338 Why certain kinds of Timber [April, 
one thousand to two thousand seeds) should, in the spring time, 
be blown to pieces after the winter’s freeze, and their needle-like 
seeds be blown upon the adjacent hills, very few of them would 
light on ground favorable to sprouting them. Occasionally we 
find a lone sycamore on the uplands, standing among the oak, 
beech, poplar and other upland timber, and every year bearing its 
quota of seed and shedding them on the adjacent ground by the 
million, none, or very few of which, ever take effect, and for rea- 
sons before hinted at, but which will be more fully explained 
further on. 
The sycamore seed must fall on ground, warm, very moist, but 
not absolutely wet, and sufficiently bare for the sun to shine on it 
the greater part of the day. Otherwise it may not sprout. The 
acorn, on the other hand, falls a little while before the leaves fall. 
If it falls on very moist ground it rots. If it falls on the leaves 
of the former year, and is shaded enough to prevent drying or 
baking from the sun, and is covered lightly by the fall of the cur- 
rent year’s leaves, or by a chance wind has the old leaves drifted 
on top of it, a slow rain with subsequent sunshine will sprout it. 
It will send out little rootlets which bore through the underlying 
old leaves and penetrate the ground, and once started, no weather 
or climatic conditions will kill it. The same is true of the seed 
of the hickory, beech, sugar maple and other upland trees. 
During the past two years my work has been on and about the 
Wabash river banks and its bottoms (flood-plains), and I have 
discovered why it is that in some parts of these bottoms one 
kind of timber, as sycamore, will take complete possession of a 
few acres, while at or near by the cottonwood will prevail almost 
to the exclusion of everything else, and at other places the soft 
or water maple will do likewise, and at still another the water elm 
will monopolize all the space on which a grown tree can stand 
for several acres. 
It comes about in this way. The balls of the sycamore, after 
undergoing the winter’s freeze, are dissolved so that the sepa- 
rate, needle-like, or more properly pin-like seeds (as the outer 
end has the germ of the root, and swells into a bulb like a pin- 
head) are blown by the wind, the little “ fuz” they hold enabling 
them to float a great way both in wind and on water. They 
begin falling early in the spring months, and if a flood is receding 
at the time, they stick to the soft, moist banks wherever they 
