86 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



One morning towards the last of July (1888), my son called my 

 attention to a straggling stream of crows that seemed to be directing 

 their flight with much cawing towards a point in the adjacent woods, 

 less than half a mile distant^ and judging by the continuous corvine 

 outcries that reached our ears, from the objective point of assembly, 

 the inference seemed a justifiable one that there was " some 

 onpleasantness " occurring at the point indicated. So, gun in hand, 

 he promptly sallied forth to investigate. Upon coming up to a large 

 beech tree, he soon saw two crows' nests, a number of yards apart, 

 amid the dense upper branches, and on an adjoining big maple tree 

 three or four crows were cawing very excitedly, and their perturbation 

 was evidently shared in by the continuous new arrivals. Upon 

 scanning the large, high and forking branches of the maple, my son 

 saw a large racoon trying to keep shady and flatly clinging to the 

 side of the big limb with a demeanour that indicated a consciousness 

 of having attained an unenviable notoriety. Two shots brought Mr. 

 Procyon to the ground, to the infinite relief of the sombre-hued birds. 



One of our most common impressions when roaming- through 

 the primeval torests of this country, has been a feeling of surprise 

 that there should be so few relics, such a meagre amount of debris 

 and refuse material left as evidence of the unremembered centuries 

 that the sylvan garniture is supposed to have been a predominating 

 feature in these regions. Some of the colossal oak trees that are still 

 occasionably met with, give conclusive evidence that no appreciable 

 climatic or topographical changes have occurred during the last five 

 hundred years. Newspaper correspondents have occasionally dis- 

 puted the ac.curacy of the testimony as to the age of trees, afforded 

 by the annual rings of growth; but we have a confident conviction, 

 formed after careful experiment and long observation, that such in- 

 dications in the trunks of exogenous trees are perfectly reliable 

 guides to the conclusions above referred to. 



That hackneyed term, " the struggle for existence," conveys too 

 an idea that is incessantly kept before the mind during a woodland 

 stroll, and quite recently, in the course of our occasional experience 

 as woodchoppers, we met with a most striking instance of the 

 formative power of this principle in determining the height and 

 contour of the leafy domiC or pyramid of most of our forest trees ; 



