THE AMEKICAN FORESTS. 331 



The multitude of species, intermixed as they are in their 

 spontaneous -growth, gives the American forest landscape a 

 Tariety of aspect not often seen in the woods of Europe ; the 

 gorgeous tints which nature repeats from the dying dolphin to 

 paint the falling leaf of the American maples, oaks, and ash trees, 

 clothe the hillsides and frmge the watercourses with a rainbow 

 splendor of foHage unsurpassed by the brightest groupings of the 

 tropical flora. It must be confessed, however, that both the 

 northern and the southern declivities of the Alps exhibit a nearer 

 approximation to this rich and multifarious coloring of autumnal 

 vegetation than most American travellers in Europe are willing 

 to allow ; and, besides, the small deciduous shrubs which often 

 carpet the forest-glades of these mountains are dyed with a ruddy 

 and orange glow, which, in the distant landscape, is no mean sub- 

 stitute for the scarlet and crimson and gold and amber of the 

 transatlantic woodland.* 



Agricola Forestale all' esposizione di Parigi, 1878, p. 204, where it is stated that 

 the surface occupied by olive trees in Italy is 900,311 feet = 2,300,000 acres, the 

 total yield of oil 3,385,591 hectol. ; and the average yield per hect. 1.38 in Lom- 

 bardy, 2.39 in Tuscany, 4.04 in Liguria, 4.57 in the Southern Provinces, and 

 6.09 in Sardinia. Although olive-oil is much used in cookery in Italy, lard 

 is preferred as more nutritious. Much American lard is exported to South- 

 -eastern Italy, and olive-oil is imported in return. 



* The most gorgeous autumnal coloring I have observed in the vegetation 

 of Europe has been in the valleys of the Durance and its tributaries in Dau- 

 phiny. I must admit that neither in variety nor in purity and brilliancy of tint, 

 does this coloring fall much, if at all, short of that of the New England woods. 

 But there is this difference : ia Dauphiny it is only in small shrubs that this 

 rich painting is seen, while in North America the foliage of large trees is dyed 

 in full splendor. Hence the American woodland has fewer broken lights and 

 more of what painters call breadth of coloring. Besides this, the arrangement 

 of the leafage in large globular or conical masses affords a wider scale of light 

 and shade, thus aiding now the gradation, now the contrast of tints, and gives 

 the American October landscape a softer and more harmonious tone than 

 marks the humble shrubbery of the forest hillsides of Dauphiny. 



Thoreau — who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the 

 present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural forces, 

 but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than 

 almost any other descriptive writer, among and with her children — has a very 

 eloquent paper on the "Autumnal Tints " of the New England landscape. — 

 See his Excurmns, pp. 215 et seq. 



Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural historj'- accessible 

 to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that veiy 



