146 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [13:4— April, 191 7 



off thousands of years ago, and they didn't leave any descendants 

 with that bad habit. No, indeed. We wait for the cold. 



"The cold! Oh, how good it feels. It is so comfy. In Indian 

 summer one feels all stuffed up, sort of bilious. Too much carbo- 

 hydrates, the doctor would say. But when settled cold weather 

 comes everything is all right again. Some of us don't really freeze 

 at all. We are under a warm cover of leaves and a thick blanket 

 of snow, and often even in zero weather, as the wise old wood- 

 chopper can tell you, the ground about us doesn't freeze. But 

 most of us do freeze. The trees and the large shrubs, which stand 

 up through the snow, freeze through and through. When we are 

 frozen w^e are sound asleep. There is nothing else doing." 



"It is when the temperature is just above freezing that things 

 begin to happen. One gets numb and relaxes, and dozes along in 

 serene half conscious happiness, like a boy on a visit, waking up in 

 a new and strange bed, comfortable, contented. 



"When the storage for the winter is first completed the various 

 materials are in special compartments. The starch, for example, 

 is in starch cells, where it is held tight and sound. But when our 

 live parts get cold and numb ever\i:hing begins to leak, I guess. 

 At any rate, all through the Indian summer the starch had remained 

 in stubborn solid grains which couldn't be used in making new 

 growth, but now something was coming in contact with these 

 grains which dissoU^ed them and turned them into sugar. Appar- 

 ently there had been a leak somewhere. 



"Oh, the starch, and the cold, and the sugar ! Most people think 

 the sugar maple has a monopoly of the sugar business in this 

 neighborhood, but the fact is that nearly all of us plants are making 

 sugar out of starch whenever there is a thawing day in winter time. 

 Even a potato gets sweet if it is down at nearly freezing for a month 

 or two. The sugar maple hasn't any sugar in the fall. It is 

 simply gorged with starch. You see that maple over yonder? 

 Last January in a warm spell a squirrel bit off some of its twigs, and 

 it shed sugary tears all over the place. It makes sugar just Hke 

 the rest of us, at any time during the winter when it is cold but not 

 frozen. 



"When the starch begins to change into sugar something else 

 happens. Did you ever hear of osmotic pressure? Well, never 

 mind. It's this way. When one of our little inside compartments 

 has sugar in it it gets thirstier than usual. It drinks in water and 



