1895.] ESSAYS. 71 



or tent seems a possibility. A large specimen of the black birch 

 growing on the hillside west of Goes Pond has attracted a good deal 

 of attention because of its peculiar appearance. The tree apparently 

 started as a seedling from under the side of a large bowlder, and in 

 growing its roots have penetrated a crack in the rock. As they have 

 increased in size and strength, they have lifted a mass of this rock, 

 estimated to weigh not less than fifteen tons, some distance into the 

 air. The yellow birch was one of the vegetable loves of Thoreau, 

 who considered the meeting it of sufficient importance to record in his 

 journal. In one place he says of it, "The sight of these trees affects 

 me more than California gold. In the twilight I went through the 

 swamp, and the yellow birches sent forth a yellow gleam that each 

 time made my heart beat faster." The commonest birch to be seen 

 in our city is a variety of that English birch that the poets have called 

 the " lady of the woods." I mean the cut-leaf weeping birch. 



If we proceed on a numerical basis, the family to rank next in im- 

 portance to the oak is the (Joniferce, or pine family, for it contains 

 nine of our native trees, and a family that gives us the pines, spruces, 

 hemlock, fir, larch, white and red cedar, and arbor vitte will be 

 generally allowed to have other importance than that of mere num- 

 bers. To have produced the white pine alone, would be enough to 

 distinguish it. A tree of which Professor Sargent says, "It is the 

 most valuable timber tree of the region it inhabits and no other tree, 

 perhaps, has ever played such an important part in the material 

 development of a country. It has brought cities and railroads and 

 great fleets into existence, and furnished employment to tens of 

 thousands of laborers." We no longer allow these trees to grow to 

 the height of those we read of in the old forest, where they towered 

 two hundred and fifty feet and more toward the sky, and we have 

 little to help us in determining their age ; but the two old pines bor- 

 dering Institute Park, on Salisbury Street, and that in front of the 

 Wetherell farmhouse, at Newton Square, must have been standing 

 there before Columbus found his way across the trackless Atlantic. 

 Instead of planting such a tree as this, or our beautiful hemlock, the 

 Scotch and Austrian pines, the Norway spruce, and the gingko are 

 too often chosen. 



The family that gives us the walnuts and hickories, the Jugland- 

 acece, ought surely to be named next. The true walnuts are the black 

 walnut and the butternut, but in New England we apply the term 

 wrongly to the hickories. Though the black walnut is not indigenous 

 to this part of the State, it is admirably adapted to our soil, and 



