XCII 
OAKS LIKE TO BE DIFFERENT 
I SN’T IT ODD that brothers in the plant world have 
tastes as different as those of human brothers and in¬ 
sist on living very different sorts of lives! 
There are the oaks, for example, all marked by the 
acorn as being of the same family. Its members choose 
widely varying careers. The California live oak is by 
instinct a mountaineer, while the swamp oak of the East 
takes to the lowlands. 
This mountain live oak seems quite possessed with the 
idea of climbing toward the skies. It positively refuses 
to live anywhere except high up on mountain sides. It 
will sometimes come as low down as the two-thousand- 
foot line above the sea, but never lower. From there it 
climbs steadily until it gets to nine thousand feet. Up 
there conditions are so cold and unpromising that it can¬ 
not get along very well, but it clings to the mountain side. 
Life is so hard for it that it is no longer a tree but a mere 
shrub a foot high. Despite this fact, year after year it 
produces the acorns that prove it to be an oak. 
The swamp oak grows in low countries with its feet in 
the water. It may reach one hundred feet in height, but 
its arms are likely to be well supplied with bends and 
elbows. It is knotty and gnarled and looks as though it 
were drawing up its arms to show its muscles. And it is 
strong beyond conception. In the woods it grows tall in 
reaching up for the sunlight. Its mountain brother, on 
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