LEAF AND TENDRIL 



hop, the wild buckwheat, and some others go up 

 from right to left. Most of our forest trees show a 

 tendency to wind one way or the other, the hard 

 woods going in one direction, and the hemlocks and 

 pines and cedars and butternuts and chestnuts in 

 another. In different localities, or on different 

 geological formations, I find these directions re- 

 versed. I recall one instance in the case of a hem- 

 lock six or seven inches in diameter, where this 

 tendency to twist had come out of the grain, as it 

 were, and shaped the outward form of the tree, 

 causing it to make, in an ascent of about thirty feet, 

 one complete revolution about a larger tree close to 

 which it grew. On a smaller scale I have seen the 

 same thing in a pine. 



Persons lost in the woods or on the plains, or 

 traveling at night, tend, I believe, toward the left. 

 The movements of men and women, it is said, differ 

 in this respect, one sex turning to the right and the 

 other to the left. 



I had lived in the world more than fifty years 

 before I noticed a peculiarity about the rays of light 

 one often sees diverging from an opening, or a series 

 of openings, in the clouds, namely, that they are 

 like spokes in a wheel, the hub, or centre, of which 

 appears to be just there in the vapory masses, instead 

 of being, as is really the case, nearly ninety-three 

 millions of miles beyond. The beams of light that 

 come through cracks or chinks in a wall do not 

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