Central Park 
been compressed than into their varied foliage, which, 
however beautiful, the tree-student soon comes to 
regard as a rather unmeaning adjunct. In fact, the 
most superficial acquaintance with a tree is the knowl- 
edge of its leaf—only a card of introduction; foliage 
is but the garb it wears a portion of the year, and it 
conceals more than it reveals of vegetative nature. 
Whoever can name a tree in winter may assume to know 
it. Trunk, branch, twig, bark, grain, fibre, and even 
the dormant bud are all sealed with the sign-manual of 
some peculiar type, which is always distorted in forest- 
growth, but has become realized in the favorable sur- 
roundings of this great nature-garden. Never go to the 
deep woods to study trees. A dense forest is a mass 
of malformations, tall, spindling forms, each trying to 
overtop its fellows, as if gasping for breath and strain- 
ing for the light. 
In the single point of general figure, what contrasts 
in the forms of the overarching elm, the slanting- 
branched maple, the cylindrical tulip-tree, the round- 
topped, almost globular horse-chestnut, the beech wide- 
spreading with slender, horizontal, tremulously straight 
boughs, the angular, stubborn-visaged oak, the coarse- 
branched hickory and ailanthus, the spindling, effemi- 
nate Lombardy poplar, the curious ginkgo, the languid, 
refined white birch, the sprawling catalpa, all arms and 
legs like an ungainly school-boy, the spruce little aspen 
that ought to carry a little cane, the stately cottonwood, 
a senator indeed, the conical red cedar, the tall-shafted 
white pine, the king of trees. 
How typical and ever varied the bark, one of the 
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