NATURE LOEE 



ceive its attention. An oak on my father's farm wag 

 struck twice in the course of many years, the last 

 bolt proving fatal. The hard, or sugar, maple, is 

 frequently struck, but only in one instance have I 

 known the tree to be injured. In this case a huge 

 tree was simply demolished. Usually the bolt comes 

 down on the outside of the tree, making a mark as 

 if a knife had clipped off the outer surfaces of the 

 bark, revealing the reddish-yellow interior. In sev- 

 eral cases I have seen this effect. But a few summers 

 ago an unusually large and solid sugar maple in 

 my neighbor's woods received a charge that simply 

 reduced it to stovewood. Such a scene of utter de- 

 struction I have never before witnessed in the woods. 

 The tree was blown to pieces as if it had been filled 

 with dynamite. Over a radius of fifty or more feet 

 the fragments of the huge trunk lay scattered. It 

 was as if the bolt, baffled so long by the rough coat 

 of mail of the maple, had at last penetrated it and 

 had taken full satisfaction. The explosive force prob- 

 ably came from the instantaneous vaporization of 

 the sap of the tree by the bolt. 



Some friends of mine were inoculated with curi- 

 osity about insects by watching the transformation 

 of the larvae of one of the swallow-tailed butterflies, 

 probably the Papilio asterias. As I was walking on 

 their porch one morning in early October I chanced 

 to see a black-and-green caterpillar about two inches 

 long posed in a meditative attitude upon the side 

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