38 WINTER FIELD MEETING. 



MR. JOHN ROBINSON exhibited a number of twigs of 

 trees of various kinds, showing the condition of the buds 

 during winter. After a few special remarks on the spec- 

 imens collected during the morning, he read the following 

 paper on 



OUR TREES IN WINTER. 



THE winter condition of our deciduous trees is for 

 them a matter of necessity. They are bare and rigid at 

 this season of the year from force of circumstances, and 

 not because it would be impossible for them to be other- 

 wise, were they placed under different influences. 



There was a period, previous to the last glacial epoch, 

 in the geologic history of our earth, when what is now 

 the perpetually frozen north was covered by a luxuriant 

 vegetation, and the present temperate region of North 

 America, including our own New England, possessed 

 a s,ub-tropical flora. Then the winter was not the cold, 

 snowy season we are all familiar with, but there was at 

 most, only a season of rest for the trees and herbs which 

 covered this portion of the earth. 



Countless ages of time changed that old geological cli- 

 mate, by slowly freezing out, at the north, the forest of 

 the former period. As the cold wave continued its 

 course southward, the plants of the northern region were 

 forced before it, far beyond the limits of the present tem- 

 perate flora, but they were permitted to return as the cold 

 wave receded, and to re-occupy the positions in which we 

 find them about us to-day. It would be impossible that, 

 throughout all these great changes, any plant could be so 

 constructed as to conform itself to them without becoming 

 greatly changed in character itself. 



Plants are in this respect unlike animals ; they cannot 

 move out of the way of unfavorable influences ; hence, 



