
tips. Achenes ca 3 mm long, whitish, the pappus deciduous. 2n=26
(Moore & Frankton 1954, ex Darlington 1955).
Native of the Caucasus, introduced with alfalfa to the United
States and reportedly spread from the West Coast inland to Michi¬
gan, collected once in Wisconsin : Milwaukee Co. : R. R. at House of
Correction, North Milwaukee, July 26, 1940 [fl & mature fr], Shin-
ners 2331 (MIL, WIS, WISM) .
5. Centaurea jacea L. Brown Knapweed. Map 30.
Robust, glabrous, flocculose, or sparsely scabrous perennials 4-12
dm tall. Leaves sessile, entire to subentire, linear to lanceolate-ovate,
scabrous at least on the margins. Heads rose-purple, often sub¬
tended by a '‘whorl” of reduced leaves, the outer flowers large and
ray-like. Involucre globose, brown, 10-18 mm high, the rounded
scarious bract-appendages large, light brown, irregularly toothed to
deeply (but usually irregularly) laciniate or rarely pectinate (in
var. PECTINATA Neilr.). Achenes 2.5-3 mm long, whitish; pappus
completely lacking. 2n=44 (Marsden- Jones and Turrill 1954).
Native of Europe, N. Africa and N. to W. Asia, very sporadic in
Wisconsin (first collected in 1915) along sandy roadsides, railroads-,
in fields and disturbed wooded places, in “Fairy Chasm” (Ozaukee
Co.) collected regularly since 1928. Flowering from mid-July to
early October.
Intergrading with C. nigra, both species being aggregates of great taxonomic
complexity. Centaurea jacea generally has thin-papery, round, irregularly cut,
brown appendages, the outer sometimes with very fine fringes; Centaurea jacea
var. pectinata has appendages much more deeply and regularly cut, their strong
resemblance to forms of C. nigra suggesting hybridity, which is known from
Europe (Hegi).
6. Centaurea nigra L. Black Knapweed. Map 31.
Coarse, stiffly branched perennials. Basal leaves petioled, spatu-
late, coarsely lobed, the upper ones sessile, lanceolate, entire, all
pilose-scabrous. Heads red-purple, the marginal florets often en¬
larged and sterile. Involucre sub-globose, 15-17 mm high, the dark
brown to black triangular appendage of the outer bracts 3-U mm
long and with sharply and regularly cut pectinate margins. Achenes \
light brown to gray; pappus of 1 mm long white bristles. 2n=44 J
(Marsden- Jones and Turrill 1954), i
Typical C. nigra has been collected once, in Milwaukee Co. : St, .
Frances, June 23, 1911 [fl], Katze-Miller s.n. (MIL).
1963] Johnson & litis — -Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf8 301
Centaurea nigra var. radiata DC., differing from the typical
form by light brown, rather than black, involucral bracts, is known
from Dodge Co.: Fox Lake, Aug. 26, 1908 [fr] Ward s.n. (MIL) ;
Sheboygan Co. : Terry Andrae State Park, July 5, 1938 [fl], Throne
mi (WISH), July 4, 1925 [fl], Fuller m (MIL, WIS), and
[ca 1920] s.n. (WIS).
Very similar to C. jacea, but with darker, more deeply and regu¬
larly cut involucral bract appendages and short, bristly pappus.
7. Centaurea vochinensis Bernh.
Robust, pilose-hirsute to glabrous perennials similar to C. jacea
or C. nigra. Basal leaves long-petioled, obovate, repand to lobed, the
upper ones sessile, oblanceolate to lanceolate, entire, all scabrous be¬
neath or at least on the margins. Heads solitary or clustered, rose-
purple; involucre cylindrical to campanulate, 13-15 mm high;
bracts weakly ribbed, the dark triangular appendages ca 1 (-5) mm
long, not obscuring the bracts proper, the margins laciniate.
Achenes 2.5-3 mm long, gray- white.
A native of Europe, established in the United States E. and S. of
Wisconsin, here collected but four times : Dane Co. : fire lane 200
yards SE. of headquarters area, U. of Wis, Arboretum, Madison,
Aug. 17, 1952 [fl], Greene s.n. (WIS). Milwaukee Co.: Menomonee
Valley, Wauwatosa, sandy loam meadow, Aug, 31, 1938 [fl], Pohl
1212 (WIS, MIL) ; City Dump, Wauwatosa, Aug. 25, 1934 [fl],
Pohl s.n. (MIL), Aug, 31, 1938 [fl & fr], Shinners s.n. (WISM).
Walworth Co.: Delavan, Sept. 20, 1908 [fl & fr], Wadmond Uh09
(MIN, WIS) . The last cited collection, placed here with trepidation,
differs from Wisconsin plants in the long-arching bract appendages,
but closely resembles Blake 106If2 (WIS) from Clarendon, Virginia,
determined as C. vochinensis by the collector.
8. Centaurea maculosa Lam. Spotted Knapweed Map 32,
Coarse, stiffly branched, gray-pubescent biennials or short-lived
perennials 3-13 dm tall. Leaves sessile, cobwebby when young,
glabrate, black-punctate, deeply pinnatifid below, entire and greatly
reduced above. Heads light reddish-purple or rose, rarely white (in¬
forma ALBIFLORUM J. Wagner: gravel roadside, Poynette, Columbia
Co., July 19, 1961 [fr], Johnson, litis, & Beery JfI^-61 [WIS]), the
outer flowers enlarged and ray-like. Involucres cylindricaLcampanu-
late, 10-14 mm high, the outer bracts with 3 (-5) longitudinal ribs,
acute, the black-brown tips bearing short black, brown or white
filiform teeth, the inner bracts longer, obtuse with lighter, erose
tips. Achenes 2.4-3 mm long, gray to brown, the white pappus, 0.5-
302 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
2.7 mm long. 2n=36 (Moore and Frankton 1954, ex Darlington
1955) ; 2n=18 (Love & Love 1961) .
Native of Europe to W. Siberia and the Caucasus, on limestone,
loess, and in Stipa grassland (cf. Hegi), in Wisconsin locally abun¬
dant in sandy or gravelly (probably mostly calcareous) roadsides,
dry abandoned or unplowed sandy fields, and in pastures, rarely in
deep soil prairies and in Jack Pine stands, in Door Co. on thin soil
over dolomite, the earliest collections dating from 1915 (Vilas
County) and 1925 (Iowa County), since the 1930’s rapidly spread¬
ing. Flowering from mid-July through mid-October; fruiting from
August through October.
Hegi distinguishes three subspecies native to Europe, based on head size,
shape and relative size of bract tips and appendages, and size of pappus in re¬
lation to the achene. Most wide-spread in Europe is Centaurea maculosa ssp.
rhenana (Boreau) Gugler, a name applied to Wisconsin plants. Wisconsin
plants, however, do not have the characters in the appropriate combinations as
used by Hegi, and thus are yet to be identified with the proper Eurasian sub¬
species.
9. Centaurea americana Nutt. American Basket Flower.
Smooth to scabrous, slender to robust, sparingly branched an¬
nuals; stem conspicuously enlarged beneath the terminal, solitary
rose-purple heads. Lower leaves petioled, ovate, the upper sessile,
ovate-lanceolate, becoming clustered beneath the head, all pilose to
glabrous, sparsely toothed to entire. Involucre globose, 1. 5-1.7 cm
high, the outer bracts much shorter than their deeply laciniate scari-
ous appendages, the inner with spatulate erose tips.
Native to the S.W. and S.-central United States and Mexico, rare
N.E. of the Great Plains. Collected once in Wisconsin: Waukesha
Co.: Waukcowis Farm, Big Bend, July 13, 1929 [fl], Wadmond s,n.
(WIS).
TRIBE X. CICHORIEAE Spreng.
Milky-juiced annuals, biennials or perennials with basal or alter¬
nate leaves. Heads yellow, orange, red-orange, blue, rarely creamy,
white, pink or purplish, the flowers all ligulate (flat, strapshaped)
and perfect.
Key to Genera
A. Pappus absent _ 60. LAPSANA.
AA. Pappus present.
B. Pappus of numerous simple hairlike (capillary) bristles
only.
C. Achenes flattened or compressed.
1963]
Johnson & litis- — Wisconsin Flora, No. 1^8
303
D. Achenes beaked or unbeaked, but enlarged at the
tip ; heads blue or yellow, with relatively few
flowers _ _ _ _ 56. LACTUCA.
DD. Achenes not beaked, not enlarged at the tip ; heads
yellow with many flowers _ 55. SONCHUS.
CC. Achenes cylindrical, fusiform, or terete, not flattened.
E. Stems branched or unbranched and leafy or sub-
scapose; achenes truncate or tapered, rarely short-
beaked; pappus pale yellow, red-brown, tannish or
white; involucral bracts uni- or biseriate.
F. Perennials; cauline leaves lanceolate to pal-
mately lobed, or unlobed and dentate to entire;
inflorescences branched racemes, panicles of cy¬
lindrical drooping heads, or corymbs with erect
campanulate heads ; pappus tawny to brown, not
pure snowy white ; main involucral bracts biseri¬
ate.
G. Leaves lanceolate to palmately lobed; heads
cylindrical, nodding ; corolla pink, purplish to
yellow or white; pappus pale yellow to red-
brown ; plants sometimes tomentose, not
glandular _ 51. PRENANTHES.
GG. Leaves spatulate to oblanceolate, not lobed;
heads campanulate, erect; corolla yellow to
red-orange; pappus tannish; plants usually
glandular-pubescent _ 52. HIERACIUM,
FF. Annuals or biennials with well developed, usually
pinnatifld basal leaves; inflorescences open
corymbs or panicles of yellow campanulate
heads; pappus white; main involucral bracts
uniseriate _ 53, CREPIS.
EE. Plants scapose ; achenes beaked, or tapered and the
beak lacking; pappus white; involucral bracts in
more than one series.
H. Achenes tuberculate-muricate above with a long
filiform beak; heads many flowered on hollow
scapes; leaves variously runcinate-pinnatifid. __
_ 54. TARAXACUM.
HH. Achenes not tuberculate-muricate above, slightly
tapered, but not beaked ; heads many flowered on
solid scapes; leaves grasslike, the margins pub¬
escent _ 58. MICROSERIS.
BB. Pappus of plumose bristles, scales mixed with bristles, or
scales only.
I. Pappus of plumose (feathery) bristles only.
304 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1963] Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. 305
J, Plants scapose, scaly bracted above; leaves basal,
coarsely dentate _ 61. LEONTODON.
JJ. Plants leafy stemmed, branched, not scaly-bracted
above; leaves cauline, grasslike -62. TRAGOPOGON.
II. Pappus of scales mixed with bristles or scales only.
K. Pappus of 5 to numerous outer scales alternating
with 5 to numerous scabrous hairs ; plants scapose or
sub"Scapose, branched or not branched; corolla yel¬
low _ _ _ 59. KRIGIA.
KK. Pappus of numerous minute scales; plants profusely
branched; corolla blue, rarely pink or white _ _
_ _ _ 57. CICHORIUM.
51. PRENANTHES White Lettuce
Perennial caulescent herbs with fusiform roots. Leaves deltoid,
spatulate or lanceolate and often palmately lobed. Inflorescence a
racemose panicle (thyrse) or open panicle, the nodding cylindrical
heads subtended by an inner uniseriate involucre of bracts about 4
times the length of the outer secondary bractlets. Corolla pink, pur¬
plish, white or yellow. Achenes columnar, longitudinally grooved,
slightly constricted at the summit or truncate. Pappus of pale yel¬
low to red-brown capillary bristles. Name from the Greek prenes
(drooping) and anthes (flower), in reference to the nodding heads.
Key to Species
A. Inflorescence an open panicle ; leaves, at least the lower, long-
petiolate, broadly ovate, deltoid to sagittate, or hastate.
B, Basal leaves deeply palmately lobed; plants glabrous or
nearly so; involucral bracts purplish; pappus rich red-
brown; very common throughout _ _ _ 1. P. ALBA.
BB. Basal leaves coarsely and irregularly dentate; plants pubes¬
cent in inflorescence ; involucral bracts green ; pappus pale
yellow to brown; rare, S. Wisconsin __2. P. CREPIDINEA.
A A. Inflorescence a dense, strict, elongate racemose panicle
(thyrse) ; leaves, at least the lower, spatulate, the rounded
blades gradually attenuate into the petiole ; uncommon species
of prairies.
C. Leaves of inflorescence with broad sessile auriculate bases ;
flowers 8-13 mm long, white to purplish ; leaves and stem
glabrous and glaucous except in the uppermost inflores¬
cence; S. and W. Wisconsin _ 3, P. RACEMOSA.
“ Based in part on an unpublished manuscript of W. L. Milstead, Purdue University.
s
306 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
CC. Leaves of inflorescence lanceolate, with attenuate narrow
bases; flowers (8-) 11-15 (-19) mm long, yellow; stem, at
least the upper parts, and leaves scabrous, not glaucous ; S.
Wisconsin _ 4. P. ASPERA.
1. Prenanthes alba L. White Lettuce; Rattlesnake Root; Lion’s
Foot Map 33.
Glabrous perennials 3-10 dm tall. Lower leaves ovate or deltoid
to cordate, entire to deeply palmately lohed with dentate and
deeply incised margins, the petioles winged, the upper oblong, en¬
tire to dentate. Panicle open to elongate; heads 10-14 mm long, the
6~8 primary bracts glabrous, glaucous, usually purplish. Flowers
(7-) 10-11 (-13) per head, whitish to purplish- white ; pappus brown
to red-brotvn. 2n=32 (Babcock 1947, ex Darlington 1955).
Very common throughout Wisconsin in many habitats, most
abundant and prevalent in the southern dry-mesic, dry, and mesic
forests (Curtis 1959) , as well as in low woods, also abundant in low¬
land prairie where . . the high level of soil moisture [may] com¬
pensate in some way for the great evaporation and insolation of the
prairie . . .” when compared to that of the forest (Curtis 1959:
285-6), often on roadsides, limestone bluffs, sandy shores, less com¬
mon in northern coniferous forests and deer yards. Jack Pine woods,
alder thickets and white cedar-hardwoods. Flowering from early
August to early October; fruiting from mid- August through Octo¬
ber.
2. Prenanthes crepidinea Michx. Map 34.
Perennials 1-2 m tall, glabrous except in the inflorescence. Leaves
ivith long winged petioles, the lower generally deltoid to sagittate or
hastate, coarsely and irregularly dentate, the upper elliptic to ovate,
entire. Panicle large and open; heads 10-14 mm long, the primary
bracts usually 13, pilose, green. Flowers 20-35 /head, white; pappus
light brown.
A very rare and distinctive species of the wet-mesic prairie, col¬
lected twice: Crawford Co.: Lynxville, Sept. 1, 1915 [fl & full fr],
Denniston s.n. (WIS). Green Co.: dense community of tall peren¬
nials, low wet prairie in ditch along railroad, 5 mi. WSW of Brod-
head, Aug. 15, 1956 [early fl], Greene s.n. (WIS).
3. Prenanthes aspera Michx. Rough White Lettuce. Map 34.
Perennials 3-10 dm tall, from thickened roots, the unbranched
strict stem rough pilose to hirsute at least in the upper half. Lower
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. A8
307
leaves sessile or petioled, oblanceolate to spatulate, entire to coarsely
dentate, scabrous beneath and on the margins, those of the inflores¬
cence mostly lanceolate and narrow at base. Panicle (thyrse) a
dense raceme; heads (8-) 11-15 (-19) mm long, and 8-10 primary
bracts pilose, yellow-green. Flowers 11-19 /head, yellow; pappus
pale yellow.
A very rare prairie species strongly resembling P. racemosa, col¬
lected last in Dunn Co.: Caryville, Aug. 15, 1920, Wadmond 1927
(MIN); Rock Co.: along right-of-way, C. M, StP. & Pac. RR.,
Clinton, Sept. 5, 1927, Wadmond s.n. (ILL, MIN) ; and Green Co.:
low prairie, railroad right-of-way, Albany twp., 1948, Curtis &
Greene s.n. (WIS). The following collection was seen by Milstead;
Sauk Co. : vicinity of Kilbourn, on Wisconsin R., no date, Steele 59
(US).
4. Prenanthes racemosa Michx, Glaucous White Lettuce.
Map 35.
Perennials 3-15 dm tall from deep, occasionally thickened tap¬
roots, the unbranched strict stem glabrous except in the uppermost
inflorescence. Leaves glabrous and glaucous, the lower mostly spatu-
late, entire or irregularly dentate, wing-petioled, the upper ones and
those of the inflorescence sessile, oblong to deltoid with auriculate
clasping bases. Panicle (thyrse) a dense raceme, the heads 8-13 mm
long, the 7-17 primary bracts pilose, green or purplish. Flowers
11-2/ per head, white to purple; pappus pale yellow.
At one time a prevalent species of deep soil, wet-mesic to dry-
mesic prairies (Curtis 1959), now restricted to relic prairies mostly
on railroad rights-of-way south of the 'Tension Zone.” Flowering
from late August or early September through September, about
three weeks later than P. aspera; fruiting from mid-September to
mid-October.
Prenanthes racemosa, though very similar to P. aspera, can be
distinguished by broader inflorescence leaves, glaucousness and
smaller flowers. There are no intermediates known from Wisconsin,
the species probably seasonally isolated. The few dated collections
of P. aspera indicate full bloom from the first to the third week in
August and very rarely into early September, while P. racemosa,
though occasionally in bloom by the end of August, often doesnT
begin to bloom until after the first week of September. While this
does not apply to the flowering of the species in Maine, for example,
where P. racemosa blooms from the middle of August, it holds true
in Wisconsin and nearby Indiana (cf. Beam 1940 : maps 2234, 2235,
pp. 1015“=6). Both species have been collected on Sept. 5, 1927 in the
prairie along the railroad right-of-way at Clinton, Rock Co., by
Wadmond (MIN). At that time, P. aspera was mostly past flower-
308 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ing except for a few heads on the lowest branches, while P. race-
mosa (ILL, MIN) was still in bud except for the top two of the 16
branches.
Both species are rare and, like P. crepidinea, on the verge of
extinction, no doubt because the mesic, deep soil prairies, where
they could survive, have all been plowed.
52. HIERACIUM L.^^ Hawkweed
Scapose or leafy stemmed, often pubescent and glandular, slender
perennials with fibrous roots from horizontal rootstocks. Leaves in
basal rosettes or alternate, entire to dentate, pubescent. Inflores¬
cence paniculate-corymbiform, commonly of several to numerous
orange to yellow heads, rarely of one. Achenes 2-3 mm long, cylin¬
drical. Pappus of one series of tawny to nearly white simple bristles.
Name referring to the Greek legend in which hawks, soaring
high, would focus their eyes on these bright flowers, thereby
strengthening their vision. A large genus with few well-defined
species, especially difficult in Europe where . technical specialists
with eyesight stimulated beyond that of the ancient hawks . . .^^
(Fernald, 1950:1562) have split the genus into ca 20,000 species,
subspecies, varieties, and forms based mostly on the degree and
character of the pubescence. Many species are apomictic.
Key to Species
A. Plants scapose ; leaves clustered at base, linear to spatulate or
oblanceolate, sessile, pilose or glabrous, entire; heads red-
orange or yellow; hairs less than 1 cm long or absent; intro¬
duced weeds.
B. Flowers bright red-orange ; involucre densely covered with
black-glandular and eglandular hairs; leaves spatulate to
oblanceolate, with rusty-red pubescence ; stolons present _
_ l.H. AURANTIACUM,
BB. Flowers yellow; leaves oblanceolate to spatulate.
C. Leaves narrowly oblanceolate to spatulate, essentially
glabrous, stolons lacking, short rhizomes present ;
peduncles minutely white-stellate _
_ 2. H, FLORENTINUM.
CC. Leaves oblanceolate with tawny-white hairs on both
surfaces; stolons erect or arching with abundant fine
Many of the Wisconsin collections have been checked by Father Ernest Lepage,
Ecole d’ Agriculture, Rimouski, Quebec, Canada.
1963] Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora^ No. Jp8 309
pubescence ; rhizomes lacking or inconspicuous ; pedun¬
cles glandular hirsute _ 3. H. CAESPITOSUM.
AA. Plants not scapose ; leaves not clustered at base, or if so, then
plants with abundant hairs 7-20 mm long; leaves lanceolate
to elliptic or spatulate, petioled or sessile-clasping, pilose to
glabrous, the margins dentate to denticulate or subentire;
rhizomes and stolons lacking (except H. vulgatum) ; North
American natives (except H. vulgatum) .
D. Leaves chiefly basal, abruptly reduced upward ; plants, ex¬
cept the inflorescence, densely long-pilose, the hairs (7-)
10-20 mm long; peduncles with yellow-orange gland-tipped
hairs; prairies, S. and central Wisconsin _
_ _ _ 8. H. LONGIPILUM.
DD. Leaves often cauline; plants with hairs to 3 mm long or
glabrous ; peduncles glabrous, scabrous, stellate or ap-
pressed-pubescent, sometimes glandular.
E. Leaves broadly elliptic, tapering to long and villous
petioles, coarsely dentate; involucres 6-8 mm high, the
hairs stellate ; stem glabrous ; rare introd. weed _ _
_ 4. H. VULGATUM.
EE. Leaves various, tapering to shorter petioles or ses¬
sile, toothed to subentire; involucres 5-13 mm high,
glabrous to glandular ; stem glabrous or hairy ; common.
F. Leaves spatulate, the upper sessile, the lower pe¬
tioled subentire; involucres (and peduncles) black-
glandular, 5-8 mm high ; stem setose _
_ 7. H. SCABRUM.^^
FF. Leaves lanceolate to oblanceolate, sessile, toothed;
involucres (and peduncles) rarely glandular, 8-13
mm high; stem glabrous to villous-hispid or setose
below.
G. Lower leaf surface or margin pilose to glabrous,
never scabrous ; peduncles stellate, not scabrous ;
stems glabrous to setose below _5. H. KALMII.^"^
GG. Lower leaf surface and especially margin
scabrous; peduncles scabrous and stellate; stem
glabrous to pilose below _
_ 6. H. SCABRIUSCULUM.^^
1. Hieracium aurantiacum L. Orange Hawkweed; DeviFs Paint¬
brush ; Grim-the-Collier ; Red Daisy. Map 36.
Hairy-glandular scapose perennials 1-6 (-8) dm tall with arched,
horizontal, leafy or subterranean, slender stolons. Leaves basal
Hybrids between species 5, 6 and 7 are not uncommon (see p. 317).
310 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
^ (rarely one or two cauline), spatulate to oblong, 10-35 mm wide,
densely covered with long reddish-brown to white hairs. Inflores¬
cence a compact corymb, becoming open with age, the few to many
heads bright red-orange. Involucres 4-6 (-7) mm high, densely
covered with long black and short glandular hairs. 2n=36 (cf. Love
& Love 1961) ; apomictic (Christoff 1942) .
Very weedy, aggressive and common throughout all but NW and
S Wisconsin ; though beautiful, one of the most troublesome weeds,
occurring most often in sandy roadsides, abandoned fields and over-
grazed pastures, often in cut-over Northern Hardwoods and sandy
open Jack Pine woods. Flowering from late May to late September;
fruiting from mid- June to October.
The ability of H. aurantiacum to compete is believed to stem from a potent
antibiotic produced by the roots, which kills all but a few species such as
Bracken Fern (Pteridum) (Curtis 1959: 316). A specimen from the Chicago
Natural History Museum carries the following information: ‘‘Species rapidly
spreading; rare a quarter century ago in region of Mishicot (Manitowoc Co.),
June 21, 1938^’ (Benke 5918). The Brillion (Calumet Co.) News of July 5, 19'29,
printed a front page story reporting that in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s
H. aurantiacum was rare or unknown in Calumet and Manitowoc Counties. The
first colony was seen near Denmark (Brown Co.) and sometime later east of
Maribel (Manitowoc Co.). Its spreading ability was attributed to the runners,
numerous viable seeds, and basal rosettes which choke most competitors. This
species very rarely hybridizes with No. 2.
2. Hieracium florentinum All. Yellow DeviFs Paintbrush; King
Devil. Map 37.
Perennials from a short stout erect rhizome, the basal off-shoots
many, but very short, not stoloniferous ; stems 3-9 dm tall, sparsely
glandular-pubescent and setose above. Leaves in a basal rosette,
1-3 on the scape, narrowly oblanceolate, 6-18 cm long, 6-18 mm
tvide, glabrous except sparingly pilose on margin and midrib below,
entire. Inflorescence, when old, an open corymb; heads yellow, sev¬
eral to many, the involucre cylindrical-campanulate, the bracts 5-7
mm high, more or less black-glandular hairy and white-margined.
Locally very common in N. Wisconsin, often with H. auranti¬
acum, mostly along sandy roadsides (with Salix, Pteridium, Popu-
lus, and Pinus) , gravelly-sandy lake shores, lawns, sandstone cliffs
(Ashland Co.), railroad yards, marshes and open fields. Flowering
from early June through September, fruiting from mid- June
through September.
Often confused with H. caespitosum, but distinguished by short
erect rhizomes, lack of stolons, essentially glabrous stems and
leaves, and smaller heads.
This species was first noted as a weed in a hayfield at Cutler,
Maine, occurring as a small patch only a few feet in diameter (Han¬
sen 1922) . Now, in Wisconsin, it is actively spreading (see Map 37) .
196S]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. AH
311
3. Hieracium caespitosum Dumort King Devil Map 38.
Hieracium prateme Tauch,
Glandular-hirsute scapose perennials, 4-6 dm tall^ with a short
erect rootstock, often with arched or erect leafy stolons. Leaves all
basal (or rarely with 1-3 well-developed scape leaves) , oblanceolate,
(7-) 9-19 mm long, (11-)15-2A mm wide, setulose to pilose, entire.
Inflorescence a compact to open corymb; heads yellow; involucres
cylindrical, 6-8 mm high, the bracts dark green with black midrib
and with long white or brown, short glandular hairs. Mature
achenes truncate, the pappus 5 mm high, white to sordid. 2n=36
(cf. Love & Love 1961) .
Native of N. Eurasia, scattered in N. Wisconsin in patches of
weeds, sedges and rushes, wet sedge meadows, bogs, sand, and along
roadsides. In Juneau Co,, Hieracium caespitosum has been collected
in 1940 (earliest record), and again in 1961 and 1962, on a moist
cut-over meadow and roadside in abundance with weedy H. auranti-
acum, the continual cutting apparently having no disadvantageous
effect on either species. In Forest Co., one collection dates from 1941,
all others from 1959, the species evidently persisting. Flowering
from mid- June to August
4. Hieracium vulgatum Fries.
Slender perennials ca 6-7 dm tall, the few leaves on the lower half
of the stem. Leaves elliptic-ovate, 10-15 cm long, distantly toothed
except toward apex, the lower ones often purplish. Inflorescence a
few-headed, open corymbose, glandular to glabrous panicle.
Native of Europe, collected once in Wisconsin: Walworth Co.:
Woods, Covenant Harbour, Lake Geneva, July 4, 1953, Swink 2287
(F).
Gray^s Manual (1950) and Gleason (1952) do not list H, vulgatum from
Wisconsin, the species reported from Newfoundland to Michigan. Because of
its many gardens, various interesting adventives occur in the Lake Geneva
region, e.g. Lysimachia clethr aides (litis & Shaughnessy, 1960).
5. Hieracium kalmii L. Kalm iS Hawkweed. Map 39.
Hieracium canadense sensu older U.S. floras, not Michx,
Hieracium canadense var. fasciculatum (Pursh) Fern.
Hieracium Kalmii L. var. fasciculatum (Pursh) Lepage.
Hieracium Kalmii L. var. suhintegrum (Lepage) Lepage.
[Lepage, Ernest. Hieracium canadense Michx. et ses Alliees en
Amerique du Nord. Naturaliste Canadien 87 : 59-107. 1960]
Slender to robust perennials 3-11 (-12) dm tall ; stem leafy, pilose
at base, becoming less so toward the inflorescence. Leaves elliptical
312 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1963] Johnson & Iltis—Wisconsin Flora, No. J^8 313
to lanceolate or lance-ovate, 3-11 (-13) cm long, 8-25 (-27) mm
wide, entire to distantly toothed, prominently so in robust plants,
sessile, the bases rounded to cuneate, the lower pilose beneath, sub-
pilose to glabrous above. Inflorescence paniculate, few to many
headed (then much branched) ; heads yellow, the involucre spread-
ing-campanulate, (6~)8-13 mm high, the green to dark olive bracts
0.7-1. 5 (-1.8) mm wide, glabrous to slightly glandular. Achenes 1.9-
2.9 mm long, the pappus yellow-brown.
Common throughout Wisconsin, especially in the Bracken-grass¬
land north of the ‘"Tension Zone” (Curtis 1959), mostly on sandy
slightly acid soil (cf. Beam 1940), with Jack Pine, oaks and pines,
and aspen, on sandy lakeshores and rivers, weedy on sandy road¬
sides, railroad tracks, in pastures, gravel pits, quarries, and sandy
fields. Flowering from mid- July through late September (mid-
October) ; fruiting from late July through October.
H. Kalmii is very similar to the sub-arctic H. canadense Michx.,
which occurs throughout E. Canada and from Maine to Lake Supe¬
rior (Isle Royale; Keweenaw P. I.) and Cook Co., Minn. The two
species differ in the upper leaves, triangular with cordate to trun¬
cate bases in H. canadense, lanceolate with rounded to cuneate
bases in H. Kalmii. The involucre is glandular in H. canadense,
glandular to glabrous in H. Kalmii. The distinctive style color, re¬
ported as yellow in H. canadense and brown in H. Kalmii, can not
be ascertained from dried material.
In Wisconsin, Lepage (l.c.) recognized two varieties in addition
to typical H. Kalmii: Var. subintegrum (Lepage) Lepage, with
three specimens, we believe to be quite untenable even as a form,
representing simply plants with more entire leaves. One sheet so
named, however [Ashland Co. : Rocky SE. shores of Outer Island,
Lake Superior, Cottam & Vogl 633 (WIS)], is most unusual in its
nearly linear leaves, smooth as in H. Kalmii, but with large heads
strongly resembling those of H. scabriusculum. Var. fasciculatum
(Pursh) Lepage has been applied to robust extremes, with larger
leaves, longer, more irregular teeth, and more branched, larger in¬
florescences bearing 30 to 40 heads. Since there are all possible in¬
termediates between this and the typical variety, it hardly deserves
recognition, H. Kalmii hybridizes with H. scabriusculum (see
p. 317).
6. Hieracium scabriusculum Schwein. Maps 41, 42.
Hieracium umbellatum of authors, not L.
Slender, scabrous (rarely pilose), leafy perennials 5-11 dm tall.
Leaves ovate, obovate, or lanceolate, with acute tips, rounded ses¬
sile bases, 2-10 cm long, 0.7-2 cm wide, the involute, more or less
toothed margins and surfaces conspicuously scabrous. Inflorescence
314 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
iimhellate-paniculate, the peduncles appressed pubescent, scabrous;
involucre 8-12 mm high, the bracts (1.1— ) 1.3-2. 6 mm wide, green,
most often glabrous or with few gland-tipped hairs. Achenes 2.5-
3.2 mm long ; pappus yellow- white.
Hieracium scabriusculum closely resembles H. Kalmii (with
which it hybridizes; cf. p. 317), but can be distinguished by very
scabrous leaves, especially the lower, and generally wider bracts.
Though width of the median involucral bracts is of taxonomic im¬
portance, immature heads may be subtended by phyllaries more nar¬
row than indicated in the key.
Key to Varieties (After Lepage)
a. Stem and leaves all without long hairs _
_ 6a. var. SCABRIUSCULUM.
aa. Stem and leaves on lower part of plant pilose _
_ 6b. var. COLUMBIANUM.
6a. Hieracium scabriusculum Schwein. var. scabriusculum
Map 41.
Stem and leaves not pilose, or only very slightly so.
Scattered throughout Wisconsin, common along roadsides, on
sandy lake shores, in dry sand, on open wooded slopes and in vacant
city lots (Douglas Co.: Superior). Flowering and fruiting from
late July through September.
6b. Hieracium scabriusculum Schwein. var. columbianum
(Rydb.) Lepage Map 42.
Lower stem and leaves white pilose. A weak taxon of uncertain
validity, sporadic in Wisconsin, in sandy fields or on gravelly lake
shores, roadsides, and rocky woods. Flowering from late July
through September, and fruiting from late August to early October.
7. Hieracium scabrum Michx. Rough Hawkweed. Maps 43, 44.
Coarse, stiffly -pilose glandular perennials (2-) 3-9 dm tall. Leaves
spatulate to obovate, (3-) 3.5-13 cm long, 1.4-4.5 cm wide, rusty-
pilose to glabrous, entire or rarely minutely and distantly denticu¬
late, the lower petioled, the upper sessile. Inflorescence paniculate,
the branches thickish, densely glandular with appressed broivn
pubescence, the rather small heads yellow; involucre 5-8 mm high,
dark green, glandular (cf. Rhodora 16:182-183. 1914).
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. 1^8
315
Key to Varieties
a. Hairs of lower internodes, petioles and lower midribs 2-3 mm
long _ 7a. var. SCABRUM.
aa. Hairs of lower internodes 0.2-0. 5 mm long; leaf surfaces usu¬
ally glabrous to very slightly pilose _ 7b. var. TON SUM.
7a. Hieracium scabrum Michx. var. scabrum Map 43.
Coarse, the stem generally stiffly pilose-glandular, the usually
scattered leaves rusty-pilose.
Relatively common throughout Wisconsin, especially in the south¬
ern dry-mesic forest (Curtis 1959) and in the Northern Hardwoods
region, mostly in dry sandy soil. Jack Pine or Red Pine woods, oak
woods and oak openings, rarely in more mesic woods, lake shores,
stream banks, sandy prairies, and sunny hillsides, pastures, fields,
and railroads, both on sandstone and limestone. Flowering from the
third week of July to late September; fruiting into early October.
7b. Hieracium scabrum Michx. var. tonsum Fern. & St. John
Map 44.
Rather delicate with sub-scapose to scapose sub-glabrous stems,
the leaves usually glabrous and often more clustered at the base
than in var. scabrum.
Scattered through Wisconsin with habitats similar to those of
var. scabrum, but more abundant in the Northern Hardwood region,
in Black Oak, Sugar Maple, Acer-Populus, and spruce-fir-hemlock-
Thuja woods, sandy plains, lake shores, and pastures. Flowering
from late July to early September; fruiting to late September.
The two varieties may occur together in Iron, Vilas and Wash¬
burn Counties (all collected by Fassett), the latter collection inter¬
mediate between the varieties.
8, Hieracium longipilum Torr. Long-Beard Hawkweed; Prairie
Hawkweed. Map 45.
Strict perennials 4-14 dm tall, densely covered with stiff more or
less ascending rusty-red to white hairs 7-20 mm long. Leaves
crowded near base of stem, spatulate to oblanceolate, 5-18 cm long,
1-3.3 cm wide, ascending, entire, abundantly pilose, the lowest
petioled, the upper sessile. Inflorescence an elongate to compact
panicle, the branches appressed-glandular pubescent ; heads yellow ;
involucre cylindrical to spreading, 6-9 mm high. Achenes 2. 5-3. 2
mm long, slightly tapered at summit.
316 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, If8
317
SW. Wisconsin, most prevalent in, and characteristic of sandy
prairies, especially along the Chippewa, Wisconsin, and Trempe-
leau Rivers and on railroad rights-of-ways, occasionally on steep dry
prairies, in Jack Pine woods, abandoned fields, and rarely as a road¬
side weed. Flowering from early July through mid- August; fruiting
from late July through late September.
Natural Hybrids in Hieracium.
L Hieracium aurantiacum L. X H. florentinum All.
Closely resembling the parents except for the ligules which are
yellow with red tips.
A single collection : Taylor Co. : roadside 3 miles north of Rib
Lake, June 29, 1947 [fl] Anderson 319 (WIS).
II. Hieracium kalmii L. X H. scabriusculum Schwein.
Map 40.
This hybrid, proposed by Lepage (1960), can be distinguished by
the sparsely scabrous leaves and the intermediate width of the in-
volucral bracts. Rare in Wisconsin, in secondary Red Maple woods,
dunes, outwash sand prairies, and wooded hills.
III. Hieracium scabriusculum Schwein. X H. scabrum Michx.
Leaves subdentate, scabrous or pilose on margins, the peduncles
scabrous and red-pilose, the characters intermediate between the
parents.
Two collections : Ashland Co. : La Point, Lake Superior, Lapham
s.n. (WIS). Washburn Co.: Jack Pine woods, Gilmore Lake,
Minong, Fassett 15151 (WIS).
IV. Hieracium kalmii L. X H. scabrum Michx.
Hieracium X Fassettii Lepage
Included here is a diversity of forms which have properties of
both parents, i.e, they may look like H, Kalmii but have hairy
peduncles, leaf margins and stem bases (as H, scabrum) ; or they
may look like H. scabrum but lack glandular hairs and have larger
heads (as H. Kalmii), Three notomorphs, groupings representing
supposedly stable, apomictic segregates or back-crosses, based on
type and quantity of gland-tipped hairs have been separated by
Lepage (1960) who has annotate our specimens and who cites all
collections.
a. nm, fassettii Lepage (1960:94) Map 48.
Like H. Kalmii, but stems red-pilose below, less so above, the lower leaves
red hairy above and beneath, the upper glabrous, the margins ciliate. Heads
318 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
more than 5, the peduncles and involucres dark glandular-pilose (as in H.
scabrum). Scattered and rare in Wisconsin on sandy banks and in Jack Pine
Woods.
b, nm. WISCONSINENSE Lepage (1960:97) Map 46.
Like H. Kalmii, but stems more or less villous-hispid, lower leaves pilose
beneath, the upper ones glabrous, the peduncles with minute colorless or light
brown stipitate glands. Heads few, the involucres sparsely glandular. Only in
Wisconsin, scattered and rare in Red Pine woods, on clay bluffs and along
creeks. [Type: Summit of clay bluff along Lake Superior, Port Wing, Bayfield
Co., Fassett (WIS)]
c. nm. MENDICUM Lepage (1960:99) Map 47.
Stem totally glabrous to hirsute-vilous at the base. Leaves sub-entire
glabrous. Peduncles elongate, glabrous or puberulent, eglandular. Heads many,
small. . . distinguished from nm. wisconsinense by the absence of the tiny
glands on the peduncles and the absence of the rigid, red hairs at the top of
the stem; the hairs of the involucre are occasionally glandular, also more ro¬
bust.” (Lepage 1961). Rare in NE. Wisconsin on sandy lake shores and banks.
[Type: Sandy bank, Sand Lake, 10 mi. S. of Hayward, Sawyer Co., Fassett &
Gilbert 15155 (WIS)]
Hieracium gronovii L., the Hairy Hawkweed, a perennial resembling H.
scabrum with fewer leaves on lower stem and thinner, less glandular pedun¬
cles, has been collected once in Wisconsin (Sauk Co.: Bluffs, Devil’s Lake, Aug.
11, 1897 [fr] Umbach s.n. (F)) This record is no doubt based on error, for
the abundant botanizing in that area during the last 50 years has never yielded
another H. Gronovii. The closest reported stations are in Cook County, Illinois
(Jones & Fuller 1955). One may assume a label mix-up with interchange of
material from northern Indiana, Umbach’s main collecting grounds, where the
species is common.
Hieracium (albiflorum Hook.?)
Young, sterile plant; stem with dense, long golden-brown pilose hairs; leaves
spatulate with same pilosity on lower midrib and margins, less so on upper and
lower surfaces. Douglas Co.: Sandy, low quite dry ravine at Nebagamon, July
12, 1917, Goessl 7656 (MIL). This specimen very closely resembles certain col¬
lections of the western H. albiflorum Hook. (e.g. Sandburg 5619, Kootenai,
Idaho, July, 1892 (WIS)).
53. CREPIS L. Hawk’s Beard
[Babcock, E. The Genus Crepis. U. of Calif. Press, 1947.]
Annuals (ours) with well developed basal rosettes or leafy
glabrous to hispidulous branching stems. Involucral bracts in two
series, the outer becoming thickened at base. Corollas yellow.
Achenes fusiform, beaked or the beak lacking. Introduced weeds.
Key TO Species
A. Achene not beaked; plants glabrous to hispidulous, at least
above, not setose.
B. Ligules yellow; inner surface of inner series of bracts
microscopically appressed-puberulent ; common, NW. Wis¬
consin _ 1. C. TECTORUM.
1963]
Johnson & Iltis—Wisconsin Flora, No. 1^8
319
BB. Ligules yellow, minutely tipped with red; inner surface of
inner series of bracts glabrous ; rare. _2, C. CAPILLARIS.
AA. Achene slenderly beaked; stem and involucre strongly setose
with stiff yellow bristles; rare. _ 3. C. SETOSA,
1. Crepis tectorum L. Hawk’s Beard. Map 49.
Annual or biennial 2-5 (-9) dm tall, branching above. Lower stem
glabrous, pilose to hispid-tomentose on peduncles. Basal and lower
cauline leaves 6-16 cm long, 1-3 cm wide, short-petioled, pinnatifid
or dentate to entire, sparsely pilose on upper surface. Upper cauline
leaves sessile, linear. Corymbs open, much-branched, with several
to many (-80) small heads, these when in flower ca, 25-30 mm in
diam, ; outermost bracts very short, the inner in a single series,
5. 5-8.8 mm high, glandular-pubescent and minutely arachnoid on
outer surface, with minute (20x) silky avpressed hairs on the inner.
Achenes narrowed toward summit, but not beaked, scabrous on the
ribs. Pappus of numerous glistening white bristles. 2n=8 (Bab¬
cock 1947).
Native of Eurasia, locally abundant in NW. Wisconsin (esp. in
area of '^Glacial Lake Barrens’’ ; cf. p. 267) on roadsides, in sand or
gravel in Jack Pine woods, lake shores, river banks, cultivated or
abandoned fields, low pastures, bogs, dumps and deer yards. Flower¬
ing from early June through early October; fruiting from mid-June
to mid-October.
Crepis tectorum can be confused with species of Hieracium, espe¬
cially H. florentinum, but has many cauline leaves, the lower lobed
to dentate, while H. florentinum has all leaves entire and usually
only 2 or 3 on the scape.
2. Crepis capillaris (L.) Wallr.
Our plants small (ca, 15 cm tall), resembling C. tectorum, but
ligules minutely tipped with red, and inner surface of inner series
of bracts glabrous; generally more pubescent than C. tectorum, in
more robust specimens the peduncles noticeably enlarged (fistu-
lose). 2n=6 (Babcock 1947).
Native of Central Europe, naturalized along the U.S. West Coast,
a rare adventive in Wisconsin, collected twice : Dane Co. : Madison,
University Farms, July 11, 1916, [y.fr] Denniston s.n., (WIS).
Fond du Lac Co.: Single plant, yard at 722 Woodside Ave., Ripon;
''probably an impurity in grass seed sown June, 1950.” Oct. 3, 1951
320 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
[f 1] Cors. s,n. (WIS) . A specimen from Illinois was also thought to
be introduced as an impurity in grass seed (cf. Jones and Fuller
1955: 486).
3. Crepis setosa Hall f.
Branched annual^ ca. 5 dm tall, with long slender taproot. Leaves,
stems, and involucres hispid with stiff yellow hairs. Achenes beaked,
light brown. Pappus copious, of numerous white bristles. 2n=8
(Babcock 1947).
Native of SE. Europe, occasionally introduced but not persistent
in the United States, rare in Wisconsin, collected once in Fond du
Lac Co.:” lawn weed, impurity in grass seed sown June, 1950; two
plants of this species bloomed in July and August, 1951,” Cors s.n.
(WIS). Note citation of previous species.
54. TARAXACUM Zinn. Dandelion
Deep-rooted perennials with pinnatifid leaves in basal rosettes
and showy, solitary, yellow heads on hollow scapes. Involucre bi-
seriate, the outer row reflexed or erect, the inner erect. Achenes
tuberculate above, cylindrical to fusiform, topped with a small
pyramidal projection subtending the elongate slender beak. Pappus
copious, of white to tawny bristles. Naturalized from the temperate
Old World.
Key to Species
A. Mature achenes reddish to deep brown or purplish ; leaves gen¬
erally deeply lobed or cut to midrib _
_ 1. T. ERYTHROSPERMUM.
AA. Mature achenes tan to olivaceous, not red; leaves various,
deeply lobed to entire _ 2. T. OFFICINALE.
1. Taraxacum erythrospermum Andrz. Red-Seeded Dandelion
Map 50.
Taraxacum laevigatum of many authors, not of (Willd.)DC.
Weedy scapose perennials 5-20 (-30) cm tall, with deep straight
taproots. Leaves lanceolate to oblanceolate, deeply runcinate-pin-
natifid, 4-21 cm long, 1-3 cm wide, sessile to short-petioled. Inner
series of bracts 10-15 mm long, at times with a small apical projec¬
tion (corniculate) , not reflexed, the outer series shorter, erect to
reflexed. Achenes red to reddish-hrown or purplish, the body 3-3.7
mm long, the beak 7-11 mm long. 2n=24 (Poddubnaja & Dionowa
1937, ex Darlington 1955).
1963] Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No. 321
Naturalized from Europe, rather common as a weed in Wiscon¬
sin. Flowering from late April through May and from late August
to September; fruiting from May through mid-October. One may
assume that this -species is more common in Wisconsin than Map 50
indicates.
2. Taraxacum officinale Weber Common Dandelion. Map 51.
Very common weedy scapose perenials l-dC-G) dm tall. Leaves
in a basal rosette, lanceolae to oblanceolate, variously sinuately
lobed (usually not to the midrib) to entire, 11-35 cm long, 2-3 cm
wide, tapering to slightly tvinged petioles. Inner series of bracts
erect, 1-17 mm long, the outer series shorter, strongly reflexed in
fruit. Achenes tan to olivaceous, the body 2, 5-3.1 mm long, the beak
7-11 mm long. Sexual micro-species: diploid 2n=:16, Apomicts: tri-
ploid 2n— 24; tetraploid 2n=32; pentaploid 2n=40; hexaploid
2n=48 (Gustafson ex Love & Love 1947) .
Naturalized from Europe, a ubiquitous weed throughout Wiscon¬
sin. Flowering mainly from April to June, occasionally in Septem¬
ber; fruiting from May through September (-November).
Taraxacum officinale, has been divided, especially in N. Europe, into innum¬
erable apomictic micro-species, based on shapes of involucral bracts, shape of
leaves, extent of lobing, etc., all characters difficult to determine objectively. It
is best, therefore, to consider all Wisconsin Taxaxaca with tannish to olivace¬
ous achenes the highly polymorphic T. officinale. Fernald (1950) and Sherff
(1920) use the corniculate bracts of T. erythrospermum to distinguish it from
T. officinale. Since Wisconsin plants show this rarely it has not been used as a
key character. Fernald considered the extent of leaf lobing to be important,
leaves of T. erythro'spermmn being- shorter and g-enerally more deeply lobed
than those of T. officinale.
55. SONCHUS L. Sow Thistle
Annual or perennial leafy weeds, mo-stly glabrous, sometimes
glandular above. Leaves alternate, sessile, lobed or unlobed, with
spinulose-dentate margins. Heads yellow, many flowered, the in¬
volucral bracts imbricated in 2-3 series. Achenes laterally com¬
pressed, beakless. Pappus bristles abundant, glistening white. An
Old World genus, all our species introduced weeds.
Key to Species
A. Perennials with underground horizontal rootstocks; heads
large, the involucre 12-20 mm high; leaf bases auriculate,
more or less clasping the stem, the rounded auricles small and
inconspicuous; achenes 5-nerved; terminal leaf lobe elongate-
triangular to oblong.
322 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. AS
323
B. Peduncles and involucre glandular _ 1. S. ARVENSIS.
BB. Peduncles and involucre glabrous _ 2. S. ULIGINOSUS.
AA. Annuals with elongate taproots; heads smaller, mostly 9-12
(-14) mm high; leaf bases auriculate-clasping, the acute or
rounded auricles large and conspicuous ; achenes 3- to 5-
nerved; terminal leaf lobe triangular.
C. Auriculate leaf bases acute, the leaf margins sparsely
prickly ; achenes striate with 5 weak nerves ; terminal leaf
lobe sharply equilaterally triangular, cut nearly to midrib
_ 3. S. OLERACEUS.
CC. Auriculate leaf bases rounded, the leaf margins abundantly
spinulose-dentate ; achenes 3-nerved ; leaves mostly unlobed,
or if lobed, terminal leaf lobe broadly or irregularly tri¬
angular, the leaf cut about halfway to midrib _
_ 4. ASPER.
1. SONCHUS ARVENSIS L. Field Sow Thistle. Map 52.
Perennials from long horizontal underground rootstocks, 5-13
dm tall, leafy mostly on lower half of glabrous stem. Leaves
glabrous, oblanceolate, the upper lanceolate, generally deeply lohed
or sometimes entire, the margins spinulose-dentate, the small basal
lobes rounded, short-auriculate. Inflorescence an open corymbiform
panicle, the feiv to many heads on glandular peduncles. Involucral
bracts dark to pale green, (10-) 14-18 (-23) mm high, glandular.
Achenes dark brown, 5-nerved, rugulose-papillose, 0. 8-1.1 mm wide,
2.3-3. 1 mm long. 2n=54 (Mulligan 1957, ex Love & Love 1961) ;
2n=64 (Darlington 1955).
Native of Europe and Western Asia, in Wisconsin infrequent on
roadsides, river banks, beaches and abandoned low pastures, first
collected in 1884. Flowering from (mid-) late June through Septem¬
ber; fruiting from July through September.
2. SoNCHUS ULIGINOSUS Bieb, Smooth Sow Thistle. Map 53.
Sonchus arvensis L. var. glabrescens Guenth., Grab. & Wimm.
Very similar to S. arvensis but 6-13 (-25) dm tall, from long
horizontal underground rootstocks, the few to many heads on
glabrous peduncles, the involucral bracts glabrous, 11-16 mm high,
with wide scarious white margins. Achenes 2. 0-3.1 mm long, 0.9-1. 4
mm wide. 2n=36 (Love & Love 1961) .
324 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Common in E. and N. Wisconsin as a weed in railroad yards and
on roadsides, generally in moister habitats than S. arvensis, such as
lake shores, river banks, marshes, low wet fields and pastures, as
well as in Oak-Hickory and Oak-Basswood woods, roadsides in
sandy aspen stands and near houses in Northern Wisconsin; first
collected in 1915. Flowering from early July to September; fruit¬
ing from July to early October.
3. SONCHUS OLERACEUS L. Common Sow Thistle; Milk Thistle.
Map 54,
Slender to robust annuals 5-13 dm tall, from taproots, glabrous
^ (rarely glandular) above. Leaves oblanceolate with soft spiny teeth
and large acute clasping basal auricles, the lotver generally more or
^ less deeply lyi^ate-lobed, the terminal lobe sharply broad-triangular,
cut nearly to midrib, the upper lanceolate, often unlobed. Inflores¬
cence corymbiform-paniculate ; heads solitary or several, on glab¬
rous or rarely glandular peduncles, the involucre glabrous, 8-12 mm
high. Achenes transversely rugose with usually 5 ribs or nerves,
including the two marginal (lOX), light brown, 2.3-3. 3 mm long.
2n=32 (Cooper & Mahoney 1935, probably from Wisconsin mate¬
rial) .
Native of Europe, W. Asia and N. Africa, naturalized generally
south of the ‘‘Tension Zone” in disturbed open weedy areas such as
gardens, gravelly roadsides, railroad ballast and beaches. Flower¬
ing sporadically from (late June-) July to October; fruiting from
June into November.
Most distinguishing field characters of Sonchus oleraceus are
lyrate-lobed thin leaves resembling those of Lactuca fioridana, and
large, very acute, clasping leaf auricles.
Sonchus oleraceus has long been considered closely related to S. asper,
Bentham and Hooker treating S. asper as its variety. Barber (1941) listed
four characters to distinguish S. oleraceus from S', asper: 1) looser growth
habit, 2) less spinose leaf margins, 3) sagittate spreading leaf bases, and 4)
transverse achene ribs, and often more deeply lobed leaves. Their rare hy¬
brids are sterile because the 9 chromosomes of S. asper and the 16 of S.
oleraceus do not properly pair at meiosis. The S. oleraceus characters are all
highly developed in S. tenerrimus, an annual of Southern Europe. Stebbins,
et al. (1953) suggest that S. oleraceus (2n = 32) is an amphidiploid of S. asper
(2n = 18) and S. tenerrimus (2n;=14).
4. Sonchus asper (L.) Hill Spiny Sow Thistle. Map 55.
Annuals from long taproots, 3-10 dm tall. Lower leaves lanceo¬
late to spatulate-oblanceolate, fnostly unlobed [forma inermis
(Bisch.) (4. Beck] to sometimes shallowly runcinate-lobed (the lobes
usually cut less than halfway to the midrib, the terminal lobe
1963]
Johnson & litis — -Wisconsin Flora, No.
325
broadly and irregularly triangular) , the margins strongly spines-
cent-dentate, the large i^ounded spiny bases auriculate-clasping . In¬
florescences umbellate; heads solitary or crowded on glabrous or
glandular peduncles [forma glandulosis Beckh,], the involucres
10-15 mm high, glabrous, gray-green, the innermost bracts often
with white scarious margins. Achenes 2-3 mm long, 3-nerved
(lOx), otherwise smooth. 2n=18 (Barber, 1941).
A native of Europe, N. Africa and W. Asia, in Wisconsin not in¬
frequent in roadsides, moist sand, damp woods, cedar swamps, bogs,
railroad yards and embankments, lawns, and pastures. Flowering
and fruiting from July to October.
56. LACTUCA L. Wild Lettuce
Leafy-stemmed annuals, biennials or short-lived perennials with
paniculate inflorescences. Involucre urn-shaped to cylindrical, the
bracts in two or more unequal series. Achenes laterally compressed,
beaked or unbeaked, with pappus attached to the enlarged tip.
Heads usually numerous, the few flowers yellow, blue, or rarely
white. Latin name for Lettuce, from Lac — milk, alluding to the
milky juice.
Key to Species
A. Mature achenes with distinct filiform beak; leaves variously
lobed or entire, the bases sagittate-clasping, or leaves petioled ;
corollas yellow, blue or purple.
B. Achenes with short white bristles near summit; lower
leaves lobed, the upper entire, with leaf margins, midribs
and often lower stems spinulose; common weed _
_ 1. L. SERRIOLA.
BB. Achenes lacking bristles near summit; leaves lobed to en¬
tire, neither margins, midrib nor lower stem spinulose (ex¬
cept in L. ludoviciana) .
C. Mature achenes 1.5-3 mm, the beak 0.5-2 mm long;
pappus 9-11 mm long; involucre 13-20 mm high; leaves
thickish, mostly entire or the lower runcinate ; corollas
blue or purple; introduced perennial, rare _
_ 4. L. PULCHELLA.
CC. Mature achenes 2.5-4 mm, the beak 1-3 mm long; pap¬
pus 4-9 mm long; involucre 6-19 mm high; leaves
lobed to dentate or rarely entire with sagittate bases.
D. Achenes 2. 5-3. 4 mm long, the beak 1-2 mm long;
pappus 4-6 mm long; involucre 6-12 mm high;
leaves petioled, lobed or the upper unlobed, the mar-
326 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
gins dentate to entire; corollas yellow; very com¬
mon _ 2. L. CANADENSIS.
DD. Achenes 3.4-4 mm long, the beak 2.5-3 mm long;
pappus 7-9 mm long; involucre (10-) ,14-19 mm
high ; leaves lobed to dentate, pronouncedly glaucous
and rather thick-textured, spinulose on margin and
midrib beneath; corollas blue or yellow; prairies __
_ 3. L. LUDOVICIANA.
AA. Mature achenes with short stout beak or beak lacking; leaves
deeply lobed, rarely sessile, the bases not sagittate-clasping;
corolla blue to whitish ; tall woodland species.
E. Pappus white ; leaves lyrately lobed, petioled ; flowers blue ;
S. Wisconsin _ 5. L. FLORIDAN A.
EE. Pappus brown or tawny, never white; leaves sessile, the
lower lobed, the upper entire ; flowers very pale bluish to
ivory or whitish, inconspicuous ; common throughout _
_ 6. L. BIENNIS.
1. Lactuca serriola L. Prickly Lettuce ; Compass Plant. Map 56.
Lactuca scariola L.
Slender to robust glaucous annuals or biennials 4-11 dm tall, the
lotver stem occasionally ivith prickly hairs. Lower leaves lobed,
broadly sagittate-clasping at base, the margins and midrib beneath
spinulose-ciliate, the upper minutely serrulate, 5-16 cm long, 2-10
cm wide. Inflorescence an open panicle ; heads narrowly cylindrical,
the corollas pale yellow ; involucre 9-14 mm high, the narrow bracts
spreading in fruit. Achenes 5~7-ribbed, bristly near summit, 2.5-4
mm long, with a beak 3-4.5 mm long. 2n=18 (Thompson, ex Dar¬
lington 1955).
Native of Eurasia to the Himalayas, in S. Wisconsin a prevalent
weed on roadsides, vacant lots, side walks, railroads (especially in
r.r. yards), disturbed prairies, woods. Lake Michigan dunes, and
(Curtis 1959), “one of the unusual features of the bracken-grass¬
land community.’' Flowering from mid-July through September;
fruiting from late July to October.
This species, easily distinguished by its prickliness, has a ten¬
dency, when growing in the open, for the stem leaves to be held
vertically in a north-south plane, hence “Compass Plant.” Lactuca
serriola is the wild ancestor of cultivated lettuce, L. sativa (cf.
Whitaker et al. 1939, 1941), and its great variability in Wisconsin
may well be due to introgression from the cultivar.
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf8
327
328 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
2. Lactuca canadensis L. Wild Lettuce, Wild Opium.
Maps 57-59.
Glabrous leafy biennials 8-16 dm tall. Leaves 6-40 cm long, the
lower oblanceolate, petioled and lobed, the upper usually lanceolate,
entire, sessile-sagittate. Inflorescences variable from open pyra¬
midal panicles to dense spike-like racemes; corollas pale yellow;
mature involucre narrow, 6-13 mm high, the bracts often green
ivith purple margins. Mature achenes with 1 median rib, 2.5-3.5
mm long, the beak 1~3 mm long, frequently drying green. Pappus
4-6 mm long, glistening white. 2n=r34 (Whitaker & dagger 1939).
Throughout Wisconsin in a great variety of habitats, prevalent
in wet to wet-mesic prairies (Curtis 1959), on roadsides, sandy
fields, limestone bluffs, and in disturbed maple-hemlock, aspen and
river bottom woods, shaded ravines and marshes. Flowering from
late June through September; fruiting from July through Septem¬
ber.
Divisible, strictly on the basis of leaf lobing and toothing, into
the following rather weak varieties (after Fernald 1950).
Key to Varieties
a. Most leaves lobed.
b. Lower most leaves with lobes entire, 3-7 (-10) mm wide _
_ 2b. var. LONGIFOLIA.
bb. Lowermost leaves with lobes dentate, (6-) 14-25 (-40) mm
wide, the upper leaves usually lobed __2c. var. LATIFOLIA.
aa. All but the lowermost leaves not lobed, the margins entire _
_ 2a. var. CANADENSIS.
2a. Lactuca canadensis L. var. canadensis Map 57.
Lactuca integri folia (Bigel.) Gray Wiegand (1920) and
Am. authors.
All leaves entire or rarely the lowest coarsely incised. Mostly in
E. Wisconsin,
2b. Lactuca canadensis L. var. longifolia (Michx.) Farw.
Map 58.
Lactuca canadensis L. var. typica sensu Wiegand (1920),
not L.
Principal leaves lobed, the lobes entire, rarely 1 cm tvide, the
upper leaves lanceolate and entire. Throughout Wisconsin, though
more common in the north.
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, U8
329
2c, Lactuca canadensis L. var. latifolia Ktze. Map 59.
Principal leaves lobed, the lobes dentate, and wider than in var,
longifolia, the upper ones lobed or entire. Throughout Wisconsin.
Two northern sheets of Lactuca canadensis [Marinette Co.: Schuette s.n.
(F). Douglas Co.: Brule Barrens, Thomson 5186 (WIS)] closely resemble L.
ludoviciana in the large spreading inflorescences and large heads, but are more
like L. canadensis var. latifolia in the coarsely lobed, not spinulose-dentate
leaves.
3. Lactuca ludoviciana (Nutt.) Ridd. Prairie Lettuce, Map 60.
Robust biennials or short-lived perennials 4-12 dm tall. Leaves
6-17 (-28) cm long, 2-6 (-9) cm wide, crowded, sessile-sagittate,
thickish, conspicuously glaucous, the loiver ivith midrib spinulose
beneath, deeply lobed, the lobes acute to obtuse, sharply dentate, the
teeth and lobes more or less falcate, the upper mostly unlobed, den¬
tate, Inflorescences paniculate-racemose; corollas yellow or blue
(Gleason, 1952 ; Wisconsin plants mainly in fruit, their color mostly
not established); involucre cylindrical to ovate (12~)14--^0 mm
high, Achenes ivith one lateral rib, mm long, the beak 2,5-3
mm long, very similar to those of Lactuca canadensis, but larger.
Pappus snowy white. 2n=34 (Stebbins et al, 1953, ex Darlington
1955).
Scattered or locally common through S. and central Wisconsin,
most abundant in dry-mesic upland prairies (Curtis, 1959), mesic
deep-soil and in sandy prairies, often on railroads or roadsides, in
N. Wisconsin introduced on roadsides, railroads, coal yards, and
sandy fields. Flowering from July through mid-September; fruiting
from late July to October.
Vegetatively resembling L. serriola and L. canadensis, but differ¬
ing by the wider, very glaucous leaves, with the larger teeth lacking
the many smaller secondary teeth of L. serriola, and the wider, more
robust, abrupt inflorescences with much larger heads.
4. Lactuca pulchella (Pursh.) DC. Map 61.
Slender leafy glabrous perennials with deep taproots, 3-6 dm tall.
Leaves sessile, thickish, 5-10 (-13) cm long, 1-2 (-3) cm wide, the
lower quite entire to deeply runcinate-pinnatifid, the lobes entire or
nearly so, the upper lanceolate, entire. Inflorescences open panicu-
It is possible that this species is seasonally isolated from L. canadensis. Field
observations by the second author, on July 31, 1962, in Central Wisconsin (Marquette
Co.), showed that L. ludoviciana, which there is not uncommon on sandy roadsides
and open oak woods and often grows with L. canadensis, blooms earlier, with almost
all inflorescences past flowering-, while most plants of L. canadensis were just at be-
g-inning- of anthesis.
330 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
late-racemose, the few large heads on scaly-bracted peduncles; co¬
rollas bright blue to blue-violet. Involucre cylindrical, 13-20 mm
high. Achenes thickish, 1.5-3 mm long, with short firm beak 0.5-2
mm long ; pappus white.
Native of the grasslands of the Western United States, in Wis¬
consin occasional and sporadic along railroad rights-of-way or rail¬
road yards. Flowering from early July to late August; fruiting
from mid-August.
5. Lactuca floridana (L.) Gaertn. Blue Lettuce. Map 62.
Lactuc villosa Jacq.
Slender biennials 1-2 m tall, similar to L. biennis. Leaves thin,
deeply lyrate-lobed, 7-28 cm long, 3-12 cm wide, the margins den¬
tate, the midrib often pilose beneath. Inflorescences spreading pan¬
iculate-racemose; corollas light blue, often with purplish tinge; in¬
volucre cylindrical to spreading, 6-10 mm high. Mature achenes
brown or mottled, 3-4 mm long, the beak very short or lacking.
Pappus ivhite (never brownish) , 5-7 mm long.
Rather common in SW. Wisconsin in rich mesic oak woods^ river
bottoms, forests, on roadsides, and cultivated areas. Flowering from
late July through early (late) September; fruiting from August
into October.
6. Lactuca biennis L. Woodland Lettuce. Map 63.
Lactuca spicata (Lam.) Hitchc., sensu Am. authors, not Lam.
Slender to very robust leafy biennials 1-3 m or more tall. Lower
leaves often lyrately lobed, the falcate lobes often alternate, (7-)
9-18 (-51) cm long, 3-10 (-16) cm wide, the upper lanceolate, en¬
tire. Panicles elongate, the corollas very pale blue to translucent
ivory or whitish, the limb often very small and corollas therefore
very inconspicuous, the open head ca. 8-10 mm diam. ; involucre
cylindrical to campanulate, 8-12 mm high. Achenes thickish, ca 4
mm long, the beak lacking. Pappus taivny or brown, sometimes red¬
dish, never white, 4-5 (-9) mm long. 2n=34 (Thompson, ex Dar¬
lington 1955).
A woodland species, most common in the southern dry mesic oak
forest and low flood plain forests, in the north not uncommon in
maple-basswood and low maple-elm-ash forests, tamarack-spruce-
white cedar-hemlock-hardwoods, Rubus thickets, on wooded shores
of lakes, streams and rivers, and roadsides, there to over 5 m tall !
Flowering from mid-June to mid-September; fruiting from late
July to late September,
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, k8
331
332 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
57. CICHORIUM L. Chicory
1. CiCHORiUM INTYBUS L. Chicory; Blue Sailors, Map 64.
Branched, glabrous to densely pilose, robust perennial, to 1 m tall,
the deep taproot used as an adulterant or substitute for coffee.
Leaves alternate, variously lobed. Heads 3-4 cm diam., showy,
bright blue [white in forma albiflorum Neum, ; pink in forma
ROSEUM Neum.], in sessile clusters of 2-3 in the axils of upper
leaves or terminal on erect, hollow, glandular peduncles, each with
1-2 sessile heads. Involucre biseriate, the outer series glandular.
Pappus of numerous minute chaffy scales. 2n=18 (Stebbins, ex
Darlington 1955),
^ Native to the Mediterranean Region, abundant in S. and E. Wis¬
consin along roadsides and in disturbed areas in cities. Flowering
from (mid-) late June through October; fruiting from late July
through October.
58. MICROSERIS D. Don
1. Microseris cuspidata (Pursh) Schultz Bip. Map 65.
Agoseris cuspidata (Pursh) Steud.
Scapose perennials with deep taproots. Scape glabrous below,
abundantly pilose above, 1-5 dm tall. Leaves basal, grass-like to
linear- elliptic, 11-27 cm long, 4-11 (-22) mm wide, the margins
woolly-pubescent. Heads solitary, large, 3-5 cm in diam. ; corollas
yellow. x=9 (Darlington 1955).
Native of the western Great Plains, in S. Wisconsin rather rare
and sporadic, mainly on sandy, or dry rocky calcareous prairies and
bluffs, gravelly hillsides, and along railroads, in Pierce County
(Hager City) on the Mississippi River sand terraces with Anemone
patens and A. caroliniana [Wadmond s.n. (WIS)]. Flowering
throughout May (-June) ; fruiting from mid-May to June.
Microseris cuspidata can be distinguished from Tragopogon by
the scapose habit, beakless achenes, and woolly leaf margins.
59. KRIGIA Schreb. Dwarf Dandelion.
[Shinners, Lloyd H. Revision of the genus Krigia Schreber.
Wrightia 1 : 187-206. 1947.]
Scapose annuals or perennials. Leaves basal, variously lobed to
entire, glabrous or glandular. Heads solitary to clustered, the corol-
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No. J^8
333
las yellow to yellow-orange. Involucral bracts biseriate. Achenes
cylindrical to conical, truncate. Pappus double, the outer series of
minute scales, the inner of few to numerous scabrous bristles.
Key to Species
A. Plants annual ; achene conical ; pappus of 5 outer scales alter¬
nating with 5 inner scabrous hairs; scape leafless; rare, S.
Wisconsin _ 1. K. VIRGINICA.
AA. Plants perennial; achene cylindrical; pappus of more numer¬
ous scales and scabrous hairs ; scape bearing ,1-2 reduced ses¬
sile leaves ; peduncles glabrous or glandular ; common through¬
out _ 2. K. BIFLORA.
1. Krigia VIRGINICA (L.) Willd. Dwarf Dandelion. Map 66.
Very slender scapose annual (5-) 9-29 cm tall, from long taproot,
stem glandular at base and at base of involucre, sparsely so in mid¬
portion. Leaves numerous, basal, oblong to spatulate, often with re¬
mote acute teeth, glandular over both surfaces or at least on the
margins, often black-punctate. Heads solitary, when flowering 18-
20 mm in diam. (fresh). Involucral bracts of fruiting plant trans-
Incent, often with red or purple center line. Pappus of 5 outer white
or brownish 1 mm long scales alternating ivith 5 inner scabrous Jp~6
mm long bristles.
Locally abundant in S.-central Wisconsin, in sandy soil along
roads, railroads and Jack Pine barrens along the Wisconsin River in
Dane, Sauk, Iowa and Richland counties, the range closely parallel¬
ing that of Opuntia compressa var. macrorhiza (Ugent, 1962), at
Arena, Iowa Co., on sand dunes and flats with Diodia teres var.
setifera (only Wise, station), Polygonella articulata, Polanisia dode-
candra, Hudsonia tomentosa, Hypericum gentianoides, Cycloloma
atriplicifolia. Cyperus schweinitzii, Cenchrus pauciflorus, etc., the
Madison record presumably an introduction in the University of
Wisconsin Arboretum [1947, Greene s.n. (WIS)].
2. Krigia BIFLORA (Walt.) Blake Dwarf Dandelion. Maps 67, 68.
Slender perennials 2-6 dm tall, the stem scape-like ; leaves mostly
basal, except for 1~2 mostly reduced, sessile-clasping bracts sub¬
tending inflorescence branches, spatulate-lanceolate with winged
petioles, glabrous (rarely pilose), entire, repand to variously lobed.
Heads few, orange-yellow, 2-3 cm in diam. when in flower, on elon¬
gate peduncles arising singly or several in the axil of 1-3 short
leafy bracts. Pappus double, the outer series of numerous taivny
minute scales, the inner of scabrous bristles. 2n==:10 (cf. p. 336).
334 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Key to Subspecies
a. Inflorescence branches and involucre completely glabrous;
leaves nearly always entire _ 2a. ssp. BIFLORA.
aa. Inflorescence branches and at times the involucre sparsely to
densely glandular ; leaves entire to often deeply lobed _
_ 2b. ssp. GLANDULIFERA.
2a. Krigia bilfora (Walt.) Blake, ssp. biflora. Map 67.
Common in Wisconsin in the southern ‘^forest-prairie province’’,
in open oak-hickory, maple-basswood, and Jack Pine- Jack Oak
woods, sandy prairies, roadsides, railroads, and thickets. Flowering
from late May to mid-July (-August) ; fruiting from June through
July (-October).
2b. Krigia biflora (Walt.) Blake, ssp. GLANDULIFERA (Fern.)
litis, stat. nov. Map 68,
Krigia hiflora (Walt.) Blake, forma glandulifera Fern. Rho-
dora 37:337. 1935
Relatively common in sandy areas north of, or within the “Ten¬
sion Zone”, on roadsides, lake shores, or in oak or Jack Pine woods,
on sandy hillsides and open fields, less common in aspen woods,
sedge meadows and alder-White Cedar swamps. Flowering from
(late May-) early June to mid-July (-September), the peak about
10 days later than in ssp. hiflora, this perhaps related to its more
northerly range; fruiting from June sporadically through August
(-October) .
In a recent revision of the genus, Shinners (1947b) considered
the glandularity of the peduncles to be of no taxonomic or geo¬
graphic significance and relegates Fernald’s form to synonomy. A
glance at the great similarity of the glandular to the non-glandu-
lar plants makes this view understandable. Yet there are several
reasons to think that the two forms have had separate histories, and
that it would be better to recognize them as geographic subspecies.
Morphologically, the only differences are those outlined in the
key. The glandularity varies from plants densely glandular on in-
volucral bracts, peduncles and even scapes, to plants that have just
a few hairs at the very base of the head, or none at all. Linked with
glandularity is a strong tendency for deep lobing of the leaf, a
tendency noted by Fernald (1935: 337-8). While all but a very
few plants of ssp. biflora have entire (unlobed) leaves, as do many
plants of ssp. glandulifera, deeply lobed leaves are a common ten¬
dency of the latter taxon only. It is likely that detailed measure-
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No.
335
336 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
ments will in the future add other characters to these distinctions.
Chromosome number of ssp. glandulifera is 2n=10, counted re¬
cently on Wisconsin specimens (Vilas Co.) by Dr. S. Kawano at
the Univ. of Wis. Herbarium. The number for ssp. biflora is un¬
known.
Though the total range of either subspecies is not known to us,
their distribution in Wisconsin in relation to the above characters
is significant (cf. maps 67, 68) . Good ssp. biflora, with no glandular
hairs whatsoever, is restricted to rocky woods and sand areas
south or within the floristic “Tension Zone” (cf. Desmarais 1952:
377-8 ; Curtis 1959 ; and others) , i.e. to south of the Northern Hard¬
wood region. On the other hand, heavily glandular plants are re¬
stricted to sandy areas within and north of the “Tension Zone”, in
"^effect, to areas within the Northern Hardwoods. From within the
Wisconsin area of good ssp. biflora there are a number of specimens
that have only 5 mm of peduncle beneath the head that is glandular,
or sometimes less, with only 2 or 3 hairs! These are mostly re¬
stricted to south of the “Tension Zone” (Map 68, stars), and, since
in every other way they are ssp. biflora plants, it seems reasonable
to suppose that their weakly expressed glandularity represent intro-
gression from ssp. glandulifera. In Wisconsin, Krigia biflora often
acts as a pioneer. This attribute, together with wind-borne fruits,
would facilitate establishment, migration, and hybridization.
While throughout most of Wisconsin the mass ranges of the sub¬
species do not overlap, in the “Tension Zone” in Central Wisconsin
both may grow within the same population. In eight mass collec¬
tions from Jackson County, Fassett (ms., ca. 1948) calculated per¬
centages of glandular plants in a given population, finding that five
stations were 100% glandular, one was 98%, one was 95% and one,
in eastern Jackson County, 57% glandular. This last station also
had plants with both slightly glandular and glabrous peduncles on
the same plant.
While ssp. biflora is widespread in the eastern U.S., we have only
few records of glandular plants in the University of Wisconsin
Herbarium south of the region of the Northern Hardwoods. One
sheet from Peoria, Illinois (a wooded valley), and a few from east¬
ern Kentucky and the Southern Appalachians have hairy peduncles.
Intermediates, like those of southern Wisconsin, are not rare in
Iowa or Minnesota. These observations essentially agree with those
Fernald (1935) who also reports the Colorado and New Mexico
plants to be glandular, as does Scoggan (1957) for those from
Manitoba. All in all, it suggests that these subspecies were once
segregated along the lines of the Northern Hardwoods or perhaps
Rocky Mountains area (ssp. glandulifera) vs. Southern Deciduous
Forest area (ssp. biflora), but have in recent times begun to reinte-
1963]
Johnson & litis — Wisconsin Flora, No, Jf8
337
grate. In Wisconsin, near the western limit of the Northern Hard¬
woods, where the more northern (or western) sisp. glandulifera may
have met the southern ssp. biflora only recently, the distinctions of
morphology on a geographic basis are still quite clear.
60. LAPSANA L.
1. Lapsana communis L. Nipple Wort. Map 69.
Slender weedy annual 4~6 dm tall, branched above. Stem pilose
below, glandular-pilose above. Lower leaves lyrately-lobed to ovate,
long petioled, the upper sub-sessile to sessile, ovate to lanceolate,
the dentate margins pilose. Inflorescence an open panicle. Heads
few flowered, small, the corollas yellow; involucre glabrous, biseri-
ate, the inner series of 8 erect, keeled bracts 6-7 mm high, the outer
ca 1/10 as long. Achenes narrowed toward summit, but not beaked.
Pappus none. 2x=14 (Love & Love 1961) .
Naturalized from Europe, rare in Wisconsin in mesic or moist
habitats, on refuse heaps, roadsides, fence lines, deciduous or coni¬
ferous woods, and street corners in Milwaukee. Flowering in July;
fruiting in July and August.
61. LEONTODON L.
1. Leontodon autumnalis L. Autumn Dandelion; Hawkbit.
Slender, simple or branched scapose perennial ca 5 dm tall. Leaves
basal, oblanceolate, their lobes distant, linear, entire, glabrous to
sparsely pilose. Heads subtended by stvollen, scaley-br acted sparsely
pilose peduncles, the corollas yellow. Involucre campanulate, ca 9
mm high, the bracts narrow, glandular-pubescent. Achenes colum¬
nar, faintly nerved, rugulose. Pappus uniseriate, the bristles plu¬
mose. Native of Eurasia, established on the E. U.S. coast but rarely
inland, in Wisconsin collected once in Sheboygan, June, 1903 [fr]
Goessl s.n, (WIS) (very possibly in the collector’s garden!?).
62. TRAGOPOGON L. Goat’s Beard
[Ownbey, Marion. Natural Hybridization and Amphidiploidy in the
Genus Tragopogon. Am. Jour. Bot. 37 : 487-499. 1950]
Branched or unbranched glabrous perennials with a long straight
taproot. Leaves alternate, grass- or ribbon-like, the sessile bases
338 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
clasping. Heads large, the numerous flowers yellow or purple. In¬
volucre uniseriate. Achenes cylindrical, long beaked. Pappus of num¬
erous plumose bristles. Eurasian genus, with several species com¬
mon weeds.
Key to Species
A. Ligules pale violet to deep purple; achenes abruptly tapering
to beak longer than achene body; involucral bracts 7-11 ; culti¬
vated and rarely escaped _ 1. T. PORRIFOLIUS,
AA. Ligules yellow ; achenes gradually tapering to a beak longer or
shorter than the achene body ; common weeds.
B. Bracts generally 8 or 9, margined with red or purple, about
equal to the corollas; achene beak shorter than body;
peduncle slender, not enlarged below the head; leaf tips
recurved _ 2. T. PRATE N SIS,
BB. Bracts generally 11-13, not margined with red or purple;
achene beak longer than body; peduncle strongly enlarged
(inflated) below the head; leaf tips not recurved _
_ 3. r. DUBIUS.
1. Tragopogon PORRIFOLIUS L. Salsify; Oyster Plant. Map 70.
Glabrous perennial to 8 dm or more tall, with pale violet to pur¬
ple ligules shorter than the involucral bracts, the flotvering heads
borne on somewhat sivollen holloiv peduncles. Leaves to 34 cm long,
to 1 cm wide, narrow-lanceolate to linear. Involucre of (7-) 8-9(11 )
bracts, 2.5-3 cm long, becoming longer in fruit. Achenes tapering
abruptly to a slender beak somewhat longer to twice the length of
the achene body. 2n=12 (Ownbey 1950) .
Introduced from Europe, rarely found in Wisconsin on open road¬
sides and railroads as an escape, the plants often grown as root
vegetables. Flowering from late May to early August ; fruiting from
August to September.
2. Tragopogon pratensis L. Lesser Goat’s Beard. Map 71.
Perennial branching from midway on stem, 5-8 dm tall, with yel¬
low ligules about equaling the involucral bracts, the fruiting pedun¬
cles remaining thin and cylindrical. Leaves 17-26 cm long, to ,1-7 cm
wide at the base, the tips recurved. Involucre 21-23 mm long in
flower, extending to 32 mm in fruit, the (7-) 8-9 (-11) bracts mar¬
gined. with red or purple. Achenes gradually tapering to a thin beak
shorter than achene body. Fruiting head abruptly and pronouncedly
thickened. 2n=12 (Winge 1926, ex Ownbey 1950).
1963]
Johnson & litis— Wisconsin Flora, No, ^8
339
Native of Europe, mainly in southern and eastern Wisconsin as a
weed along roadsides, vacant lots, on railroad prairies, hayfields,
and with Juniperus virginiana, etc. on sandstone bluffs. Flowering
from late May through mid-July; fruiting from June to mid-
August.
3. Tragopogon dubius Scop, Greater Goat’s Beard. Map 72.
Perennial branching from near base, 5--9 dm tall, with yellow
ligules all shorter than the involucral bracts, the peduncles en¬
larged and hollow (in late plants or late shoots less so). Leaves to
30 cm long, 8-12 mm wide at the base. Involucre 25-35 mm long
lengthening to as much as 67 mm in fruit, the 13 bracts green
throughout, Achenes abundantly scabrous, gradually tapering to a
thin beak equalling or slightly longer than the achene body. 2n=12
(Ownbey 1950).
Naturalized from Europe, mainly in S. and E. Wisconsin as a
common weed of roadsides, sandy prairies, sandstone cliffs, railroad
ballasts, abandoned fields, orchards, dry sandy oak woods, Sugar
Maple-Basswood woods, and pastures. Flowering from late May to
mid- July, sporadically through September and October; fruiting
from late June through October.
Tragopogon dubius, quite similar to T. pratensis, may be distinguished, aside
from key characters and generally longer fruits, as follows (after Ownbey
1950) :
Leaves :
Bracts :
Branching:
Ligules :
Achenes:
T. DUBIUS
Tips straight
Long, narrow, not margined
with red or purple, 13
From near base
Shorter than bracts
Slender
T. PRATENSIS
Tips recurved
Shorter, wider, red or purple
margins, 8 or 9
From midway on stem
Equalling bracts
Thicker
Ownbey (1950) reports natural hybrids and their amphidiploids in Washing¬
ton State, where all three species are found sympatrically. Hybrids, then, may
occur in southern Wisconsin, though none have been recognized to date.
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PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN
NO. 49. COMPOSITAE II— COMPOSITE FAMILY II
The Genus Senecio — The Ragworts — In Wisconsin*’^
T. M. Barkley
Senecio is a world-wide genus of some one thousand or more
species, exhibiting great morphological and ecological diversity. It
varies from tropical trees to small arctic herbs, and includes wide¬
spread weedy species and narrow endemics. Many native temperate
North American Senecio species are biologically complicated in that
they readily intergrade with each other.
The distribution maps are based on specimens in the University
of Wisconsin (WIS) , Milwaukee Public Museum (MIL) and North¬
land College, Ashland (NC) herbaria, and on my revision (1962) of
Senecio aureus and allied species, which includes S. aureus, S. pseu-
daureus var. semicordatus, S. pauperculus, S, plattensis, and S. in-
decorus of the Wisconsin flora. I am grateful to Hugh H. litis. Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin, Emil P. Kruschke, Milwaukee Public Museum,
and Eugene Hsi, Northland College for making the specimens of
their respective institutions available to me. Mrs. Roberta Kirkpat¬
rick, Ollie Weber, and Barbara Elder assisted in preparation of the
manuscript.
Genus 26. SENECIO Linn. Groundsel, Ragwort, Butterweed
Annual, biennial or perennial herbs with alternate, toothed or
divided to entire leaves and few to numerous cylindric or campanu-
late heads. Heads radiate or eradiate ; rays yellow to whitish-yellow.
Principal involucral bracts green, equal in size or nearly so, appear¬
ing in a single series, usually subtended by a few small calyculate
bracts; receptacle naked. Disk florets perfect and fertile; style
branches flattened and penicillate; ray florets pistillate and fertile.
Pappus of fine, smooth or very lightly barbellate bristles. Achenes
terete or nearly so at maturity, 5-10 nerved.
1 Contribution No, 617, Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Kansas Agr.
Expt. Station, Manhattan. Botany Serial No. 774.
2 Research supported in part through the Kansas State University Bureau of Gen¬
eral Research, publication throug-h direct support of the J. J. Davis Memorial Fund,
administered by the Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
343
344 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Key to Species
A. Leaves more or less equally distributed on the stem ; annuals,
or perhaps rarely biennials.
B. Rays conspicuous; leaves entire to weakly toothed; pubes-
sence often copious. Rare native, N. Wisconsin _
_ 1, S. congestus.
BB. Rays inconspicuous or absent; leaves, or some of them,
lobed to pinnatified; pubescence short and often scant,
crisp. Introduced weeds.
C. Rays absent; calyculate bracts well developed with dis¬
tinct black tips _ _ _ 2. S. vulgaris.
CC. Rays present, small; calyculate bracts usually without
distinct black tips _ 3. S. sylvaticus.
AA. Cauline leaves relatively few, progressively reduced upward,
usually smaller and more toothed than the basal leaves ; peren¬
nials or sometimes biennials with short, erect, or spreading
underground parts.
D. Basal leaves cordate or abruptly contracted to the petiole.
E. Inflorescence a loose to congested corymbose cyme,
rarely conspicuously subumbellate.
F. Basal leaves typically cordate, occasionally subcor-
date or truncate; caudex weakly spreading to sub¬
erect. Common and widespread _ 4. S. aureus.
FF. Basal leaves truncate to abruptly contracted ; caudex
simple, very short, erect or suberect. Sandy lake-
shore prairies, Kenosha and Racine Co.s, rare _
_ 5. S. pseudaureus var. semicordatus.
EE. Inflorescence subumbellate; basal leaf blades usually
abruptly contracted to the petiole. Apostle Islands, Lake
Superior, rare _ 8. S. indecorus.
DD. Basal leaves rounded or obtuse to tapering at the base,
rarely subtruncate. Common and widespread species.
G. Pubescence normally persistent, at least along the upper
stem, among the heads in the inflorescence, and in and
near the axils of the basal leaves ; caudex usually short
and simple, erect or suberect ; lower cauline leaves usu¬
ally well developed, pinnatifid _ 6. S. plattensis.^
GG. Glabrous or nearly so at maturity, caudex weakly
branching and often elongated; cauline leaves usually
reduced _ 7. S. pauperculus var. pauperculus.^
Species 6 and 7 intergrade freely and intermediates are common (cf. text).
1963]
Barkley— Wisconsin Flora, No, 1^9
345
1. Senecio congestus (R.Br.) DC. Marsh Fleabane Map 1.
S. palustris (Linn.) Hook. 1834, not of Velloso, 1827.
S. congestus var. tonsus Fern. (TYPE: La Chapelle, Wiscon¬
sin, July 16, 1897, Cheney 7Jfl9 (GH, WIS)).
Annual (sometimes biennial?) herbs, 3-8 dm tall, densely lanate-
tomentoise with long, jointed hairs, especially on the upper stem and
among the heads in the inflorescence, or occasionally rather sparsely
tomentose (var. tonsus Fern.) ; stems thick and soft, unbranched,
arising singly from a cluster of fibrous roots. Leaves linear-spatu-
late to narrowly oblanceolate, the lowermost to 12 cm long, progres¬
sively shorter up the stem; margins shallowly pinnatifid to merely
undulate or subentire. Inflorescence congested to occasionally rather
open ; heads frequently numerous, to 50 or more ; involucral bracts
narrow, 4-7 mm long (calyculate bracts absent) ; rays light yellow,
the ligule 5-6 mm long (dry) ; pappus long and abundant, conspicu¬
ous in mature plants.
NW. Wisconsin and Door Co., in swamps, edge of streams, etc.,
rather rare. Flowering from late May through July. A distinctive,
circumpolar species, occuring in North America as far south as
Iowa.
2. Senecio vulgaris Linn. Common Groundsel Map 2.
Annual weed to 3 (-4) dm tall, lightly crisp-pubescent, glabrate
and smooth in age ; stem leafy throughout, unbranched to strongly
branched, from a more or less distinct taproot. Leaves fleshy, 1-8
cm long, the margins undulate to pinnatilobate, the lobes often
denticulate; lower leaves petiolate, becoming progressively more
sessile and clasping upward. Heads strictly discoid, cylindrical-
principal involucral bracts 4-7 mm long, about 21 in number; caly¬
culate bracts much shorter than the principal involucral bracts, con-
hpicuously black-tipped.
SE. and extreme N. Wisconsin, in waste ground, roadsides, gar¬
dens, etc., a native of the Old World, now established throughout
much of the temperate zone. Flowering from mid-May to early in
July, and from the second week in September to mid-November.
3. Senecio sylvaticus Linn. Wood Groundsel Map 1.
Annual weed to 8 dm tall, moderately crisp-pubescent to sub-
glabrous ; stems leafy througout, usually unbranched, arising singly
from a taproot. Leaves more or less distinctly pinnatifid, the seg¬
ments often denticulate. Heads cylindrical; involucral bracts 5-7
mm long, about 13 in number; calyculate bracts usually present but
346 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
very small, narrow, and inconspicuous, usually lacking distinct
black tips; rays present, small, the ligule often less than 1 mm long.
A native of the Old World, now widely established as a weed, in
North America most abundant in the northeastern U.S., adjacent
Canada, and along the Pacific Coast, known from Wisconsin by a
single collection, viz. Fassett 9558, talus, gabbro knob, Hurley, Iron
County (S25 T46N R2E), Aug. 2,1, 1929 (WIS) .
Senecio sylvaticus is readily distinguished from the similar S.
vulgaris by the presence of small rays, as well as a pronounced oily
scent, which is lacking in fresh material of ;S^. vulgaris.
4. Senecio aureus Linn. Golden Ragwort Map 3.
S. gracilis Pursh
iS. aureus var. gracilis (Pursh) Hook.
Perennial herbs 2-6 dm tall, glabrous or occasionally lightly to-
mentose in and near the axils of the basal leaves and among the
heads in the inflorescence ; stems single or loosely clustered from a
horizontal, more or less branched and rhizomatous caudex. Basal
leaf-blades rotund-ovate, cordate or sometimes subcordate, crenate
to serrate-dentate, 1-6 -f cm long, 1-6+ cm wide; petiole commonly
2-4 times as long as blade ; cauline leaves reduced upward. Inflores¬
cence a loose to congested corymbose cyme of 6-20 heads, the ligule
5-15 mm long, or ray florets absent in occasional individuals.
Throughout Wisconsin, frequent in rich woods, pastures, bogs,
and other damp or wet areas. Flowering from mid-May in the
southern part of the state to the second week in July in the north.
Common and widespread, with many races and local variants, rang¬
ing from Newfoundland to Florida and west to the limit of the
deciduous forest.
In SE. Wisconsin, especially in Dane, Jefferson, Kenosha, and
Racine counties, occasional individuals bear a marked, somewhat
intangible resemblance to Senecio pseudaureus var. semicordatus.
In these individuals (hollow circles. Map 4) the basal leaf blade is
rather abruptly contracted to the petiole, the petiole is relatively
long and slender, and the underground portions tend to be reduced
to a short caudex.
A slender, small-leaved phase, S. aureus var. gracilis or S.
gracilis, uncommon in Wisconsin, though rather frequent in the
Middle Atlantic States, is not sufficiently well defined morphologi¬
cally or geographically to warrant taxonomic recognition.
5. Senecio pseudaureus Rydb. var. semicordatus (Mack. & Bush)
T. M. Barkley Western Golden Ragwort Map 4.
S. semicordatus Mack. & Bush
S. aureus var. semicordatus (Mack. & Bush) Greenm.
1963]
Barkley— Wisconsin Flora, No, Ip9
347
348 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Thin, slender, perennial herbs, seldom over 5 dm tall, glabrous or
only slightly tomentose; stems single or rarely loosely clustered
from a stout, short, erect to weakly spreading caudex. Basal leaves
with margins often crenate to shallowly dentate, the blades 2-4 cm
long and 1-2 cm wide or sometimes smaller, abruptly contracted to
a thin petiole. Inflorescence a loose to isubcongested corymbose cyme,
often somewhat subumbellate ; heads 6-12; principal involucral
bracts 4-6 mm long; ray florets with ligules 5-7 mm long (dry).
Senecio pseudaureus var. semicordatns occurs from Manitoba and
Minnesota, south through the Missouri River Valley to Kansas and
Missouri. Its occurence in Wisconsin is doubtful, and its inclusion
in this treatment rests on a few specimens from two localities on
the shore of Lake Michigan : Racine Co. : Barnes Prairie at Mygatts
Corner.^ Kenosha Co. : 4 m S. of Kenosha, May 31, 1939, A. M.
Fuller C~U2U (F, MIL). These differ from typical S. pseudaureus
var. semicordatus of the northern prairies in their somewhat
smaller leaves, shorter petioles of basal leaves, more conspicuously
sharp but shallow dentation on the lower cauline leaves and more
pronouncedly subumbellate inflorescences. Plants with strong mor¬
phological tendencies toward S. pseudaureus var. semicordatus oc¬
cur, especially in southern Wisconsin, in certain populations of
otherwise typical S. aureus, (cf. S. aureus; hollow circles. Map 4).
7. Senecio plattensis Nutt, Prairie Ragwort Map 5, 7; fig. 1
Herbaceous perennial, 2-5+ dm tall, more or less persistently
floccose-tomentose, especially underneath the leaves, in the leaf
axils, and among the heads of the inflorescence, sometimes sub-
glabrate in age; stems single or occasionally loosely clustered from
a short erect caudex, this occasionally stolon-producing. Basal leaf
blades subelliptic to oblanceolate, crenate to serrate-dentate or oc¬
casionally subentire, 1-6+ cm long and 0.5-3+ cm wide, the petiole
about as long to twice as long as the blade. Cauline leaves progres¬
sively reduced up the stem, the lower and middle often nearly as
large as the basal leaves and sub-lyrate to deeply pinnatisect, the
uppermost irregularly dissected to subentire. Inflorescence a rather
congested to open corymbose cyme of 6-20 heads ; principal involu¬
cral bracts 5-7 mm long; ray florets with ligules 5-10 mm long.
Achenes hirtellous, especially along the angles, or occasionally
glabrous.
North American prairies and plains; in Wisconsin in prairies and
prairie-like habitats in the south and west and in Door County.
Flowering from mid-May to the third week in June (rarely later).
4 Collection and herbarium data for this collection have been misplaced.
1963]
Barkley — Wisconsin Flora, No. Jf9
349
Senecio plattensis and S. pauperculus are distinct species, each
with its own range and morphological characteristics (cf. Map 7).
In the upper Mississippi Valley, from Minnesota and Wisconsin
south to Missouri, where their ranges overlap, the two species inter-
grade morphologically. The extent of the intergradation varies from
locality to locality, with most intergradant specimens not precisely
midway between plattensis and S. pauperculus, but usually rather
strongly resembling one of the two taxa, with some slight morpholo¬
gical tendencies toward the other. With sufficient comparative ma¬
terial, most of the intermediate specimens are readily referable to
one taxon or the other.
Hybrids of S. plattensis and S. pauperculus
Senecio plattensis is most frequent in western Wisconsin, from
St. Croix county to Rock county south of the Tension Zone and
within the region of prairies (Curtis, 1959). However, intermedi¬
ates tending toward S. pauperculus may be found nearly through¬
out Wisconsin (hollow circles on Maps 5 and 6). These flower at
nearly the same time as the typical S. plattensis and/or S. pauper¬
culus of the region (see Fig. 1). The species are somewhat season¬
ally isolated in Wisconsin, though at the present time the interme¬
diates effectively bridge the gap between them.^
7. Senecio pauperculus Michx., var. pauperculus Northern
Ragwort Map 6, 7 ; fig. 1.
S. balsamitae Muhl. ex Willd.
S. pauperculus var. balsamitae (Muhl.) Fernald
S. aureus var. balsamitae (Muhl.) T. & G.
Herbaceous short-lived perennial, 2-6 -f- dm tall, glabrous to
sometimes lightly tomentose in and near the leaf axils and in the
inflorescence ; occasionally lightly tomentose throughout ; stems
single or frequently loosely clustered from a simple to weakly
spreading caudex. Basal leaf-blades lanceolate or oblanceolate to
subelliptic, crenate-dentate to subentire, 1-6 -f cm long and 0.5-2-/
cm wide, the petiole as long to sometimes twice as long as the blade.
Cauline leaves reduced up the stem, becoming sessile ; margins vari¬
ously dissected to subentire. Inflorescence a loose to sometimes con¬
gested corymbose cyme of 2-10-/ heads; principal involucral bracts
® Note by H. H. litis: 8. pauperculus, as Barkley (1962) so well points out, is evi¬
dently a Cordilleran element which migrated eastward post-g-lacially. The ease with
which it apparently hybridized with 8. plattensis is therefore doubly sig'nificant, and is
direct, g'enetic proof that the mig'ration is indeed post-g’lacial, since a long' period of
contact would have resulted in mutual merging.
350 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
Map, 7. Geographic ranges of Senecio pauper cuius and S. plattensis. Cross-
hatched area in the region of geographic overlap represents area of conspicuous
morphological intergradation.
1963]
Barkley — Wisconsin Flora, No.
351
Fig. 1. Flowering dates of Senecio plattensis and S. pauperculus in Wisconsin.
One vertical division (left hand margin) on each weekly coordinant (triangles
at base) represents two collections. Only collections with accurate and complete
label data were used. The seasonal isolation of the two parental species may be
partially due to differences in latitude, S. plattensis being southern, S. pauper¬
culus mainly northern (cf. maps 5 and 6),
3.5-8 mm long; ray florets with ligules 5-10 mm long, or rarely
absent. Achenes glabrous, rarely hispidulous along the angles.
Throughout Wisconsin in meadows, bogs, streambanks, and open
woods. Flowering from late May in southern Wisconsin to mid- July
or exceptionally later in the north.
352 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
A widespread, northern and western species encompassing many
morphological phases and intergrading with related species in areas
of range overlap. The more or less typical representatives of Senecio
pauperculus are most frequent north of the Tension Zone, in the
northern third of Wisconsin. Southward and especially in the
southwest half of Wisconsin, S. pauperculus intergrades with
plattensis (cf. S. plattensis) . These intergradants (hollow circles on
Map 6) flower nearly at the same time as typical S. pauperculus of
the region (Fig. 1).
8. Senecio indecorus Greene Northern Squaw-weed Map 4.
Herbaceous perennial 2-5 dm tall; glabrous or essentially so;
stems single from a short caudex. Basal leaf blades ovate to obovate,
abruptly contracted at the base, 1-2 cm long, 1-2 cm wide ; cauline
leaves reduced upward, often lyrate or subpinnatifld. Inflorescence
distinctly subumbellate, the peduncles 1-1.5 cm long; heads about
6-20; involucral bracts 5-7 mm long; rays normally absent, but
present in all Wisconsin material.®
Streambanks and open areas in boreal North America, known
from Wisconsin by only two collections, both from North Twin
Island in the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior. Ashland Co. \_Laue
2192, June 21, 1955 (WIS) ; Lane 2f58, July 13,1955 (NC)].
Senecio indecorus occurs also along the northern edge of Lake Su¬
perior and on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan.
Bibliography
Barkley, T. M. 1962. A revision of Senecio aureus Linn., and allied species.
Transact. Kansas Acad. Sci. 65: 318-408.
- , - . 1963. The intergradation of Senecio plattensis and Senecio
pauperculus in Wisconsin, Rhodora 65: 65-67.
FernAld, M. L. 1945. Contributions from the Gray Herbarium CLVII: Senecio
congestus. Rhodora 47 : 256-257.
Greenman, J. M. 1901. Monographie der nord — und centralamerikanischen
Arten der Gattung Senecio — I Teil. Leipzig. 37 pp. (Reprinted in Engler’s
Botanische Jahrbiicher 32: 1-33. 1903.)
- , - . 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918. Monograph of the North and Central
American species of Senecio, Part II. Ann. Mo. Bot. Gard. 2 : 573-626, 3 :
85-194, 4: 15-36, 5: 37-107.
* Throughout its range, most individuals in any population are eradiate, with a few
radiate individuals, however, usually present. Whether S. indecorus behaves abnor¬
mally in Wisconsin, or whether collectors merely happened to select radiate individuals,
has not been determined.
PRELIMINARY REPORTS ON THE FLORA OF WISCONSIN,
No. 50. COMPOSITAE III— COMPOSITE FAMILY III
The Genus Solidago—GoLDEis^ROD
Peter J. Salamun
The distribution of the species and varieties of the genus Solid-
ago in Wisconsin, habitat information and dates of flowering and
fruiting were compiled from specimens in the herbaria of the Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin (WIS), University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee
(UWM), Milwaukee Public Museum (MIL), and the University of
Minnesota (MIN). Other sources of information are cited in the
text. Each dot, circle or cross on the maps indicates a specific
location where a specimen was collected. The numbers within the
squares in the lower lefthand corner of each map represent the
number of specimens noted that were flowering or fruiting in the
respective months. Specimens in vegetative condition, in bud or
with immature fruit are not included. These indicate approximately
when a species or variety is apt to flower or fruit in Wisconsin.
The nomenclature, phylogenetic sequence, and descriptive fea¬
tures generally follow the New Britton and Brown Illustrated
Flora (Cronquist, in Gleason, 1952) and Gray's Manual of Botany,
Ed. 8 (Fernald, 1950). Where the names differ in these references,
those in the first are usually given priority and those of the latter
are listed underneath in italics. More recent treatments of certain
taxa are discussed in the text.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the curators. Dr. Hugh
H. litis. University of Wisconsin, Professor Alvin L. Throne, Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mr. Albert Fuller, Milwaukee
Public Museum, and Dr. Gerald B. Ownbey, University of Minne¬
sota, for the loan of their Wisconsin specimens; to Dr. Lorin 1.
Nevling, Associate Curator, Gray Herbarium of Harvard Univer¬
sity and Dr. Bassett Maguire, Curator, New York Botanical Gar¬
den, for the loan of supplementary specimens; to Drs. Arthur
Cronquist, Jean R. Beaudry, and Lloyd H. Shinners for helpful
comments concerning certain taxa ; and to Dr. Hugh H. litis for his
suggestions in the preparation of this report as well as his critical
reading of the manuscript.
This work was supported entirely or in part during the summers
of 1958-1961 by the Research Committee of the University of
Wisconsin from funds supplied by the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation. This support is gratefully acknowledged.
353
354 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
31. SOLIDAGO L. Goldenrod
Perennial herbs with rhizomes or caudices and fibrous roots, the
erect wandlike stems, single or clustered, bearing simple, alternate,
entire or variously toothed leaves, and few to many small campanu-
late to subcylindric, racemed, corymbed or clustered heads. Heads
small, radiate (in our species) ; both ray and disk flowers yellow
(except in hicolor and a few albino forms). Rays pistillate and
fertile. Disk flowers perfect and fertile; anthers entire at base;
style branches somewhat flattened, and with lanceolate hairy ap¬
pendages. Achenes many ribbed, nearly terete, glabrous or hairy;
pappus of many equal, usually white, capillary bristles. Recepta¬
cles small, flat or slightly convex, not chaffy. Involucral bracts more
or less imbricate in everal series, appressed, somewhat chartaceous
at the base, sometimes with herbaceous green tips.
A genus of approximately 100 species, most in North America
with a few in South America, Azores and Eurasia, reaching its
greatest complexity in eastern United States where taxonomically
it is one of the most difficult genera. The genus may be subdivided
into two sections, Virgaurea Endl. and Euthamia Nutt., with
species 1 to 19 included in the first, and 20 to 21 in the second
section.
Key to Wisconsin Species of SOLIDAGO
[Adapted chiefly from Cronquist, A. C., in Gleason, 1952 (Vol.
3:414-416) and Fernald, 1950 (1381-1389).]
A. Heads in clusters or short racemes in the axils of upper leaves
or on elongate branches forming racemose, thyrsoid or
spreading panicles.
B. Inflorescence a series of clusters or short racemes in the
axils of upper cauline leaves or, if a terminal panicle or
thyrse, with erect summit, the heads spirally arranged on
the branches, thus not secund.
C. Inflorescence a series of axillary clusters or short
racemes, all but the uppermost of which are exceeded
by their subtending leaves.
D. Cauline leaves lanceolate, acuminate, tapering to a
sessile or obscurely short-petiolate base ; stem
glabrous, glaucous, terete; rare, in Southeastern-
most Wisconsin _ 1. S. caesia,
DD. Cauline leaves ovate to elliptic, abruptly acuminate
at the tip, abruptly narrowed to a short winged
petiole; stem glabrous or slightly pubescent above,
somewhat angled; widespread _ 2. S. flexicaulis.
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No, 50
355
CC, Inflorescence a terminal panicle or thyrse, or if of
axillary clusters or racemes only the lowermost ex¬
ceeded by the subtending leaves.
E. Lower cauline leaves, including petioles, seldom
more than 7 times as long as wide, if longer, then
without sheathing petioles ; plants chiefly of upland
areas.
F. Involucres mostly 3-5 mm (sometimes 6 mm)
high ; pedicels mostly less than 5 mm long.
G. Stems pubescent from base through inflores¬
cence; leaves pubescent above and below __
_ 3. S. hispida.
GG. Stems glabrous except for occasional sparse
puberulence in the inflorescence and upper¬
most stem; leaves glabrous except for his-
pidulous margins and sometimes sparse
pubescence beneath.
H. Achenes short-hairy; basal and lower
cauline leaves broadly spatulate to obo-
vate; mostly on cliffs, in the Driftless
Area of southwestern Wisconsin -
_ 4. S. sciaphila.
HH. Achenes glabrous; basal and lower cau¬
line leaves ovate to oblong-lanceolate ;
widespread _ 5. S. speciosa.
FF. Involucres mostly 5-9 mm high; many pedicels
5-15 mm long; very local. Door County _
_ 6. S. spathulata.
EE. Lower cauline leaves, including petioles, mostly 7-
15 times as long as wide, petioles with sheathing
bases; plants of marshes and bogs -_7. S. uliginosa.
BB. Inflorescence a terminal panicle with nodding summit and
with at least the lower branches more or less recurved;
heads secund (one sided), viz., borne on the upper side of
the branches.
I. Leaves triple-nerved, i.e., the two obvious lateral nerves
prolonged parallel with the midrib.
J. Stems more or less pubescent or scabrous, at least in
the upper portion below the inflorescence.
K. Cauline leaves obovate, oblanceolate to linear, en¬
tire or sparingly serrate, obscurely 3-nerved;
basal leaves present at flowering time ; very wide¬
spread - 8. S. nemoralis.
356 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
KK. Cauline leaves mostly lanceolate to ovate, evi¬
dently 3-nerved; basal leaves wanting or decidu¬
ous at flowering time.
L. Cauline leaves canescent on both surfaces,
mostly ovate to elliptic, acute to roundish at
the tips; very rare, adventive _ 9. S, mollis.
LL. Cauline leaves glabrous to puberulent beneath,
glabrous or scabrous above, mostly narrowly
lance-elliptic, acuminate at the tips; wide¬
spread species.
M. Involucres 2-3 mm high 10. S. canadensis.
MM. Involucres 3-6 mm high.
f N. Leaves glabrous or scabrous above,
pubescent on the veins beneath; stem
pilose chiefly above the middle _
_ 10. S. canadensis.
NN. Leaves scabrous above, densely pubes¬
cent beneath; stem grayish with close
puberulence throughout, except some¬
time near the base _ 11. S. altissima.
JJ. Stems glabrous below the inflorescence.
0. Basal and lower cauline leaves the largest, per¬
sistent at flowering time ; cauline leaves progres¬
sively reduced upwards.
P. Basal and lower cauline leaves mostly 2-7.5
cm wide, scarcely 3-nerved, glabrous except
for ciliate margins, sometimes sparingly hir¬
sute on one or both surfaces; achenes short-
hairy; throughout Wisconsin __12. S. juncea.
PP. Basal and lower cauline leaves mostly 0.5-2
cm wide, more or less strongly 3-nerved,
glabrous except for ciliate margins; achenes
glabrous or sparsely-hairy ; prairies south of
Tension Zone _ 13. S. missouriensis.
00. Basal and lower cauline leaves mostly smaller
than the middle ones, deciduous and lacking at
flowering time ; cauline leaves reduced only
slightly upwards.
Q. Branchlets of panicle and pedicels glabrous;
prairies south of Tension Zone _
_ 13. S. missouriensis.
QQ. Branchlets of panicle and pedicels more or
less pilose; throughout Wisconsin _ _
_ 14. S. gigantea.
1963]
Salamun — -Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
357
II. Leaves pinnately veined, the lateral veins not conspicu¬
ously prolonged parallel with the midrib.
R. Stems glabrous or only slightly pubescent in the
upper portion below the inflorescence.
S. Upper surface of leaves strongly scabrous ; upper
portions of stems strongly angled — 15. S. patula
SS. Upper surface of leaves only slightly pubescent
or glabrous; stems terete.
T. Basal and lower cauline leaves with long-
tapering bases, glabrous or sometimes short
hirsute on both surfaces; inflorescence more
or less compact.
U, Plant with stout branched caudex and
flbrous roots ; basal and lower cauline
leaves mostly 2-7.5 cm wide; achenes
short-hairy; throughout Wisconsin _
_ 12. S. juncea.
UU, Plant with creeping rhizome; basal and
lower cauline leaves mostly 0.5-2 cm wide ;
achenes glabrous or sparsely-hairy, prai¬
ries south of Tension Zone _
_ 13. S. missouriensis.
TT. Basal and lower cauline leaves elliptic or ellip¬
tic-ovate and abruptly tapering to the petiole,
loosely hirsute on midrib and main veins be¬
neath; inflorescence an open panicle with a
few long, slender and strongly divergent or
arched ascending branches __16. S. ulmifolia.
RR. Stems pubescent or scabrous their entire length;
very widespread _ 8. S. nemoralis.
AA. Heads in flat corymbiform inflorescences.
V. Basal and lower cauline leaves with either petioles or
sheathing bases, middle and upper cauline ones progres¬
sively reduced and less petiolate or sessile; involucral
bracts obtuse or broadly rounded, more or less longitudin¬
ally striate.
W. Cauline leaves elliptic, broadly lanceolate to broadly
ovate, densely pubescent above and below ; stems
densely pubescent; plants of mesic-dry habitats, com¬
mon, mostly south of Tension Zone _ 17. S. rigida.
WW. Cauline leaves narrowly elliptic to linear-lanceolate,
glabrous except for scabrous margins ; stems glabrous
or slightly puberulent below the inflorescence; plants
of marshes, swamps, wet prairies and moist calcareous
meadows.
358 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
X. Basal and lower cauline leaves narrowly elliptic,
flat, obtuse or rounded at the tip, often serrate
above the middle, not triple nerved; southeastern
Wisconsin and Door County _ 18. S. ohioensis.
XX. Basal and lower cauline leaves linear-lanceolate,
often longitudinally folded, acute, entire, tending to
be triple-nerved; southeastern Wisconsin _
_ 19. Riddellii.
VV. Leaves uniform, only slightly reduced upwards, linear to
narrowly lanceolate or narrowly oblong, tapering abruptly
to a short base or sessile, the basal ones soon deciduous;
involucral bracts acute, not striate.
y Y. Leaves 1-nerved or sometimes faintly 3-nerved, but
without any additional nerves, 2-5 mm (rarely 6 mm)
wide and 4-9 cm long, with conspicuous, dark and
viscid punctation; heads slenderly cylindric (becoming
slenderly turbinate on pressing), tending to be evi¬
dently pedicellate; involucres 4. 5-6.5 mm high; not
common ; south of the Tension Zone _
_ 20. S. gymnospermoides.
YY. Leaves evidently 3-nerved, the larger ones ordinarily
with 1 or 2 additional pairs of fainter lateral nerves,
2-12 mm wide and 4-13 cm long, with less conspicuous
punctation; heads slenderly campanulate to turbinate,
chiefly sessile or subsessile in small glomerules ;
throughout Wisconsin _ 21. S. graminifolia.
1. SOLIDAGO CAESIA L. Wreath or Blue-stemmed Goldenrod. Map 1.
A slender glabrous plant 3-10 dm tall from a stout caudex or
short rhizome; stem greenish or purplish, terete, glaucous, mostly
simple or sometimes branching ; leaves narroivly lanceolate to lance-
elliptic, 4-12 cm long and 1-3.5 cm wide, serrate, pinnately veined,
narrowed to a sessile or very short-petiolate base, acuminate at
apex, glabrous or only slightly pubescent above and along the
midrib beneath; basal and lowermost cauline ones deciduous at
flowering time; inflorescence a series of axillary clusters, all hut
the uppermost exceeded by subtending leaves; involucre glabrous,
3-5 mm high, the bracts obtuse or rounded; rays 3-5; achenes
hairy.
An Eastern Deciduous Forest species, restricted in Wisconsin
to Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties, where it reaches its
western limit. Locally abundant in Milwaukee County, in Grant
Park, near South Milwaukee, at the edge of a Sugar Maple-Beech
woods above the ravine; and at the edge of and along a path in
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
359
360 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
a Sugar Maple-Beech woods (Cudahy Woods) at the junction of
W. College Ave. and S. Howell Ave. Flowering from late August
to late September; fruiting into October,
2. SOLIDAGO FLEXICAULIS L. Flexuous-stemmed or Zigzag Gold-
enrod. Map 2.
Plant 2-10 dm high; stem mostly simple, slender, flexuous (zig¬
zag), erect, striate-angled, and glabrous below the inflorescence;
leaves ovate to elliptic, 7-15 cm long, 3-10 cm wide, abruptly nar¬
rowed to a short winged petiole, acuminate at the tip, sharply ser¬
rate to nearly dentate, hirsute beneath at least on the midrib and
main veins, glabrous or sparsely pubescent above, the basal and
lower cauline slightly smaller than the middle ones and usually
deciduous by flowering time ; upper cauline and bracteal leaves nar¬
rower and less toothed or entire, subtending the clusters of heads;
involucre 4-6 mm high, bracts obtuse; rays 3-4; achenes short-
hairy.
Throughout Wisconsin rather common in dry to mesic Oak,
Sugar Maple, Basswood, Beech and Aspen woods, sometimes in
mixed conifer-hardwood forests, and rare in low woods and edges
of bogs. Collections are sparse in the central sand area and in the
counties bordering Lake Superior. Flowering from (late July)
early August to mid-September (early October) ; fruiting from
late August to mid-October.
3. SOLIDAGO HISPIDA MuhL var, hispida. Hairy Goldenrod Map 3.
Plant with a stout branched caudex, 1-10 dm tall; stem erect,
hirsute throughout; leaves broadly oblanceolate to narrowly obovate,
3-20 cm long, 1-5 cm wide at or near the base of plant, acute to
nearly rounded at the tip, crenate or serrate, petioled, more or less
pubescent, progressively reduced upward and becoming lance-ellip-
t|c to oblong, sessile or nearly so, and obscurely toothed to entire ;
inflorescence a narrow, erect, terminal panicle, the heads not
secund ; involucre 4-6 mm high ; bracts obtuse or rounded, the tips
slightly greenish; rays 7-14, deep yellow; achenes glabrous when
mature.^
1 A very similar eastern species, Solidago hicolor L,, has been listed as occurring
in Wisconsin (Fernald, 1950; Gleason, 1952). The following Wisconsin specimens were
annotated by Cronquist as 8. hicolor: Polk Co.: St, Croix Palls, September, 1851,
E. P. Sheldon (MIN); Osceola, September, 1852, E. P. Sheldon (MIN). Door Co.:
Ellison Bay, August 11, 1918, Milton T. Greenman (,MIN). Milwaukee Co.: Milwau¬
kee, E. J. Hasse (NY). This species differs from S. hispida chiefly in having whitish
or cream-colored rays. Because the rays of 8, hispida tend to fade and those of 8.
hicolor become yellowish after some years in the herbarium, it is difficult to distin¬
guish the two species. According to Cronquist (personal communication) another
difference is the color of the involucre, that of 8, hicolor being distinctly paler and,
doubtless it was on this basis the above specimens were identified. There have been no
recent collections of 8. hicolor in Wisconsin and, during four years of field work, I was
not able to find this species in this area.
1963] Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No'. 50 361
Locally abundant on dry to moist sandy or rocky soils in open
White Pine-Red Pine or mixed conifer-hardwood woods, chiefly in
the northern part of the state, extending southward to Iowa and
Kenosha counties on sand or gravelly wooded hillsides, sandstone
cliffs, outcrops and slopes. In the Driftless Area it frequently oc¬
curs in areas adjacent to S. sciaphila. In these localities S. hispida
usually occupies the more mesic wooded sandy areas while S.
sciaphila prefers the more open cliff (drier?) sites. Flowering from
(late July) early August to October, and fruiting from August to
October.
Var. arnoglossa Fern., distinguished by its smaller size and
scanty pubescence, has been listed from northern Michigan by
Fernald (1950) and Gleason (1952), and northeast Minnesota by
Fernald (1950) and Rosendahl and Cronquist (1945). To date only
var. hispida has been collected in Wisconsin.
4. SOIIDAGO SCIAPHILA Steele Cliff Goldenrod Map 4.
Plant about 4-10 dm tall, with a caudex, glabrous throughout
except for sparse pubescence in the inflorescence; basal and lower
cauline leaves broadly oblanceolate to elliptic-ovate, 3-15 (-22) cm
long and 1-5 (-8) cm wide, crenate to serrate, acute, tapering to
the petioles, the upper cauline progressively reduced, becoming
oblanceolate to elliptic, sessile or nearly so, and obscurely serrate
to entire ; inflorescence a narrow terminal panicle ; involucre about
4-6 mm high, bracts obtuse, entire; rays 5-8; achenes with short
stiff hairs, clearly visible with a hand lens even when immature.
This species, one of Wisconsin’s few endemics (?), is apparently
confined almost entirely to the Wisconsin Driftless Area where it
occurs in open or lightly wooded sandstone and limestone cliffs,
outcroppings and slopes, and rarely in open Black Oak or Jack Pine
woods at the base of cliffs. Fernald (1950) extended the general
range of this species to include western Ontario, Michigan and
Minnesota, perhaps due to possible confusion of this species with
glabrous northern variants of S. hispida. Flowering from (late
July) mid- August to late September; fruiting from late August
through mid-October.
Some individual specimens were observed with sparse pubescence
in the upper portions of the stems below the inflorescences, and
some of these also are sparsely pubescent on the undersides of the
leaves. These individuals are plotted as open circles on Map 4. Since
5, hispida, a similar but more pubescent species often occurs nearby
on the more wooded slopes, these plants may possibly represent hy¬
brids between S, sciaphila and S. hispida.
362 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences ^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
5. SOLIDAGO SPECIOSA Nutt. Showy Goldenrod. Maps 5, 6, 7.
A slender to stocky or sometimes stout plant with a thick caudex,
3-12 dm tall, glabrous or slightly scabrous (except slightly pubes¬
cent in the inflorescence) ; leaves firm, obovate to lanceolate or
broadly elliptic, decreasing in size upwards and sessile or nearly
so, the lower 6-13 (-20) cm long, 1.5-6 (-7) cm wide, abruptly
short petiolate, entire or slightly toothed, the lateral veins not
prominent ; inflorescence a terminal narrowly pyramidal to thyrsi-
form panicle, the heads not secund, the branches stiffly ascending
or sometimes slightly spreading; involucre 3-6 mm high; bracts
obtuse or rounded, yellowish ; rays 6-8 ; achenes glabrous.
Key to Varieties
A. Tall robust plants, 6-12 dm high; middle and lower cauline
leaves 2-5 cm wide; basal leaves 4-6 (-7) cm wide _
_ 5a. S. speciosa var. speciosa.
AA. Plants 3-8 dm high; middle and lower cauline leaves 1-3 cm
wide (mostly less than 2 cm wide) ; basal leaves 1.5-3. 5 cm
wide.
B. Cauline leaves numerous, usually 18-40; inflorescence
dense with ascending branches _
_ 5b. S. speciosa var. rigidiuscula.
BB. Cauline leaves relatively few, 3-20; inflorescence tending
to become somewhat open paniculate _
_ 5c. S. speciosa var. jejunifolia.
5a. SOLIDAGO SPECIOSA Nutt, var. SPECIOSA. Map 5.
Chiefly in western and southwestern Wisconsin south of the
Tension Zone, in remnant mesic prairies (Curtis, 1955) , open sandy
fields, roadsides, open sandstone bluffs, steep roadbanks, neglected
cemeteries, and sometimes in open Black Oak or Jack Pine woods,
spreading northward and eastward along sandy roadsides and rail¬
road rights-of-way. Flowering mid- August through September;
fruiting from early September to mid-October.
According to Cronquist (Gleason, 1952), this variety occupies
that portion of the species-range which was originally forested,
while the next, var. rigidiuscula, is mostly in the Great Plains area
and slightly eastward. In Wisconsin the ranges of both varieties ex¬
tend only slightly beyond the prairie areas.
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No, 50
363
5b. SOLIDAGO SPECIOSA Nutt. var. rigidiuscula Rydb. Map 6,
Solidago speciosa Nutt. var. angustata T. & G.
Locally common south of the Tension Zone in prairie remnants
and on sandy soils along roadsides^ in open fields, ridges, outcrop¬
pings, river terraces and open Black Oak and Jack Pine woods,
more common than var. speciosa and, with a similar range in the
state, but occurring farther eastward, chiefly along sandy road¬
sides, railroad rights-of-way, and on sandy beaches and dunes along
the shores of Lake Michigan. Flowering (late July) early August
to early October ; fruiting from mid- August to late October,
5c. Solidago speciosa Nutt, var, jejunifolia (Steele) Cron.
Map 7,
Solidago jejunifolia Steele.
Solidago castrensis Steele, Contr. U. S, Natl. Herb. 16 :223.
1913.
[Type: Juneau County, Camp Douglas, Sept, 9, 1890, E. A,
Mearns 96 (US No. 670444),]
There are a number of specimens in the University of Wiscon¬
sin Herbarium which fit the description of this variety. These
appear to be mostly depauperate slender plants (cf. Cronquist,
1947, pp. 77-78).
Northwestern and central Wisconsin following the area of out¬
cropping Cambrian sandstone, in sandy soils along roadsides, river
terraces, in Bur Oak and Black Oak openings, and in open Jack
Pine stands. Flowering from (mid-) late July to late August (early
September) ; fruiting from late August into October.
6. Solidago spathulata DC. var. gillmani (Gray) Cron, Gill-
man^s Goldenrod, Map 8.
Solidago racemosa Greene var. Gillmani (Gray) Fern.
Plants 1-9 dm tall from a short branched caudex, essentially
glabrous except for slight pubescence in the inflorescence and
sometimes along the stem; basal and lower cauline leaves nar¬
rowly oblanceolate to narrowly obovate, 3-20 cm long and 0.4-4
cm wide, serrate or crenate serrate to subentire, acute, ciliate mar¬
gined, cauline leaves progressively reduced upward; inflorescence
a terminal raceme, the heads not secimd, on pedicels 5—15 mm long;
involucre 3-9 mm high, somewhat glutinous, the bracts obtuse to
acute ; rays 7-9 ; achenes short-hairy.
This variety is an eastern representative of the wide-ranging
(eastern U. S., southern Canada to the Pacific northwest) S, spath-
364 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
SOLIDAGO SPATHULATA'
" var. GILLMANI
SOLIDAGO SPECIOSA
var. JEJUNI FOLIA
SOLIDAGO
NEMORALIs\^
var. NEMORALIS
SOLIDAGO
ULIGINOSA
SOLIDAGO A A.
INEMORALIS var. ■
r\LONGI PET lOLATA'
SOLIDAGO
- CANADENSIS \ _
L^r. CANADENSl's
driftless
AREA
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Fiord, No, 50
365
ulata. In Wisconsin it is infrequent on open sand dunes, ridges and
sandy beaches along Lake Michigan. All our specimens are from
Door County, there associated with such strand species as Cala-
movilfa longifolia, Artemisia caudata, Elymus canadensis, Cala-
magrostis inexpansa, Potentilla anserina, Rudheckia hirtd, Agropy-
ron psammophilum (A. dasystachyum sensu Fassett) and Salix sp.
Since this plant also has been collected in the Indiana Dunes area,
its present limited distribution in the state may be due to the wide¬
spread and often needless habitat destruction along the Lake Michi¬
gan shore. Flowering (late July) early August to October; fruiting
mid-September into October.
This plant represents one of an aggregate of entities which have
been variously described as S. racemosa Greene, S, Gillmani Steele
and S. Randii Porter. In a recent work, Cronquist (Gleason, 1952)
considers all these varieties of S. spathulata, a treatment followed
here.^
7. SOLIDAGO ULIGINOSA Nutt. var. ULIGINOSA. Swamp Goldenrod.
Map 9.
An essentially glabrous plant, except sometimes puberulent in
the inflorescence, from a rather long caudex ; stem 0.4-15 dm tall ;
basal and lower cauline leaves persistent, varying from narrowly
oblanceolate to ovate lanceolate or elliptic, from nearly entire to
serrate, tips acute, tapering to long petioles with more or less
sheathing bases, blade and petiole 6-30 cm long and 1-6 cm wide;
upper leaves progressively reduced and becoming entire and ses¬
sile ; inflorescence terminal, thyrsiform, the short branches varying
from straight to slightly recurved, the heads from non-secund to
slightly secund; involucre 3-6 mm high, the inner bracts rounded
to obtuse, the outer ones often acute ; rays 1-8 ; achenes glabrous or
nearly so.
A variable species, but only var. uliginosa appears to occur in our
area.
Fairly abundant in northern Wisconsin in moist sandy road¬
sides, ditches, wet to mesic sedge meadows, fens, edges of bogs and
open marshy areas, less frequently at the edges of conifer-hard¬
wood forests and Sugar Maple woods, southward in central and
eastern Wisconsin, chiefly in black muck soils of marshy areas,
edges of bogs and moist lake banks. A number of plants were ob¬
served in the low prairie area of southeastern Kenosha County in
^ Solidago spathulata var. racemosa (Greene) Cron. (S. racemosa Greene) and
SoUdago spathulata var. Randii (Porter) Cron. (8. Randii (Porter) Britt.) are also
listed as occurring- in Wisconsin by both Gleason (1952) and Pernald (1950), pre¬
sumably based on the few Wisconsin specimens in the Gray and New York Botanical
Garden Herbaria. These specimens all appear to be -var. Gillmani.
366 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
association with S. Riddellii, S. ohioensis and Aster ptarmicoides.
Flowering (late July) early August to September; fruiting from
mid- August to mid-October.
Solidago Purshii Porter, as described by Fernald (1950), but not
listed by Cronquist (Gleason, 1952), has similar morphological fea¬
tures and a range that includes Wisconsin. The chief morphological
differences between these entities is that S, uliginosa tends to have
secund heads while those of S. Purshii are non-secund. Recently,
Beaudry and Chabot (1959) further distinguished between these
plants on the basis of chromosome numbers. S. uliginosa is a
tetraploid (2n = 36), while S. Purshii is diploid (2n = 18). The
Wisconsin specimens, including those in the Gray Herbarium, ap¬
pear to have the tendency for secund heads and, therefore, all are
considered as S. uliginosa.
8. Solidago nemoralis Ait. Field Goldenrod; Old-field Goldenrod.
Maps 10, 11.
Small plants from a caudex ; stems 1-12 dm tall, densely pubes-
cent with loosely spreading hairs ; leaves oblanceolate to spatulate-
ovate or sometimes lance-linear, the basal and lower cauline ones
5-25 cm long and 0.5-2. 5 cm wide, long-petioled, crenate, crenate-
serrate to entire, densely pubescent, often with axillary tufts; in¬
florescence a terminal panicle, sometimes elongate, narrow and only
nodding at the tip, sometimes with spreading recurved branches
and heads secund; involucre 3-6 mm high, the bracts acute to
obtuse ; rays 5-9 ; achenes more or less pubescent.
Key to Varieties
A. Involucre 3-4 mm high; achenes with short ascending or
spreading hairs; lower cauline leaves mostly 3-6 times as
long as wide; basal leaves broadly oblanceolate to spatulate-
obovate _ 8a. S. nemoralis var. nemoralis.
AA. Involucre 4-6 mm high ; achenes silky with relatively long ap-
pressed pubescence; lower cauline leaves 7-10 times as long as
wide; basal leaves mostly narrowly oblanceolate to lance-
linear _ 8b. S. nemoralis var. longipetiolata.
8a. Solidago nemoralis Ait. var. nemoralis. Map 10.
Common throughout Wisconsin, on dry, sandy, clayey and sterile
soils in open fields, pastures, along roadbanks, on prairies, railroad
embankments, edges of oak woods, and in Jack Pine and Black Oak
barrens. Flowering from early August to early October; fruiting
late August to mid-October.
1963]
Salamun— Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
367
8b. SOLIDAGO NEMORALIS Ait, vai*. LONGIPETIOLATA (Mack. & Bush)
Palmer and Stey. Map 11.
Solidago nemoralis Ait. var. decemflora (DC.) Fern.
Habitats are similar to those of var. nemoralis, though more
common in southwestern Wisconsin. Flowering from mid- August
through late September (October) ; fruiting from early September
into October.
Beaudry and Chabot (1959) have determined that var. nemoralis
is a diploid (2n = 18) and var. longipetiolata is a tetraploid (2n =
36) . On this evidence as well as the differences in morphology and
geographic distribution, those workers recommend that the latter
variety be given specific status as S. decemflora DC.
There are no references in the literature to hybridization be¬
tween these two varieties. A population analysis of a limited num¬
ber of Wisconsin specimens is shown in Fig. 1. Most of the indi¬
viduals of each variety can be distinguished by the height of the
involucre and the type of achene pubescence. The relationship of
length and width of the lower leaves is quite variable and is a less
reliable taxonomic character. A few individuals appear to be inter¬
mediate with long involucres and short, appressed pubescence or
sericeus achenes and short involucres, and suggest that some inter-
gradation occurs between these two entities. It is also possible to
interpret these results as indicating that some genetic barrier
exists and that specific status for each variety might be considered.
Since the morphological differences are not great, chiefly quantita¬
tive in degree of achene pubescence and size of involucre, it seems
best for the present to retain both entities as varieties.
9. Solidago mollis Bartl.
A rigidly erect plant, canescent throughout; stems 1-6 dm tall,
solitary or loosely clustered, from a creeping rhizome, sometimes
glabrate near the base; cauline leaves elliptic or oval to obovate,
sessile or nearly so, triple-nerved, lower ones 3~10 cm long and
8-40 mm wide, gradually reduced upwards; basal leaves wanting;
inflorescence terminal, dense, paniculate or compactly thyrsoid, the
lower branches more or less recurved, and heads secund ; involucre
3. 5-6. 5 mm high, with rounded to acute yellowish chartaceous
bracts ; rays 6-9 ; achenes with short hairs.
A western species accidentally introduced into Wisconsin but
probably not established, the only record consisting of the follow¬
ing flowerless specimen : Washington Co. : Soo Line R. R., se of
Slinger (center of N Sec. 28, TION, R19E), July 6, 1940, Skin¬
ners 2135 (WIS) . It is reported to flower in late July to September,
and fruits from August to October.
368 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
SOLIDAGO NEMORALIS
Each dot represents a single specimen,
i
i
i i
• i i* ii
• •••• •
• • ^ •
• •••a* • • 4
i
• •••
• •
i
i i
i
var. NEMORALIS
0 achenes with short spreading
hairs.
var. LONGIPETIOLATA
^ achenes sericeous,
intermediates
i achenes with short appressed
hairs.
2/1
4/1
6/1
8/1
10/1 12/1
LENGTH / WIDTH RATIO OF LOWERMOST CAULINE LEAF.
Figure 1.
16/1
18/1
20/1
10. SOLIDAGO CANADENSIS L. Canada Goldenrod. Maps 12, 13, 14
Plant with creeping rhizome and with solitary or clustered stems,
3-15 dm tall, pubescent at least above the middle ; leaves lanceolate
to lance-elliptic, long acuminate, tapering to a sessile base, the
larger 5-13 cm long and 0.5-1. 8 cm wide, mostly sharply serrate
and only slightly reduced upward, triple-nerved, glabrous to scab¬
rous above, puberulent at least on the midrib and main veins be¬
neath or over the entire surface, the basal and lower cauline leaves
reduced or soon deciduous. Inflorescence a terminal broad pyra¬
midal panicle with conspicuous recurved branches, and secund
.leads; involucre 2-5 mm high, the bracts thin and slender, acute
or acuminate, yellowish, without conspicuous green tips ; rays
mostly 10-17 ; achenes short-hairy. An extremely variable and
widely distributed species.
Key to Varieties
A. Involucres 2-3 mm high; widespread species.
B. Leaves glabrous or merely scabrous above, slightly pilose
along the midrib and main veins beneath; stems more or
less puberulent above the middle, glabrous below _
_ 10a. S. canadensis var. canadensis.
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
369
BB. Leaves scabrous puberulent above, densely puberulent be¬
neath; stems densely puberulent throughout, or glabrate
only near the base. _ 10b. S. canadensis var. gilvocanescens.
A A. Involucres 3-5 mm high; northern Wisconsin _
_ 10c. S. canadensis var. salebrosa.
10a. SOLIDAGO CANADENSIS L. var. CANADENSIS. Map 12.
Occasional along roadsides, open fields, slopes, edges of marshes
and swamps, along fencerows, and edges of and in open woods,
chiefly in northern and eastern Wisconsin. Not as common as the
next variety. Flowering (late July) early August to early Septem¬
ber ; fruiting August to October.
10b. S. canadensis L. var. gilvocanescens Rydb.^ Map 13.
The common phase of the species, occurring abundantly in open
fields, prairies, sandy beaches, along railroad rights-of-way, road¬
sides, slopes, dry to moist ditches, edges of bogs, marshes and
woods, and occasionally in open deciduous woods and in Jack Pine
and Black Oak Barrens. Flowering (mid-) late July to mid- (late)
September; fruiting late August into October.
10c. SOLIDAGO canadensis L. var. salebrosa (Piper) M. E. Jones.®
Map 14.
Solidago lepida DC. var. fallax Fern.
Solidago lepida DC. var. elongata (Nutt.) Fern.
A boreal plant which has been collected in only a few northern
counties. It prefers open habitats along roadsides, sandy shores,
moist to dry fields and edges of deciduous and coniferous woods.
Flowering (late July) August to mid-September; fruiting late
August to October.
The taxonomic status of this plant is not clearly established as
evidenced by the different designations of Cronquist (1952) and
Fernald (1950). The first worker described this plant as S. elon¬
gata Nutt, but in the appendix of the same reference reduced it to
the varietal status under S. canadensis. Fernald considered it as
S. lepida DC. and divided it into four varieties, two of which ap¬
parently occur in Wisconsin. In the latter treatment, the specimens
collected in the state seem to fit more closely the description of var.
elongata (Nutt.) Fern, than var. fallax Fern. The nomenclatorial
version of Cronquist (1952) is used only because this reference is
being followed in this report.
11. Solidago altissima L. Tall Goldenrod. Map 15.
Solidago canadensis L. var. scabra (Muhl.) T. & G.
A tall robust plant with long rhizomes; stems 8-20 dm high,
grayish with spreading puberulence, at least above the middle;
370 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
SOLIDAGO JUNCEA
SCABRELLA
SOLIDAGO
ALTISSIMA
SOLIDAGO
. GIGANTEA ^
GIGANTEA
van. MISSOURIENSIS a
1“ van. FA SC 1C U LATA •
ZONE
SOLIDAGO X
' CANADENSIS
var. SALEBROSA
SOLIDAGO MISSOURIENSIS
1963] Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No, 50 371
leaves lanceolate to lance- elliptic, acuminate at apex, tapering to a
sessile base, middle ones 5-15 cm long and 0.7-2.2 cm wide, triple-
nerved, cinerous with spreading puherulence beneath, scabrous
above; lower cauline and basal leaves soon deciduous, the upper
gradually reduced upwards, few toothed to nearly entire; inflores¬
cence a terminal pyramidal panicle with many recurved branches
and secund heads ; involucre 3-5 mm high ; bracts yellowish, inner
ones sharply acute to broadly rounded, outer ones acute; rays 9-15;
achenes short-hairy.
Widespread throughout, but more common in southern Wiscon¬
sin, most frequently in open moist to dry fallow fields, prairies,
dry open roadsides, steep sloping banks, railroad embankments,
brushy roadsides, fencerows, open sandy areas, and along edges or,
rarely, in open deciduous woods and Jack Pine-Black Oak Barrens,
Flowering (early) mid-August to late September (early October) ;
fruiting late August through October (early November),
This species is similar in general appearance to S. canadensis
var, gilvocanescens, which blooms about two or more weeks earlier,
and extremes of either are often difficult to distinguish in our area.
Cronquist^ (1952) considers this plant as S, canadensis var, scabra
(MuhL) T. & G. On the basis of quantitative measurements the
two entities usually can be separated. In S. altissima, the involucres
are 3-5 mm high, and the middle cauline leaves are sparsely pubes¬
cent (scabrous) on the upper surface and more or less densely
puberulent or pilose beneath. The involucre in S. canadensis var.
gilvocanescens is usually 2-3 mm high and the upper and lower
surfaces of the cauline leaves are more or less uniformly puberu¬
lent. Recently, Beaudry and Chabot (1957) determined that S,
canadensis, and presumably S. canadensis var, gilvocanescens, is
diploid (2n = 18) , while S, altissima is hexaploid (2n = 54) , They
also noted that S, altissima blooms about a month later, at least in
Quebec, than S. canadensis. Similar differences in flowering dates
occur in Wisconsin (see flowering data on Maps 12, 13 and 15),
On this evidence it seems more desirable to consider this plant as
a distinct species.
12. SOLIDAGO JUNCEA Ait, Early Goldenrod. Map 16,
An essentially glabrous plant, except for scabrous or ciliate leaf
margins and sometimes sparingly hirtellous on lower surfaces of
leaves and branches of the panicle; stems solitary or few, from a
caudex, 3-12 dm tall; basal leaves on caudex, ohlanceolate to nar-
rotvly oval, acuminate, tapering to the long petiole, serrate, persis¬
tent, 10-15 cm long and 1.5-8 cm wide, not conspicuously 3 -nerved;
3 See Cronquist (Gleason, 1952, 3:546).
372 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
cauline leaves remote, decreasing in size upwards, becoming lance-
elliptic, less toothed and sessile ; inflorescence a pyramidal or some¬
what rhomboidal panicle with recurved branches and secund heads ;
involucre glabrous, 3-5 mm high ; bracts acute or obtuse, firm, pale
green or straw-colored ; rays 7-12 ; achenes pubescent.
Plants with more or less hirsute upper and lower leaf surfaces
and panicle branches have been designated as forma scabrella (T,
& G.) Fern. Specimens of this form are indicated by triangles on
Map 16.
Common throughout Wisconsin, especially abundant in sandy or
loamy open fallow fields, along railroad embankments and weedy
fencerows, less common in mesic to wet-mesic prairies and fields,
along brushy roadsides, on steep roadbanks, and rarely at the edges
of open deciduous woods. The sparsity of plants in the north cen¬
tral and west central counties is probably due to limited collecting.
The paucity of plants in the southwestern counties, however, was
confirmed on the several trips into this region. The agricultural
practice of clearing fencerows, the absence of fallow fields, as well
as the frequent clearing by cutting and burning along roadsides
and railroad rights-of-way may be contributing factors to this
rarity. Flowering late June to early (mid-) September; fruiting
from late July into October,
13. SOLIDAGO MISSOURIENSIS Nutt. Missouri Goldenrod Map 17.
A glabrous plant 3-10 dm high from a creeping rhizome; leaves
oblanceolate, mostly triple-nerved, rather firm, sharply acute to
acuminate, tapering to a sessile or inconspicuous petiole, glabrous
except for scabrous margins, the lower 0.3-2 cm wide, serrate, only
slightly reduced upwards and becoming lance-elliptic to linear and
entire; inflorescence a pyramidal panicle; branches glabrous, more
or less recurved, the heads secund; involucre glabrous, 3-5 mm
high; bracts firm, blunt or acute; rays 7-12; achenes sparsely
pubescent.
Key to Varieties
A. Plants 1-8 dm tall; panicles 2-12 cm broad, with ascending
branches bearing scarcely or only slightly recurving one-sided
racemes; achenes strigose-pilose or hirsute 1.3-2. 2 mm long;
basal leaves often present at flowering time _ _ _
_ 13a. S, missouriensis var. missouriensis.
AA. Plants mostly taller, up to 1 m high; panicles up to 20 cm
wide, usually with arched recurving branches ; achenes
glabrous or short-hispid, 1-1.3 mm long. Basal leaves usually
wanting at flowering time. _ _ _
_ 13b. S. missouriensis var, fasciculata.
1963]
Salamim— Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
378
13a, SOLIDAGO MISSOURIENSIS Nutt. var. MISSOURIENSIS,
Map 17, triangles.
The western phase of the species, collected in few south central
and southwestern counties, in dry sandy prairies, along open sandy
roadsides and on sandy river terraces. This variety is less common
than the next and appears to prefer drier habitats. Flowering
August to September ; fruiting from September to October,
13b. SoLiDAGO MISSOURIENSIS Nutt. var, fasciculata Holz.
Map 17, dots.
The widespread variety in our area, occurring chiefly in the
southwestern half of the state. It is present, but not abundantly,
in dry to mesic prairies on gentle slopes, river terraces, along road¬
sides and along railroad rights-of-way, sometimes in sandy prairies,
on or adjacent to blow-out dunes, and on steep hillsides. This vari¬
ety as well as var, missouriensis appears to be restricted to the
prairie areas of Wisconsin south of the Tension Zone. Flowering
from (late July) early August into September; fruiting from mid-
August into October.
14. SOLIDAGO GIGANTEA Ait. Late Goldenrod Maps 18, 19, 20.
A tall plant from a creeping rhizome ; stems stout, often 5-25 dm
tall, glabrous below the inflorescence, sometimes glaucous; leaves
numerous, lanceolate to narrowly lance-lineaf, acuminate, tapering
to a sessile or nearly so hose, more or less sharply serrate chiefly
above the middle, triple-nerved and relatively uniform in shape
throughout and only slightly reduced in size upward, the lower ones
soon deciduous; larger leaves 6-18 cm long and 1.5-3. 5 cm wide,
glabrous or scabrous above, glabrous or sparsely pubescent on the
main veins beneath; inflorescence a terminal pyramidal panicle
with recurved pilose branches and heads secund; involucre 2,5-4
mm high ; bracts blunt to acute, slightly green-tipped ; rays 10-17 ;
achenes short-hairy.
Key to Varieties
A. Cauline leaves 1-2.5 cm wide, the middle ones mostly more
than five times as long as wide, serrate; lower panicle
branches 3-15 cm long, commonly less than 10 cm long,
B. Leaves with midrib and main veins pilose beneath _
_ _ _ 14a, S. gigantea var. gigantea.
BB. Leaves glabrous beneath _ 14b. S. gigantea var. serotina,
AA. Cauline leaves 2-4 cm wide, the middle mostly less than five
times as long as wide, coarsely serrate ; lower panicle branches
5-25 cm long, commonly more than 10 cm long _
_ _ _ _ _ 14c, S. gigantea var, PitcherL
374 W isconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
14a. SOLIDAGO GIGANTEA Ait. var. GIGANTEA. Map 18.
Common throughout Wisconsin in open moist fallow fields, fens,
marshes, roadside ditches, along banks of lakes and streams, at the
edges of bogs and moist sandy beaches, less common in dry to mesic
prairies, open fields, along railroad embankments and brushy road¬
sides, in the latter habitats it is often associated with S. canadensis
and S. altissima. Individuals with sparse pubescence in the upper
portions of the stems, just below the inflorescences, may represent
hybrids with these species. Flowering late July to September, and
fruiting August to October.
14b. SOLIDAGO GIGANTEA Ait. var. SEROTINA (Kuntze) Cron.
Map 19.
Solidago gigantea Ait. var. leiophylla Fern.
Similar habitats, distribution, and flowering and fruiting dates
as var. gigantea.
Beaudry and Chabot (1959) noted that two cytodemes exist
within both varieties of S. gigantea, one diploid (2n = 18) and
the other a tetraploid (2n = 36), but made no recommendations
concerning any special taxonomic treatment.
14c. Solidago gigantea Ait. var. pitcheri (Nutt.) Shinners.
Map 20.
According to Shinners (1953) this variety is found in the low
prairies of Iowa, Illinois, southern Wisconsin and Minnesota. The
few specimens with broad leaves and broad panicles, which seem to
fit the description of this taxon ( see Map 20), do not appear to be
restricted to the prairie areas of the state. Furthermore, it is possi¬
ble that these plants may represent either robust plants of the two
common varieties, or their tetraploid races.
Because of the limited number of specimens, no significant eco¬
logical or geographic trends can be determined for this variety in
Wisconsin. Flowering and fruiting dates are probably similar to
those of the other varieties.
15. Solidago patula Muhl. Roughleaved Goldenrod; Spreading
Goldenrod. Map 21.
A smooth plant from a caudex, 5-20 dm high; stems glabrous
below the inflorescence, more or less 4-angled; leaves glabrous on
lower surface, harshly scabrous on upper surface, the basal and
lower cauline leaves persistent, elliptic, elliptic-ovate or elliptic-
obovate, acute to acuminate, serrate, 8-30 cm long and 4-10 cm
wide, somewhat abruptly narrowed to a broad petiole; middle and
upper cauline leaves much smaller, becoming sessile and somewhat
1963]
Salamun— -Wisconsin Flora, No, 50
375
376 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
more lanceolate, more or less toothed ; inflorescence a stiff terminal
panicle, generally with wide-spreading recurved branches, but nar¬
rower and more elongate in smaller plants ; heads secund ; involucre
about 3-4.5 mm high, the bracts greenish, acute to obtuse or
rounded, ciliolate ; rays 5-10 ; achenes sparsely pubescent.
An occasional plant in low conifer-deciduous woods, edges of
bogs, on shrubby boggy stream and lake banks (Shrub-Carr com¬
munity of Curtis, 1959), and in sedge meadows, rarer in low de¬
ciduous woods, roadside ditches, chiefly in eastern Wisconsin, but
absent from Door County and northeastern counties, where it ap¬
pears restricted to areas underlain by calcareous rocks. Flowering
mid- August through September; fruiting late August to mid-
October.
16. SOLIDAGO ULMIFOLIA Muhl. Elm-leaved Goldenrod. Map 22.
A slender stemmed plant from a caudex, 4-12 dm tall, glabrous
or nearly so below the inflorescence, leaves thin, sharply and
coarsely serrate, elliptic to elliptic ovate, larger ones 6-12 cm long
and 1-5.5 cm wide, the lower usually deciduous by flowering time,
acute or acuminate, abruptly narrowed to a short petiole or nearly
sessile, glabrous to somewhat hirsute above, loosely long-pilose be¬
neath, especially on the veins; inflorescence a terminal panicle with
a few long divergent or arched-recurving branches, the heads
secund; involucre 2. 5-4, 5 mm high, the bracts slender, acute to
obtuse, yellowish; rays about 3-6; achenes minutely pubescent.
A species associated chiefly with the Mesic Southern Deciduous
Forest Community (Curtis, 1959), most common at the edges of
Sugar Maple-Basswood woods. Oak woods, and sometimes Birch-
Aspen woods, frequently along brushy roadsides, wooded gravelly
hills and sandy outcroppings, and occasionally on steep, dripping
wet, sandstone cliffs and brushy rock outcrops in the Driftless
Area. Flowering late July to early October; fruiting late August
to October.
17. SOLIDAGO RIGIDA L. Rigid or Stiff Goldenrod. Map 23,
A coarse plant with a stout caudex; stem 3-15 dm tall; herbage
grayish-pubescent; leaves firm, entire to slightly crenate, the basal
and lower cauline persistent, elliptic-oblong, broadly lanceolate to
broadly ovate, acute, 6-30 cm long and 2-10 cm wide, with equally
long blades and petioles on the lower, the middle and upper cauline
leaves reduced in size and sessile or nearly so ; inflorescence a large
terminal corymb; heads large with involucres 5-9 mm high; bracts
firm, broadly rounded, glabrous or puberulent, conspicuously
striate; rays 7-14; achenes 10-15 nerved, glabrous.
1963]
Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No. 50
377
Widespread in dry to mesic prairies (Curtis, 1955), sandy road¬
sides, open sandy fields, south-facing slopes, and along fencerows
throughout the southern half of the state, sometimes weedy in over-
grazed pastures, spreading beyond the limits of the prairie areas
into north and east Wisconsin, on sandy soils along roadsides, rail¬
road rights-of-way and occasionally on sandy lake shores. Flower¬
ing from early August to late September; fruiting from early Sep¬
tember into October,
18. Solidago OHIOENSIS Riddell. Ohio Goldenrod Map 24.
A slender glabrous plant from a branched caudex; stem 4-9 dm
tall; basal and lower cauline leaves persistent, long petioled, nar¬
rowly oblanceolate to spatulate, the blade 7-22 cm long and 1-4 cm
wide, obtuse at tip, entire or slightly toothed, the middle and upper
cauline leaves few, progressively reduced upward and becoming
short-petioled or sessile; inflorescence terminal, corymbiform;
heads numerous ; involucre 4-6 mm high ; bracts obtuse or rounded,
more or less striate; rays short, about 6-8; achenes glabrous, 3-5
angled.
Rather rare in wet alkaline meadows, low prairies, especially
those underlain by calcareous substrate, and fens (Curtis, 1959),
in southeastern Wisconsin, and in moist to dry depressions between
old beach ridges with such species as Juniperus horizontalis, Calo-
pogon pulchellus, Gentiana procera and Solidago spathulata var.
Gillmani in Door County; the absence of specimens in the inter¬
vening area may be the result of habitat destruction. Flowering
from mid- August to late September ; fruiting late August to
October.
19. Solidago riddellii Frank. RiddelFs Goldenrod. Map 25,
A glabrous plant from a caudex, sometimes with a creeping
rhizome; stem stout, commonly 4-10 dm tall, with slight pubes¬
cence in the inflorescence ; middle and upper cauline leaves linear-
lanceolate, often longitudinally folded, acute, sometimes with re¬
curved tips, long tapering into a keeled, clasping or sheathing base,
lower and basal leaves tapering into a long keeled petiole, the lower
ones 3-5 dm long, 1-2 cm wide; inflorescence terminal, corymbi¬
form, the heads crowned ; involucre 5-6 mm high ; bracts glabrous,
obtuse to rounded, more or less striate; rays small, 7-9; achenes
glabrous or nearly so, 5-7 nerved.
Occasional in alkaline sedge meadows, wet prairies, edges of
marshes, and rarely in moist roadside ditches, in the southeastern
378 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters [Vol. 52
quarter of the state. Flowering from early August to late Septem¬
ber; fruiting September to October.
This species sometimes occurs with S, ohioensis and Aster ptar-
micoides (Nees) T. & G. and hybridization among them has been
suspected. Cronquist (Gleason, 1952, 3:460) mentions a report of
a natural hybrid between Aster ptarmicoides and an unknown
species of Solidago. He further suggests that the true affinities of
this aster are with Solidago rather than with Aster,
Dr. Jean-Paul Bernard, in a personal communication, reported
that in population samples of these species, including specimens
from a wet prairie in Kenosha County, he observed certain inter¬
grading characters. Among the Wisconsin plants he noted hybrids
1963] Salamun — Wisconsin Flora, No. 50 379
between S. Riddellii and S. ohioensis, and S. Riddellii and Aster
ptarmicoides.'^
20. SOLIDAGO GYMNOSPERMOIDES (Green) Fern, Map 26.
A glabrous plant, 3--10 dm tall, from a creeping rhizome; stem
branched at or below the middle; leaves linear, attenuate, entire,
with scabrous margins, mostly 4-9 cm long and 1.5-5 mm wide,
with dark and viscid punctation, lateral veins obscure to faintly
3-nerved, the basal and lower cauline deciduous during flowering
time, others not signiflcantly reduced upwards ; inflorescence a ter¬
minal corymb, open to compact, the heads sometimes sessile in
small glomerules, but more commonly somewhat pedunculate, slen¬
derly cylindric; involucre 4.5-6. 5 mm high, narrow, viscid ; bracts
obtuse to acute; rays 10-14; achenes hairy.
A western species which reaches its eastward limit in western
and central Wisconsin on dry sandy soils in open flelds, along fence-
rows and at the edges of Jack Pine-Black Oak woods. Flowering
August to September, and fruiting September to October.^
21. SOLIDAGO GRAMINIFOLIA (L.) Salisb. Grass-leaved Goldenrod.
Maps 27, 28.
Plant from a branching rhizome; stems 3-12 dm tall, glabrous
to hirtellous; leaves linear to linear-lanceolate or linear-elliptic,
acuminate to nearly acute in some varieties, sessile, sparsely or
moderately punctate, 4-13 cm long and 2-12 mm wide, the basal
and lower cauline soon deciduous, others not much reduced up¬
wards, evidently 3-5 nerved, glabrous or hirtellous beneath; in¬
florescence a terminal corymb; heads sessile or nearly sessile in
small glomerules, campanulate to broadly obconic; involucre 2.5-5
mm high, more or less viscid ; bracts obtuse or rounded ; rays small,
15-25; achenes with short hairs.
Key to Varieties
A. Stem, branches and branchlets cf the inflorescence essentially
glabrous; leaves glabrous except for scabrous margins and
occasionally scabrous along the main veins beneath _
- 21a. S. graminifolia var. graminifolia.
^ Two plants which appear to be hybrids between Solidago Riddellii and Aster ptar-
micoides were collected in a wet prairie area about two miles south of the city of
Kenosha on September 22, 1963, One of these is deposited as a voucher specimen in the
herbarium of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and the other has been
transplanted to this campus for further study.
6 Solidago remota, a plant of open sandy areas along the southern shores of Lake
Michigan and Lake Erie, is listed by both Gleason (1952) and Fernald (1950) as ex¬
tending to Wisconsin. However, no voucher specimens exist in any of the herbaria
examined. Dr. Shinners, in a verbal communication, mentioned that a specimen had
been collected in a sandy beach area along Lake Michigan in Kenosha County, but
this specimen could not be located.
380 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters [VoL 52
AA. Stems sometimes, branches and branchlets of the inflorescence
evidently pubescent; leaves more or less pubescent _
_ 21b. S, graminifolia var. Nuttallii.
21a. SOLIDAGO GRAMINIFOLIA (L.) Salisb. var. GRAMINIFOLIA.
Map 27.
Common throughout Wisconsin along open sandy or clayey road¬
sides, fencerows, in remnant mesic to moist prairies, moist to dry
fallow fields, railroad rights-of-way and sedge meadows, occasion¬
ally in alkaline marshes, and edges of bogs, moist Maple-Basswood
woods and Hemlock- Yellow Birch-Maple woods. Specimens are
sparse in the area from Brown County to Walworth County and
in the southwestern counties. Because considerable portions of
these areas are underlain by dolomitic bedrock or glacial drift con¬
taining dolomite material, the lack of plants here may be corre¬
lated with soil alkalinity. Flowering (late July) early August into
October; fruiting from late August into October.
21b. SOLIDAGO GRAMINIFOLIA (L.) Salisb. var. NUTTALLII (Greene)
Fern. Map 28.
Generally distributed in eastern and northern Wisconsin in
sandy open fields, along railroad rights-of-way, moist to dry open
sandy roadsides, moist fencerows, mesic to moist prairie remnants,
and sometimes at the edges of marshes, low woods and, rarely,
bogs, in open deciduous woods or at the edges of Maple-Basswood,
White Pine and Aspen woods. Flowering and fruiting as in var.
graminifolia .
In addition to the varieties listed here, the following are ex¬
cluded: Fernald (1950) lists a var. media (Greene) Harris, which
is described as being glabrous except for scabrous lines ; the leaves
linear-lanceolate, long attenuate, with only two lateral nerves and
with fewer flowered heads. Some narrow-leaved glabrous plants
which fit this description were observed from central and south¬
western Wisconsin. Rosendahl and Cronquist (1945) observed sim¬
ilar plants in Minnesota, and suggested they represent intergrades
between S. graminifolia and S, gymnospermoides. Since these nar¬
row-leaved plants were observed in the area of Wisconsin where
the ranges of these two species overlap, this explanation has con¬
siderable merit.
Var. major (Michx.) Fern., the boreal phase of S. graminifolia,
is distinguished by having broadly lanceolate leaves, mostly 7-10
times as long as wide, and with acute tips. Specimens of this vari¬
ety have been collected in northern Michigan and northern Minne¬
sota. Although no specimens have been collected in Wisconsin, they
should be looked for in the northernmost counties.
1963]
Salamun— -Wisconsin Flora^ No. 50
381
Bibliography
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— — — , 1952, In Gleason, 1952.
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OFFICERS OF THE WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES,
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