SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES. 13 



this must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. 

 If you ever ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you 

 must have perceived it — right in the centre of the luscious 

 morsel, a large earthy residuum left on the tongue. We thus 

 take into our mouths cherry stones as big as pease, a dozen at 

 once, for Nature can persuade us to do almost any thing when 

 she would compass her ends. Some wild men and children 

 instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in a hurry, 

 it being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though 

 these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings. Nature has 

 impelled the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly 

 away with them, and they are winged in another sense, and 

 more effectually than the seeds of pines, for these are carried 

 even against the wind. The consequence is, that cherry trees 

 grow not only here but there. The same is true of a great 

 many other seeds. 



But to come to the observation which suggested these re- 

 marks. As I have said, I suspect that I can throw some light 

 on the fact, that when hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut 

 down, oaks and other hard woods may at once take its place. 

 I have got only to show that the acorns and nuts, provided they 

 are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly planted in such 

 woods ; for I assert that if an oak tree has not grown within 

 ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak 

 wood will not spring up at once when a pine wood is cut down. 



Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are 

 cut off, and after a year or two you see oaks and other hard 

 woods springing up there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and 

 the wonder commonly is how the seed could have lain in the 

 ground so long without decaying. But the truth is, that it has 

 not lain in the ground so long, but is regularly planted each 

 year by various quadrupeds and birds. 



In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally 

 dispersed, if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the 

 seemingly unmixed pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect 

 many little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from 

 seeds carried into iHie thicket by squirrels and other animals, 

 and also blown thither, but which are overshadowed and choked 

 by the jjincs. The denser the evergreen wood, the more likely 

 it is to be well planted with these seeds, because the planters 



