590 The American Naturalist. [June, 
among the few scattered trees remaining, a horse chestnut about 18 ae 
inches in diameter, branching about three feet from the ground into 
two trunks, each about ten inches in diameter. ‘The trunk leaning to 
the eastward is thriving and about the normal height for its diameter. 
The one leading to the westward has broken off, with an irregular 
splintery fracture, about five feet from the ground, perbaps on account 
of its lesser resistance to our easterly gales, and the stump has rotted- 
badly. The bark, however, retains its vigor, and from the cambium 
layer, where exposed along the irregular edges of the ruptured section, 
adventitious buds have sprouted profusely. They are also found 
where the bark has split, and in the crotch where the tree has forked, 
where the bark of the two trunks unite. Some of the thickest colonies. 
of buds were at the apex of the splintered stump, and I therefore sawed 
off about fifteen inches with its buds and three young shoots which have 
seemed fortunate enough to grow to the length of some eight inches. 
It will be noted that the bark is in a good state of preservation, the 
inner layers alive, while the wood is not only dead, but far gone in 
decay. The thickest cluster of buds is 8 inches long by 1} inches 
wide, and within this space I have counted 200, about 30 of which are 
alive, the others being mostly the remains of a previous crop. There 
is no evidence of accidental destruction of the buds, though a few small 
shoots may have been cut off. Cows would scarcely browse on them, 
‘and one cluster occupied an inaccessible position in the fork. 
One is not surprised at the dense growth of shoots which rise from 
adventitious buds on a decapitated willow or the spraying branches of 
elm which are of similar origin, but I have never before noticed so pro- 
fuse a crop of buds whose mission seems to be entirely futile. They 
seem to represent an especially vigorous effort of the broken organism 
to survive, and under the circumstances this effort might be very per- 
-sistent because of the opportunity afforded the unfortunate trunk, 
deprived of means of assimilation, to draw on the sister trunk, fully 
developed, for the requisite nourishment. It therefore might seem to 
have more opportunity to thus maintain its life than had it been @ 
single trunk snapped off and dependent only on the residual nourish- 
ment within its roots. This supposition is, in some degree, supported 
by the fact that this particular tree stands on a hill some 300 feet high, 
rooted in the thin, dry soil covering a barren serpentine ledge, and 
hence would scarcely be expected to show a vigor which compares 
favorably with the sprouting of the adventitious shoots of the brookside 
willow. The specimen from the stump shows only three small surviv- 
ing shoots, and may it not be fairly surmised that if the budding effort 
