Abstract
As one travels eastward on return from a trip through the prairie states, perhaps the most characteristic feature of the landscape which starts him humming the strains of, "Back Home Again in Indiana," are the beautiful woodlands along the highways of our state. These woodlands are remnants of the great Eastern deciduous forest upon which the pioneers gazed with amazement as they penetrated the interior of our continent. The botanist and Nature lover of the present day ofttimes wish they could have had the thrill of looking at the stately array of massive-trunked, majestic giants in that forest primeval. There are no quantitative data available to show just what the sociology of this forest was originally, but judging from the remnants of the ancient towering monuments found in some virgin forest areas by Butler ecologists (3, 11, 24), we may assume that trees from 150-200 feet tall with a girth of 20 feet or more were not uncommon. Early settlers and explorers with no particular botanical or ecological interest were impressed with the grandeur of the forest through which they traveled, as may be seen from their journals and other records. Ovid Butler (2) reports that Pierre Joseph Celoron de Blainville, who traveled down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers in 1749, dined one day with twenty-eight other men in a hollow sycamore somewhere in the Ohio Valley.
