iJ92 Miscellanies. 



of two trees, one young and the other old, and counted back twenty 

 years, if the young tree indicated, by a full layer, a growing season 

 for that kind of timber, the older tree indicated the same. 



My next observation was, that the growing seasons clustered to- 

 gether, and also the meagre seasons came in companies. Thus, it 

 was rare to find a meagre season immediately preceding or following 

 a season of full growth, — but, if you commenced in a cluster of thin 

 and meagre layers, and proceeded on, it gradually enlarged and 

 swelled to the maximum, after which a decrease began and went on, 

 until it terminated in a minimum. 



A third observation was, that there appeared nothing like periodi- 

 city in the return of the full years or the meagre, but the clusters 

 alternated at irregular intervals ; neither could there be observed, in 

 comparing the clusters, any law by which the number of years was 

 regulated. 



I had then before me, therefore, two or three hundred meteoro- 

 logical tables, all of them as unerring as nature ; and by selecting 

 one tree from the oldest, and sawing out a thin section from its trunk, 

 I might have preserved one of the number to be referred to after- 

 wards. It might have been smoothed on one side by the plane, so 

 as to exhibit its record, to the eye, with all the distinctness and neat- 

 ness of a drawing. On the opposite side, might have been minuted in 

 indelible writing, the locality of the tree, the kind of timber, the 

 year and the month when cut, the soil where it grew, the side and 

 point which faced the north, and every other circumstance which 

 can possibly be supposed ever to have the most remote relation to 

 the value of the table in hand. The lover of science will not be 

 backward to incur such trouble, for he knows how often, in the 

 progress of human knowledge, an observation or an experiment has 

 Jost its value by the disregard of some circumstance connected with it, 

 which, at the time, was not thought worthy of notice. Lastly, there 

 might be attached to the same section, a written meteorological ta- 

 ble compiled from the observations of some scientific person, if such 

 observations had been made in the vicinity. This being done, why, 

 in the eye of science, might not this natural, unerring, graphical 

 record of seasons past, deserve as careful preservation as a curious 

 mineral or a new form of crystals ? 



If you should think fit to make such a suggestion, it might lead, in 

 fact, to the preservation of sections from aged trees in difiereut parts 

 of the country, and a comparison of their lines of growth with the 



