268 ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 



Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not? 

 Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life can answer 

 this question. 



There is. a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the 

 two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary man- 

 ner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both 

 elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, 

 which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. 

 *#*#****#* 



I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this slice 

 of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. 

 Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth; nine feet, where I got my section, 

 higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice 

 of apple pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about eighteen inches. 



1 have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three 

 hundred and forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness 

 of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was 

 slow, then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to 

 grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a 

 new start and grew fast until 1714, then for the most part slowly until 1786, 

 when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last 

 dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly. 



Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of -its 

 growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakespeare's. The tree was 

 seven inches in diameter when he was born ; ten inches when he died. A little 

 less than ten inches when Milton was born ; seventeen when he died. Then 

 comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, during which 

 the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is 

 the span of Napoleon's career; the tree doesn't seem to have minded it. 



I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section. I 

 have seen many wooden preachers, never one like this. How much more 

 striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees 

 which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal 

 life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers 

 all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence ! 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



The people of ancient Greece believed that in every tree dwelt a protecting 

 nymph, or dryad. These dryads were thought to perish with the trees which had 

 been their abodes, and with which they had come into existence. To willfully 

 destroy a tree was, therefore, an impious act, and was often severely punished. 



Is there not a soul beyond utterance, half nymph, half child, in those delicate 

 petals which glow and breathe about the centres of deep color? 



GEORGE ELIOT. 



