UNDER THE MAPLES 



denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession 

 usually proves fatal. The vitality of the tree 

 declines year by year till death ensues. 



To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable 

 as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which 

 it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets at the 

 bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at 

 the top. The rootlets absorb the water charged, 

 with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves 

 absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as 

 if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit, 

 like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one 

 hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, 

 on the other — earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy 

 oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely 

 organized in these parts that take hold upon nature. 

 We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense 

 they are; but all are delicate feeders in their 

 mechanism of absorption from the earth and air. 



The tree touches the inorganic world at the two 

 finest points of its structure — the rootlets and 

 the leaves. These attack the great crude world 

 of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only 

 the microscope can fully reveal them to us. The 

 animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, 

 and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, 

 through the agency of the solvent power of water, 

 absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule. 

 "^A tree does not live by its big roots — these are 



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