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the surface we shall find the solid earth beneath the mass of vegetable decomposition 

 pierced everywhere with upright and porous pillars of wonderful tubular structure — the 

 large and perpendicular tap-roots which many trees possess, passing deep into solid 

 clayey strata otherwise impermeable, and sending through the triturated earth which 

 surrounds them, a slow and steady supply of water to a thousand subterranean and spring- 

 feeding channels, which, travelling away from the forest and under the cultivated fields, 

 supply the great lower bed of moisture, that continually rising, fertilizes the upper 

 soil, and finally passes off to find in brooklet, lake or river, their course to ocean again. 

 On this great natural bed and reservoir, rain may fall in torrents, only to be held there 

 in suspension till it gradually, and in such degrees as are best fitted to promote the bene- 

 fioient work of nature, flows away in curving creek, in rippling rivulet, nourishing and 

 feeding the thirsty earth as it goes. On this same great bed, vast mountains of winter 

 snow may pile themselves, protected by the overhanging branches and dense thickets of 

 underbush, against too rapid thaws in Spring, thoroughly moistening and soaking the 

 whole great mass of humus and roots, and furnishing a vast field for evaporation ready to 

 part with its watery treasures to the surrounding atmosphere, at the fervent bidding of 

 the warm sunbeams of April or of May, the period when vegetation needs them most — 

 the period for which nature has stored them and at which she delivers them, and the 

 period, if you notice, at which she takes care no dense foliage obstructs the action of the 

 sun. Then, reversing the process, when in times of drought, the forest bed has parted 

 with its surface treasure of moisture, the deeper roots can and do draw, from the subter- 

 raneous and concealed channels, a vast supply for the trees themselves, which again 

 passes through the leaves into the air, and falls in rain or dew. 



Let us view the forest under a different aspect from that which is open and 

 apparent to the natural eye. Let us consider that great portion of its actual being, life 

 andfunctions which are carried on by means of water. This forest, with all its ponder- 

 ous trunks standing around us, solid, firm, impermeable, has been in its day, from root to 

 leaf, but water, gases and vapour, and is still but a channel for their passage, the 

 passage by which its existence is continued, its growth fostered, its death in due time 

 obtained and its reprodjiction secured. The forest is a river ; deep around its interlacing 

 roots the joining waters fill everywhere the land, they separate, they mount in every 

 trunk continually in upward flowing streams, they separate again in their course to every 

 branch and every leaf, they again separate in their passage to the outward air through 

 the thousand openings in these ; they join the air, they form a dense and vapour-saturated 

 atmosphere above the forest top, above the whole far-spreading and wind-tossed sea of 

 glittering leaves, and they rise perpetually a body of innumerable tons of invisible water, 

 cool and damp from the forest depths, to meet the coming south-west wind bearing its 

 liquid treasures fresh from the warm equatorial region, treasures of moisture rich as 

 that of the forest exhalation, far more extensive but far more heated than their's. They 

 meet, and the junction of the diff'erently heated masses necessarily precipitates both in 

 rain • it falls to the ground ; it may pass by innumerable channels to the distant ocean, 

 it may rise to the nearer atmosphere through wheat, through grass, through forest leaf 

 a^ain. Every forest is an immense fountain of water rising perpetually from earth to 

 sky, falling ever from sky to earth again. 



