Within a few miles of the lick, are eight or nine rude furnaces, disposed in the direction of a straight line, extending about two miles. He stated, that it was not known by whom, or when they were built, nor could it be ascertained for what purpose. It was evident they had been used; but no slag cinders or any thing of the kind had ever been found, nor was it possible to conjecture for what purpose the furnaces had been constructed. We regarded all these accounts, and many others of a similar character, as a sort of traditionary evidence of the accidental discovery, at some former time, of lead, coal, or pyrites; and that this discovery, by the ignorance and credulity of the people, had been magnified into an object, to which they had at length learned to ascribe a mysterious and indefinite importance. Immediately about Loutre lick the surface was rocky and uneven; low cliffs of light gray sandstone, fringed with tufts of the dark green pteris atropurpurea, and the black striped asplenium, overhung {101} the margin of the brook, where the inconspicuous flowers of the prinos lævigatus and zanthoxylon fraxineum, and the blue spikes of the amorpha fruticosa, were just expanding. Beyond Loutre lick the road traverses longitudinally that great woodless plain, thirty miles in length, called the Grand Prairie. It varies in width from one to ten or fifteen miles. The soil is deep and fertile, closely covered with grasses, interspersed with a proportion of gaudy euchromias and lichnedias, with the purple and yellow pedicularia, the tradescantia, and many beautiful astragali. At Thrall's settlement,[61] sixty miles above Loutre lick, the floerkea proserpinacoides[62] is found in great abundance in open fields and by the road side, reclining its flexile and delicate stem upon the species of bidens, polygonum, &c. common in such situations. It grows much larger here than at Albany, the only locality where we have met with it east of the Mississippi; and its leaves, instead of being quinate, are usually composed of six leafits. In neither place does it show any preference to marshy grounds, as the newly-proposed name, _palustris_, would seem to imply. Our course, inclining considerably towards the Missouri, made it necessary to leave the elevated region of the plains, and betake ourselves to the forests, soon after passing the Grand Prairie. In these forests the linden, the hop-horn beam, maple, beech, and ash, attain an uncommon magnitude. The blue beech (ostrya virginica) sometimes occurs, and is of a larger growth than in New England. [61] Thrall's settlement was about four miles north of Rocheport, Boone County. The first settlers arrived as early as 1812, and after the War of 1812-15 the population grew rapidly. Augustus Thrall, for whom the place was named, came in 1816. The site was on land granted by the federal government to sufferers from the New Madrid earthquake.—ED. [62] Willdenow. F. palustris. Nuttall.—JAMES.