140 FOREST PLANTING. 



leaning, or with a decided tend of the branches and spray 

 toward the northwest. From Maine to Colorado, and 

 from Minnesota to Texas, one need never be long at a 

 loss for the points of the compass, who has learned to 

 observe this effect, which after a little experience becomes 

 so familiar that he detects it intuitively. 



Sometimes every tree, for a large space, will have a de- 

 cided lean sometimes individual trees only exhibit the 

 effect and sometimes the branches are compressed to- 

 ward the trunk, on the windward side, and spread away 

 from it on the other, while the trunk itself is not affected. 

 The explanation is simply that the season at which the 

 S. W. winds prevail with greatest frequency and violence, 

 is during the spring and early summer, when the tree is 

 full of sap, and the young shoots are easily bent, and 

 have not yet attained sufficient elasticity to recover their 

 natural position. During many years that I was largely 

 engaged in fruit growing in New Jersey, I learned to 

 dread this wind as the worst enemy of my crops, and the 

 one whose attacks were especially to be guarded against. 

 Further observation since has served to prove that the 

 influence of these winds is much more widely extended 

 than I at that time imagined, and a very important fact in 

 regard to the modification of their effects, by passing over 

 large bodies of wood or water does not seem to me to have 

 received the attention it merits. Wherever the S. W. wind 

 strikes upon the land after passing over a large body of 

 water it tends to ameliorate the climate as compared with 

 that of places in the same parallel of latitude with a dif- 

 ferent aspect towards the water. On a large scale this 



