80 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



There are no scarlets in the English woods so unfailingly bril- 

 liant as those of the American oaks, nor any yellows so pro- 

 fuse and constant as the Canadian maples. Even when trans- 

 planted to our own more temperate skies, these oaks and ma- 

 ples remain true to acquired habit and get a splash of color 

 in the midst of the trees of park and garden which shine out 

 amidst its surroundings like the glow of an October field-fire in 

 a windy nightfall. Yet the primitive appetite for pure color 

 which every man, more or less consciously, possesses could 

 hardly require a fuller satisfaction that it can find in English 

 woodlands and along English hedge-rows, when the right 

 moment is chosen in autumn's gradual decline and the sun 

 shines in limpid October brilliance through an atmosphere 

 washed clear by rain. 



When on a day of autumn wildness the dark shade be- 

 neath a tall avenue of close-set elms is thick with flying gold 

 or all the scarlet and orange of a quiet bank of hillside beeches 

 is whipped and flung abroad by the lash of Atlantic rain, 

 there is a strange sense of the prodigal wastfulness in Nature, 

 and of a spirit of destruction that seems wholly opposed to 

 the slow maturing patience that is characteristic of her rule. 

 To see the leaves of spring and summer that were nursed to 

 birth and to full verdue at such pains of sunshine and foster- 

 ing shower, now stripped and wasted abroad in the passion 

 of a single hour, is almost like witnessing the sack of some 

 imperial city by barbarians of the north. The wilderness of 

 such an hour brings a kind of intoxication to the blood. Yet 

 in reality the fall of the autumn leaf, whether it comes tumult- 

 ously in the gale of a single night, or is completed gradually 

 and slowly in calm and equable decay is no mere blind aberra- 

 tion of destructive violence but simply one stage in the con- 

 tinual progress of life. The leaves of the old year fall be- 

 cause the young buds of the new spring are already thrusting 

 them from their places. In the case of many kinds of trees. 



