As will be seen from the act of Congress, while the jurisdiction of the States separated by the Mississippi and Wabash is concurrent and extends to the middle of said rivers, that of Illinois, in regard to the Ohio River, is confined to its northwestern shore. The jurisdiction of Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin is also coördinate with their respective boundary lines to the middle of Lake Michigan.

Within the above-described boundaries there are 56,000 square miles, or 35,840,000 acres of land, and 650 square miles of water surface. Extending from thirty-seven degrees to forty-two degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, its extreme length is 385 miles; and its greatest breadth, lying between ten degrees and twenty-five minutes and fourteen degrees and thirty minutes west longitude from Washington, is 218 miles.

The State of Illinois is greater in extent than any of the original thirteen States, except Georgia. It is larger than either Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Wisconsin, or Iowa, and embraces a larger territory than all of the New-England States combined, exclusive of Maine. It has several counties, each of which contains nearly as many square miles as Rhode Island, while two of them, McLean and LaSalle, are larger than Delaware. It comprises a larger territory than England, or than Denmark and Portugal together, and has more square miles than Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland united.

There are no mountains in Illinois, and, with the exception of Louisiana and perhaps Delaware, it is the most level State in the Union. Cairo is but three hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea, and the county of Jo Daviess, where the State attains its greatest altitude, is barely eight hundred and twenty feet higher. From this elevation in the northern portion of the State there is a gradual descent to the valley of the BigMuddy River in Jackson County, where there is a rapid rise April 18, 1818, enabling the people thereof to form a state government, as follows: "Beginning at the mouth of the Wabash River, thence up the same, and with the line of Indiana, to the northwestern corner of said State; thence east with the line of the same State to the middle of Lake Michigan; thence north along the middle of said lake to north latitude forty-two degrees and thirty minutes; thence west to the middle of the Mississippi River, and thence down along the middle of that river to its confluence with the Ohio River, and thence up this latter river along its northwestern shore to the beginning."

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until a hilly, broken ridge is reached, which extends to the extreme eastern portion of the State.

The general surface of the country inclines to the southwest, in which direction slope the water-shed and interior drainage. There are no lakes in Illinois, but the best maps show that it is watered by two hundred and eighty-eight streams, great and small; and while many of the largest of them have been declared by law to be navigable, only the Illinois River has been of any practical use for that purpose.

The Illinois River is formed by the junction of the Des Plaines and Kankakee, which unite at a point near the boundary line dividing the counties of Will and Grundy. The head-waters of the former of these two streams are in Wisconsin, near Lake Geneva, and its general course is southerly. The Kankakee rises in Indiana and flows westerly to the point of confluence. The course of the Illinois is at first nearly due west to Bureau County, thence southwesterly in a diagonal line to a point in Scott County, thence south until, after having traversed the State for five hundred miles, it empties itself into the Mississippi at Grafton, forty miles above St. Louis.

Among the other principal streams in the State may be mentioned the following: Rock River, which rises in Wisconsin, flows southwesterly about three hundred miles, and joins the Mississippi just below the upper rapids, near Rock Island; the Kaskaskia, or Okaw as it has been sometimes called, rises near the eastern boundary of the State in Champaign County, and flowing also to the southwest, enters the Mississippi at Chester, six miles below the ancient village of Kaskaskia; the Sangamon, a branch of the Illinois, has its rise also in Champaign County; the Fox, Vermilion, and Spoon rivers are also tributaries of the Illinois, as is the Pecatonica of Rock River and the Iroquois of the Vermilion; while the Embarras and Little Wabash contribute their quota to swell the waters of the Wabash.

The general surface of the State rises from its bottom lands

* There are numbers of small bodies of water in the State, especially in Lake County, and on river bottoms, called lakes, that are not properly entitled to the

name.

+ Porter's "The West."

in wooded cliffs or bluffs from fifty to four hundred feet in height. From these extend its beautifully undulating and diversified treeless meadows, called, by the French, prairies. They first appear in Northwestern Ohio, and increasing in dimensions through Indiana, become so wide and extensive in Illinois as to give it the name of the Prairie State.

As seen by the first explorers, the forest covered the entire country around the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, but as these diverged from each other the prairie began to intervene. At first only an occasional savannah, as the English called them, appeared, but proceeding northward the timber gradually diminished and the prairies enlarged, until, arriving at the centre of the State, the continuous prairie from its eastern to its western boundary was only broken by narrow strips of timber on the Vermilion, the Sangamon, and Illinois rivers, and their tributaries. And from Washington County the pioneer could travel a distance of three hundred miles to the Wisconsin line without encountering so much as five miles of timber.*

The native prairies presented themselves to the early explorers and settlers as marvels of beauty and design, as inexplicable as they were enchanting. Their attractive features consisted not only in their rich carpet of verdure and flowers, but in their bewildering extent, their undulating surface, their mysterious paths, and their occasional groves, like islands in the sea.

In the spring, the first coat of grass, sprouting up from the charred remains of autumn fires, was mingled with the violet and other smaller flowers of the most minute and delicate texture, whose natural beauty no handiwork of man's cultivation could improve. As the stronger grass increased in size, these were succeeded by others of a larger growth and more gaudy appearance, displaying their brilliant colors in striking contrast to the green surface. It is impossible to conceive a more infinite diversity or a richer profusion of hues. In the summer, the wild prairie was covered with a long, coarse grass, which later assumed a golden hue, and in the rich, wet soil, fanned by the winds and kissed by the sun, grew to the height of eight * Beckwith's "Vermilion County."

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or nine feet, throwing out long, coarse leaves which reached above the head of the traveler on horseback.

The prairies of Illinois differ from those west of the Mississippi in this, that while the former possess a uniform fertility, the latter, as they ascend toward the Rocky Mountains, gradually become less fertile until a region of drouth and barrenness is reached, rendering them comparatively valueless.

Inviting as were the prairies for agricultural purposes, the first settlers were afraid of them-of their lack of shade and water, and of their pestiferous flies. And when, finding that they improved upon acquaintance, they ventured to locate upon them, they selected the highest situations, shunning the low, wet grounds which, in some portions of the State, have in late years most richly repaid the labor of the farmer.

An interesting inquiry respecting the origin of the prairies has engaged the attention and research of many learned writers. The theories advanced, all of them more or less speculative, need not be referred to here; suffice it to say, that whether due to the action of water or fire, or of both these elements-the one to form and the other to preserve them-they furnished to the hardy pioneer of the West the finest body of farm lands, ready-made as it were, upon which the sun ever shone.

Those large districts in the southern portion of the State which were densely covered with forest trees and heavy belts of timber, extending along the banks and filling the areas between the forks of rivers and creeks, when the white man. first entered the territory, have been gradually yielding to the ax and plow. But so many groves have been planted, and so many orchards and hedges now cover the ground where formerly were only grass and weeds, that it has been claimed with great plausibility that the leaf surface of the State is larger now than ever before.*

The proportion of woodland to prairie in 1880 was estimated as follows: in the twenty-three northern counties, seven per cent; in the district extending from the Illinois River below Ottawa to the Mississippi, twenty-one counties, fifteen per cent; in the Grand-Prairie district, east of this last, seventeen counties. in the eastern-central portion of the State, six per cent; in the * Gov. Reynolds, W. C. Flagg, etc.

Centralia district south of this, between the Wabash River and the Illinois-Central Railroad, seventeen counties, twenty-four per cent, in the Kaskaskia district, thirteen counties, twentyone per cent; and in the eleven remaining counties, the grand chain district, twenty-seven per cent.*

While among the states of which Illinois is the centre, in the Mississippi Valley, the soil contains many elements common to all, yet certain distinctive peculiarities belong to each. While some of the adjoining states possess a greater proportion of prairie and others of timber, there is no other country of the same extent on the face of the globe which can boast of a soil so uniformly distributed over so large a territory, and so universally productive as that of Illinois.

The subsoil over a large portion of the State is usually a yellow clay, but in some of the northern counties it is gravel, and occasionally in the Grand-Prairie region it is of blue clay. The river-bluffs are more or less covered with a silicious deposit called loess, of uniform character and sometimes of great thickness. The surface soil is mainly formed of deposits of drift from more northern latitudes, varying from ten to two hundred feet in depth, overlaid with rich black loam from ten to fifty inches thick. It is the product of finely comminuted limestones, sandstones, and shales, mingled with organic, vegetable, and animal mould left by the dead herds and unknown harvests of countless centuries. In the north it is coarser and more open; in the south, finer and cleaner, which renders the plants in this soil less liable to damage from extreme dry cold or dry heat. Hence the greater certainty of winter-wheat as a crop in southern Illinois.

ences.

Beside this general variation, there are important local differThe soil of the river bottoms is alluvial, and is practi cally inexhaustible. Some tracts of land on the American Bottom, which stretches from Alton to Kaskaskia, have been in cultivation for over a century without perceptible deterioration. The river-bluffs composing the loess formation, as at Alton, Quincy, Warsaw, and other points, are specially adapted to fruit-culture and the production of a fine quality of vegetables. * Illinois Horticultural and U.-S. Special Census Reports. + Porter's "The West."