365 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF A BEECH TWIG. 
BY HARLAND COULTAS. 
E VERY part of a tree, whether it be leaf, shoot, branchlet, 
or branch, represents exactly the organic condition of the 
tree at an earlier period of its life, and one of the stages of 
development through which the entire tree itself has already 
passed. For it is plain that the tree was, at the commencement 
of the first year of its life, a single leaf ; and at its close, a green 
herbaceous shoot, exactly like those annual growths which it 
now makes at the sides and extremities of its branches. In 
the spring of the second year, the buds formed by the leaves 
of the first year at the sides and summit of the first year’s 
growth or shoot, developed into new growths or shoots, which 
were constructed after precisely the same pattern as the first 
years shoot. They presented in autumn, when defoliated, pre- 
cisely the same external appearances, having side and terminal 
buds, and the same peculiar form of leaf-scar. We are, there- 
fore, necessarily led to regard them as only a repetition of the 
first year’s shoot. For as the leaf is a unit, through the repeti- 
tion of which the first year’s shoot is formed, so, also, is the first 
year’s shoot itself a unit, but of a higher and more complex 
character, through repetition of which the branches, and ulti- 
mately the entire tree itself is constructed. The whole tree is 
therefore represented in each of its parts, and if we take the 
terminal branches or twigs of a tree, and study them care- 
fully, we shall obtain correct views not only of the tree during 
the first years of its life, but of those general and peculiar laws 
of growth which govern the entire tree itself. 
To render the principle of these researches clearly under- 
stood, we have selected a beech twig, which the accompanying 
plate most faithfully represents. 
By looking at Plate XVIII. the reader will see that the primary 
or central axis of the twig has put forth fifteen secondary axes 
or side-shoots. The figures in the plate, placed opposite the 
annular scars left by the winter leaves, will assist the reader in 
estimating the amount of growth made by the twig year after 
year ; for he has only to bear in mind that these annular scars 
mark the place of the bud, or the terminal growth of the twig, 
during the year indicated by the figures, to place, as it were, 
VOL. II. — NO. vii. 2 c 
