1883 .] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
459 
“ A great city! ” cried my friend. “ Why that is 
only a cluster of Ant Hills ! ” 
My friends, young and old, will find, and can 
6ee all I have described, and a good deal more, if 
they will carefully examine one of the Ant Hills 
to be found in almost every part of our country. 
Nuts and Nutting. 
Of all the months of the year, October is the 
most enjoyable, and of all the sports which coun¬ 
try children enjoy, none bring more pleasure than 
a nutting excursion. True, many of our boys 
and girls live where there are no woods, and, of 
course, no nuts. We will not pity them, for, no 
doubt, they enjoy these October days in some other 
manner. There is much to be gathered on a nut¬ 
ting excursion besides the nuts, and those will en¬ 
joy it best who see the most, and find interest in 
all around them. To be in the woods on one of 
these glorious days is a pleasure of itself. The 
warm air, the golden light, the crisp carpet of 
fallen leaves, and that fragrance, that “ woodsy ” 
odor, not met with elsewhere, all make a day in 
the woods a day of delights. Then the squirrels, 
what active nutters they are ! It is interesting to 
watch them as they go about selecting their win¬ 
ter stores. Squirrels by no means take the nuts as 
they come. Should you come across one of their 
winter store-houses, you will find that it contains 
only the best, soundest, and largest nuts. They 
spend a great deal of time in selecting these before 
they add them to their winter’s provisions. Our 
principal nuts, at least the favorite kinds, are the 
hickory and chestnut, the butternut and black wal¬ 
nut not being so generally liked. Beech nuts are 
sometimes very good, but our hazel nuts are quite 
indifferent. It requires a frost to open the husks 
of the hickory and the burs of the chestnut, but 
boys, who care more for nutting than for nuts, 
often go to the woods before many have fallen. 
The nuts are brought down by a stout boy who 
climbs the trees and pulls them, or heats, or, 
“ throbs ” the tree. It is better, so far as abun¬ 
dance of nuts is concerned, to wait until they fall, 
though there is quite as much fun if the burs have 
to be cracked open. Tou will soon learn one thing 
in nutting, that nut-bearing trees differ greatly in 
their fruit; some chestnuts are twice as large as 
others, and hickory nuts, or shellbarks, not only 
vary in size, but notably in the thinness of their 
shells. It is well to note the trees that bear the 
finest nuts, that you may visit them in other years. 
You know that your nuts are not so sweet and 
pleasant to eat when first gather¬ 
ed as they are after they have 
dried for some weeks. But the 
chestnut will keep on drying, and 
the meat will in time become too 
hard to be eatable. The best way 
to treat chestnuts is to let them 
dry a little, and then place them 
in a box or barrel, mixed with 
dryish sand. This will prevent 
them from getting too dry, and 
keep them in an eatable condition 
all winter. Aside from the pleas¬ 
ures of nutting, many a boy has 
found it profitable, and by the sale 
of nuts increased his pocket money. 
Tiny Things. 
“Uncle Ted, what did mamma 
call you a genius for the other 
day?”—“ I am sure, my dear boy, 
I haven’t the faintest idea. What 
had I been doing just at that time ? 
do you remember?”—“I remem- 
beryouhad made two orthree little 
baskets for me out of cherry stones, and when I 
showed them to mamma, she said you were a 
genius.”—“It does not require much ingenuity to 
make such things as those, for I think almost any 
one could do it, with a little practice,” said Uncle 
Ted, as he went on whittling a small boat out of 
an unpromising looking piece of wood.—“ Well, 
then, if you’re not a genius,” said Ralph, “ what 
is a genius ?”—“ Why, Ralph, a genius is a person 
who can do something that very few if any other 
persons can do, from not having either the ability 
or perseverance. For instance, Pierre Lyonnet, 
a French naturalist, dissected a common cater¬ 
pillar. This does not seem like a very remarkable 
feat until we learn that the number of muscles 
alone contained in that tiny creature amounted to 
four thousand and forty-one, the number of nerves 
and branches very much greater. When his book 
describing it, of six hundred pages (think of six 
hundred pages about a caterpillar!) made its ap¬ 
pearance, it was considered one of the most won¬ 
derful works ever written.”—“ I should think he 
would have needed ten pairs of eyes,” said Ralph, 
whose own eyes had grown very saucer-like, 
while his uncle was talking.—“ So much for what 
a genius in natural history could do,” said Uncle 
Ted. “ Now, what do you think of a man who 
could carve out of ivory a four-wheeled chariot, 
with four horses, and also a ship full rigged, but 
all so tiny that a bee could hide the chariot and 
horses and ship under its wings. The man who 
did all that lived very long ago, but the one who 
writes about it can be relied upon as truthful. 
Then there was a locksmith, in the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth, who made a lock of iron, steel, and 
brass, and a key also. In addition to this, he made 
a chain of gold of forty-three links, which he fas¬ 
tened to the lock and key, and then put it around 
the neck of a flea, which drew the whole with per¬ 
fect ease. I have heard of a cherry-stone basket, 
such as I make, containing fourteen pairs of dice, 
the spots of which were so distinct that they could 
be seen without a microscope. One genius, whose 
business it was to make iron mills, made them so 
small, with all the necessary machinery for work¬ 
ing after being started, that they could be carried 
in a good-sized sleeve, and yet so powerful that 
one, in a single day, could grind enough meal for 
eight men. But more wonderful than all these 
things, was a set of dishes, exhibited in Rome, in 
the time of Paul the Fifth. The set consisted of 
sixteen hundred dishes, perfect in every part, and 
yet so very small that the whole could be enclosed 
in a case made out of a pepper corn of the ordinary 
size. They were too small to he seen without 
magnifying glasses.” 
“ Oh, dear 1” said Ralph, screwing up his eyes, 
“it makes my eyes ache to think of such things.” 
—“ It would have made your eyes ache to read 
some of the things that have been written, I’m 
sure,” said Uncle Ted. “ Some one, who must 
have had a spite against Queen Elizabeth, wrote 
the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s 
Prayer, the Queen’s name, and the year, within the 
compass of an English penny (you know I gave 
you one the other day), and then presented it to 
her Majesty, who was of course obliged to use 
glasses in order to read it.”—“ Well, I’ll tell you 
what I think, Uncle Ted,” said Ralph, when his 
uncle seemed to have talked himself tired and had 
taken to whittling again, “ I don’t believe those 
people had much of anything to do when they 
spent their time on those little things, and I don’t 
want to be a genius. I want to be a doctor, like 
my papa, and be busy all the time.”—“ Good for 
you, Ralph ; you’re a boy after my own heart; but 
I don’t want you to think that the geniuses I have 
been telling you about are the best kind. The 
great painters, of whom you will learn some day, 
were geniuses, but they were hard workers, and 
my idea is, that a true genius is a man with an 
idea who works to carry it out with all his might.” 
Regarding Sun-Spots. 
A young friend has seen it stated that an un¬ 
usually cool summer is caused by spots on the sun, 
and wishes to know “ what these spots are, and 
what causes them.” He has asked a question 
which many of the most learned astronomers have 
long been trying to answer, but they have not en¬ 
tirely succeeded. These spots, which appear at a 
distance from the sun’s equator, and on both sides 
of it, vary in numbers, and differ greatly in size, 
some of them being thousands of miles across. 
Sometimes no spots are to be seen, and then they 
gradually increase until they become very numer¬ 
ous, and then after a time disappear. It is found 
that their times of greatest numbers occur about 
once in ten or eleven years, and it is supposed that 
they may affect the amount of heat that the sun 
gives off to the earth. So little is really known 
about the sun itself, that what takes place on its 
surface is a matter of guess work. The spots, seen 
through a telescope, have a dark centre (umbra), 
TELESCOPIC APPEARANCE OP A SUN-SPOT. 
surrounded by a less dark portion (penumbra), and 
sometimes a still darker place is seen in the middle 
(nucleus). One view is, that the sun is surrounded 
by layers of bright matter, like clouds, and a break 
or opening in the outer layers, exposing those be¬ 
low, cause the appearance known as sun-spots. 
The engraving shows the telescopic appearance of 
a very large spot. So much has been learned in 
late years about the sun and other heavenly bodies, 
that it is likely we shall in time know more about 
the nature of the spots and what causes them. 
