130 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



some like the carob (Ceratonia Siliqua, Linn.) produce their fruits 

 both upon those of this season and the season before, with also 

 a few at the same time upon old and thick branches. Some kinds 

 are fruitful on none but their topmost branches; others are fruit- 

 less at summit, and only fruitful on lateral branches. Another 

 distinction is that of (7) the location of fruits in respect to foliage. 

 Some trees bear their fruits beneath the leaves; on others it is 

 borne above them; while in some, like the sycamore fig tree (Ficus 

 Sycomorus, Linn.), >it grows down on the naked trunk. 1 From 

 our point of view this is a useless distinction ; but not so with Theo- 

 phrastus, who seems to have been unable to attribute to the foliage 

 of trees any more important function than that of a protection 

 to the young and growing fruit or seed. 



Trees are extensively treated of (8) as to their ecology and 

 geographic distribution. There are trees peculiar to mountain 

 districts, and others confined to lowlands and plains. As of the 

 former habitat he names the fir, wild pine, spruce, holly, box, 

 walnut, chestnut, and many more. A still greater number of 

 different kinds are of the plains only; among them are one of the 

 elms, the ash, maple, alder, willow, poplar. A few kinds are common 

 to mountain and plain. 2 Among the montane some, like the wild 

 pine, luxuriate on slopes that look southward, and will hardly grow 

 at all in any other places, while the fir, on the contrary, attains 

 perfection on the cool and shady sides, and if ever seen elsewhere, 

 has an inferior growth and is unlike itself. The tallest and largest 

 firs known occur in a deep valley in Arcadia where they say the 

 sun never shines. He notes it as a general rule that the kinds of 

 tree affecting shady and cool places are tall and straight, their trunks 

 not forking or parting into subsidiary trunk-like branches ; but that 

 arboreal growths of this latter description are those of open and 

 sunny places. Certain trees are wont to grow nowhere but along 

 watercourses ; and certain others belong exclusively to the highest 

 elevations of the mountains near perpetual snow. 



It is evident that in those coniferous and hardwood trees belong- 

 ing to cold northward slopes of southern mountains Theophrastus 

 sees a sort of fringe, so to speak, of the great almost unknown regions 

 of Europe northward; for what reports have been brought from 

 that direction indicate that there, even the lower lands are clad 

 with forests of fir, pine, oak, chestnut, and others known at the 

 South only on the mountains; and he thinks it may be reasonable 



1 Hist., Book i, ch. i. 



2 Ibid., iii, ch. 4; also iv, ch. i. 



