THE STEM OF VASCULAR PLANTS. 163 



demonstrated this, and it serves to explain several facts 

 to which marvellous ideas would be attached. Thus 

 the layers of the alburnum, being full of sap, are liable 

 to be frozen when the cold is very intense. When this 

 accident takes place, and the frost does not reach the 

 liber and the alburnum, the tree continues to live; the 

 frozen layer is covered over by a sound one — afterwards 

 by several others ; and thus covered, it is found in 

 the centre of trees : this accident is named in French, 

 Gelivure. We can, by counting the number of layers 

 formed since the accident took place, know in what year 

 it happened. Thus, in 1800, I had cut down in the 

 Forest of Fontainbleau, a trunk of a Juniper (Juniperus 

 communis), which was found to present, near its centre, 

 a layer which had been affected b}'^ frost, covered over 

 by ninety-one woody layers, and which dated therefore 

 from the severe winter of 1709. (PL 4, fig. 2.*) 



An inscription written upon the trunk of a tree, and 

 which penetrates to the alburnum, is covered over by 

 new woody layers, and may be found entire as long as 

 that part of the trunk remains so. It was thus that 

 Reisel found, in 1675, some capital letters in the middle 

 of a Beech ; that Maj'er, in 1688, found in the woody 

 body of a Beech a kind of sculpture representing a gal- 

 lows, and a person hanging ; that Albrechti, in 1697, 

 found in the same tree the letter H, surmounted by a 

 cross ; that Adami found, under nineteen layers of the 

 alburnum, the letters J. C. H. M. It is thus that in 

 certain trees in India there have been found inscriptions 

 in the Portuguese language, which had been written 

 there some centuries before, when the country was dis- 

 covered by those navigators. It is thvis that different 

 spots, or regular stars, have been artificially formed in 



* The extraordinary contraction observed in the trunk was caused by 

 its growing between two rocks. 



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