84 



ON ORGANIZED BODIES^, 



consists of a long series of letters discovered, in 1727, in the trunk of a full*- 

 grown beach, near Dantzito, in land belonging to the family of Daniel Berck- 

 holtz. The letters D. B. were chiefly conspicuous in the solid wood ; the 

 wood towards the bark, and that towards the heart, that is, in each extre- 

 mity, " bearing not the least trace of letters." M. Klein relates another 

 example from the Ephemerides of Natural Curiosities,''^ recorded by Joan- 

 nes Myerus. It consists of a thief hanging from a gibbet, apparently 

 drawn by nature's own pencil in the timber of a beech-tree : as also the 

 figure of a crucified man, found in a tree of the same kind ; and that of a 

 chalice with a sword, perpendicularly erect, sustaining a crown on its 

 point ; which was preserved at the Hague, and had been seen by himself. 



Such marks were formerly attributed to miraculous intervention, or re- 

 garded as marvellous sports of nature : but the hints now oflered will easily 

 explain their origin. 



Foreign substances have often been found imbedded in the same way, 

 having at one time been sunk into the inner bark, or penetrated it by a 

 wound or other excavation, and afterwards covered over with new annual 

 growths of liber and alburnum. Thus Sir John Clerk gives an account of 

 a horn of a large deer which was found in the heart of an oak in Whinfield 

 Park, Cumberland, fixed in the timber with large iron cramps, with which, 

 of course, it had been fastened on.j And we are hence able to account 

 for the occasional detection of a Capricorn beetle,]; or other insect which 

 has been found in the centre of a trunk, the animal having crept into an 

 accidental cleft, and either died there naturally, or been arrested and im- 

 prisoned by the secretion of the matter of new inner bark while in the tor- 

 pitude of its aurelian state. And hence, indeed, the cause of the very won- 

 derful phasnomena of toads or frogs being at times found in a like situation ; 

 having in the same way been impacted in the hole or crack into which they 

 had crept, by the glutinous fluid of the inner bark, during sickness or a 

 protracted winter sleep. Some of these are found alive when the tree is 

 cut down, deriving both air and nutriment enough from the surrounding 

 vessels of the tree during their imprisonment. In the Memoirs of the Paris 

 Academy there is an example of a toad found in a tree that was proved to 

 be a century old.§ 



As the series of concentric circles, produced in the trunk of a tree by 

 the growth of every year, are still visible after the conversion of every other 

 part into lignum, or hard wood, we can trace its age with a considerable 

 degree of certainty, by allowing a year for every outer circle, and about 

 two or three years for the complete lignification of the innermost.il 



Independently of these more solid parts of the trunk or stem, we gene- 

 rally meet with some portion of parenchyma and cellular substance, and al- 

 ways with the different systems of vegetable vessels disposed in one com- 

 mon and uniform arrangement. The lower orders of plants, indeed, such 

 as the annuals and biennials, consist almost exclusively of parenchyma or 

 cellular substance, with an inner and outer bark, and the respective vessel? 

 of the vegetable system. 



* Eph. Nat. Cur. decad. iii. an. v. obs. 29. 



t Phil. Trans, for 1740, vol. xli. p. 448. 



% Id. 1741, vol. xli. p. 861. 



§ Mem. de I'Acad. Par. 1731, p. 24. 

 II The palms form an exception to this general rule, possessing neither proper bark, nor 

 fascicles of vessels displayed in any circular form : the bark being produced by a remnant of 

 tBe leaves, and the vessels nmning in a straight line without regular order, and ^irronnded by 

 f ell^iTar substance. 



