SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES. 17 



frequently choke and injure oaks ; and that no mending over 

 is necessary, as scarcely an oak so planted is found to fail." 



Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient 

 experiment, and, for aught I know, they have taken out a 

 patent for it ; but they appeared not to have discovered that it 

 was discovered before, and they are merely adopting the 

 method of Nature, which she long ago made patent to all. 

 She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines without 

 our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we 

 send a party of wood-choppers to cut down the pines, and so 

 rescue an oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped 

 from the skies. 



As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound 

 of green pig-nuts falling from time to time, cut off by the 

 chickaree over my head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, 

 either within or in the neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides 

 of the town, stout oak twigs three or four inches long, bearing 

 half-a-dozen empty acorn-cups, which twigs have been gnawed 

 off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in order to make 

 them more portable. The jays scream and the red squirrels 

 scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees, 

 for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never 

 agree. I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a 

 green chestnut bur, as I am going through the woods, and I 

 used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at me. In fact, 

 they are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut season, 

 that you cannot stand long in the woods without hearing one 

 fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day before — that 

 was in the middle of October — seen a green chestnut bur dropt 

 on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood, 

 and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could 

 not tell how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnuting 

 in mid-winter, I find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its 

 gallery, just under the leaves, by the common wood-mouse 

 Qniis leucopus.^ 



But especially in the winter the extent to which this trans- 

 portation and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent 

 by the snow. In almost every wood, you will sec where the 

 red or gray squirrels have pawed down through the snow in a 

 hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and almost always 



3 



