THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
65 
and on the whole the tree does not behe the nickname of grey 
birch. Often, however, the young branches, even the trunks of 
the saphngs, are a glossy rich dark red-brown and require many 
moultings before they attain to the wdiite toga of maturity. 
Short lived, small statured, a lover of the open— this most gre- 
garious of birches shuns the strange thick-foliaged giants of the 
deep wood and wins itself a foothold on deserted barrens and fire- 
swept wastes, in little companies of six and eight. Here for at 
least a generation she will have few rivals. Only the young fire- 
cherries, with their slender trunks of burnished bronze, and their 
blood-red clusters of fruit, dangling to tempt the birds to an in- 
voluntary extension of their sway, or the tremulous aspen— slim- 
mest and smallest of the poplars and its kinsman, the sturdier 
large-toothed aspen. 
\\^ihat pen or brush could portray the delicate fantasies of col- 
oring one often finds on the smooth straight shafts of these two 
cousin poplars— U^emul Old es and grandidentataf In a single 
thicket you may meet a half dozen different grey-green tones in 
as many saplings; while in a morning's walk, the gamut runs 
from a soft old gold to a dull or silvery pale grey bark, that at a 
little distance closely imitates the white (or grey) birch. It wears 
however, always this hall-mark of distinction— a great dark eye 
with delicately penciled brow, in placs of the black triangular 
dead limb scar of the birch. 
So both poplars appear under a dozen different bark-disguises 
—now yellow, now green, often slightly clouded, as though over- 
hung with the thinnest of pale grey gossamer veils— under appar- 
ently only the slightest variations in age and situation. One does 
note, however, that the greens and yellow are more prominent in 
the younger trees, or in the older ones, after a heavy shower; 
while the bark of full grown poplars is often furrowed and dark- 
ened at the base quite out of resemblance to the younger smooth- 
skinned members of the family. 
The small, chubby outlined leaf-blade of Popidiis tremidoides 
and the larger one of Popidus grandidentata, with its bold-tooth- 
ed margin, are both alike provided with a long flattened petiole 
set like a tiny sail for the breeze and ready to turn the whole 
tree into a thousand whirling green windmills. The same breeze 
