Tree Study 789 



velvety? How many seeds do you find in a carpel ' Do they lie with the 

 points toward the stem-end or the blossom-end of the apple ? Where are 

 they attached to the apple? Describe the apple seed — its outer and inner 

 coat and its "meat." Can you find the germ within it which will, after the 

 seed is planted, produce another apple tree? 



11. Is the core at the center of the apple, or is it nearer to the stem-end 

 or to the blossom-end of the fruit ? Are all apples alike in this particular ? 



1 2 . Describe fully all the varieties of apples which you know, giving the 

 average size, texture and color of the skin, the shape of the cavities at the 

 stem and blossom ends, the color, texture and flavor of the pulp, and the 

 position within the apple of the core. 



Supplementary reading — Trees in Prose and Poetry, pp. 43-59. 



THE PINE 

 Teacher's Story 

 ONE other of our native trees is more beautiful than 

 the pine. In the East, we have the white pine with 

 its fine-tasselled foliage, growing often 150 to 200 

 feet in height and reaching an age of from two to 

 three hundred years. On the Pacific coast, the 

 splendid sugar pine lifts its straight trunk from two 

 to three hundred feet in height; and although the 

 trunk may be from six to ten feet in diameter yet it 

 looks slender, so tall is the tree. A sugar pine cone 

 on my desk measures 2 2 inches in length and weighs 

 almost one pound, although it is dried and emptied of seed. 



There is something majestic about the pines, which even the most 

 ignorant feel. Their dark foliage outlined against wintry skies appeals to 

 the imagination, and well it may, for it represents an ancient tree-costume. 

 The pines are among the most ancient of trees, and were the contemporaries 

 of those plants which were put to sleep , during the Devonian age, in the coal 

 beds. It is because the pines and the other evergreens belong essentially to 

 earlier ages, when the climate was far different than it is to-day, that they 

 do not shed their leaves like the more recent, deciduous trees. They stand 

 among us, representatives of an ancient race, and wrap their green foliage 

 about them as an Indian sachem does his blanket, in calm disregard of 

 modem fashion of attire. 



All cone-bearing trees have typically a central stem from which the 

 branches come off in whorls, but so many things have happened to the old 

 pine trees that the evidence of the whorls is not very plain ; the young trees 

 show this method of growth clearly, the white pine having five branches .in 

 each whorl.' Sometimes pines are seen which have two or three stems near 

 the top ; but this is a story of injury to the tree and its later victory. 



The very tip of the central stem in the evergreens is called "the leader,' 

 because it leads the growth of the tree upward; it stretches up from the 

 center of the whorl of last year's young branches, and there at its tip are the 

 buds which produce this year's branches. There is a little beetle which 

 seems possessed of evil, for it likes best of all to lay its rascally eggs in the 

 very tip of this leader; the grub, after hatching, feeds upon the bud and 

 bores down into the shoot, killing it. Then comes the question of which 



