THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 103 



astonished at their number and variety. We should expect to 

 see some fine plants introduced from that fair land, now our 

 ward. 



Providence, R. I. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR FOREST TREES. 



HP HERE is an individuality about the trees that is not found 

 •'■ in any other members of the vegetable kingdom. The 

 wayside flowers may charm us for a season but in the course 

 of another year or two they are gone, their places taken 

 by sturdier neighbors who have out-stripped them in the race 

 for supremacy and elbowed them aside. But the tree repre- 

 sents something more stable and permanent. The larger and 

 sturdier specimens in any locality began life before any of the 

 human inhabitants were bom, and our country does not lack 

 for specimens whose origin antedates the appearance of the 

 first white man. Something of the permanancy of the hills, 

 cliffs, and streams, seem to invest these mighty vegetables, 

 exalting them above the condition of common plants. The 

 personality of the tree made a deep impression on the imagina- 

 tive mind of primitive man and it is small wonder that he 

 peopled the forests and groves with spirits and regarded each 

 specimen as harboring a nymph or dryad whose life ended 

 with its life. 



While the trees are in many ways distinctly separated from 

 the rest of the vegetable world, they are no less sharply dis- 

 tinguished from each other. The woodsman can single out 

 and name the different trees in the landscape almost as far as 

 the eye can reach, and we, with less of his skill, can still 

 separate each species on closer inspection. In the mere mat- 

 ter of bark there are endless variations from the rough and 

 splinter)' bark of the well-known hickory or shagbark to the 

 smooth, cool bark of the beech, hornbeam and aspen or the 

 coarse bark of hemlock and pines. The method by which each 



