Forest and Stream 
Copyright, 1906, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 



Terms, $3 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. | 
Six peouthe, a1 50. ) 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, | JANUARY 3s 1906 s 


_ The object of this journal will be to studiously 
promote a healthful interest in outdoor recre- 
ation, and to cultivate a refined taste for natural 
objects. Announcement in first number of 
ForeEsT AND STREAM, Aug. 14, 1873. 
NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS. 
Beginning with Jan. 1, 1906, the subscription 
price of ForEST AND STREAM 1s $3.00 per year; 
$1.50 for six months; $1 for four months. 
All subscriptions now on our books which 
have been paid at the $4.00 rate, and which run 
for any period into 1906, will be extended pro 
rata to conform to the changed price, 
THE NEW FOREST AND STREAM. 
Tue changed form of the ForEsT AND STREAM 
has been 
Words of praise and of appreciation have come 
thick and fast from friends old and new. Some 
received with unstinted approval. 
of these expressions of commendation are printed 
on another page. The welcome thus accorded is 
extremely gratifying. 
The paper is not yet all that its editors hope 
No paper ever comes up to the 
but 
the ideal stands as an incentive, as something to 
that it may be. 
ideal of those who have the making of it; 
work toward. In its new form, with its larger 
opportunities, and with the continued support of 
its hosts of friends—readers and contributors— 
we mean to make Forest AND STREAM more than 
ever the valued companion of intelligent men and 
women who are interested in those special out- 
door topics which it has made its own. 
NATURE’S DEFENSE TO HER CHILDREN. 
Mr. RAnvotpH’s capital picture of elk on a hill- 
side, printed in last week’s Forest .AND STREAM, 
may well enough recall to many a reader things 
that he too has seen. This does not necessarily 
mean that any very great proportion of hunters 
have ever seen elk in such a situation, but most 
people who have had the opportunity to be much 
out of doors have seen just the things which the 
picture suggests. Here is a group of large ani- 
mals, feeding in the open, not concealed by under- 
brush nor by tree trunks through which they are 
seen, but standing on the bald hillside in the 
fierce glare of the sun; and yet how perfectly 
these animals blend with and become a part of the 
surrounding landscape. Of almost each animal 
some portion can be distinctly seen, but there is 
hardly one in which the outlines of the creature 
are not hidden because it stands against a back- 
ground from which it cannot be distinguished. 
Much has been written about protective colora- 
tion, and the subject is a familiar one, yet almost 
every man, in his daily life abroad, has seen 
examples of it which astonished him. What is 

more common than to see a dog stop in such 
fashion that we know the quail is close under his 
nose, and then failing to start it or to find it, it 
suddenly bursts out from under our very feet, 
from a place that we had carefully looked at. 
Many a country dweller has searched up and 
down a tree trunk or along a limb in search of 
the tree frog whose note he had traced to the 
very spot and has had his eye pass again and 
again over a little gray knot, which at last he dis- 
covers to be the animal he was in search of. 
Almost every country boy has at some time 
known where an old ruffed grouse had her nest 
and has frequently gone to look at her. 
who have done this know well how difficult it is 
to see the bird, even though the precise spot 
where she sits is known. The watcher stares and 
stares at the place but cannot make out the out- 
lines of the bird, so perfectly do they and the 
stripes and bars of dark and light color with 
which her feathers are marked blend with the 
surrounding herbage. We recall such a _ nest 
where the bird always had to be carefully looked 
for before she could be seen; then it always hap- 
pened that suddenly her form sprang into the 
eye’s view and it seemed extraordinary that it 
had not been seen before. In front of this nest 
there were certain crossed weed stems which were 
well recognized and behind which it was known 
that the bird’s head must be, yet it took always 
a long time to see her. 
With big game the same thing happens con- 
stantly. Many a man who has hunted much has 
crept up to a ridge, looked over and studied the 
landscape with care, and then having satisfied 
himself that no game was in sight has stepped 
out into plain view, seen a deer rise from its bed 
or slip out of some little thicket and put itself in 
a position of safety without offering opportunity 
for a shot. This seeming invisibility, even when 
they are in plain sight, makes the photographing 
of wild animals a matter of great difficulty. In 
another column is quoted an experience illustrat- 
ing something of this. 
We recall as vividly as if it were yesterday 
carefully climbing a ridge in Wyoming and study- 
ing a sagebrush basin which lay before us. 
Glasses and good eyes were used but absolutely 
nothing was seen, and finally we stepped over the 
hill, went partly down the open and then stopped 
and sat down to smoke. We had had time to 
light the pipes and to talk for a while, and as we 
sat and smoked, with our faces directly toward 
the basin, slowly there grew out of’nothing, feed- 
ing quietly where he had been feeding all along, 
a mountain sheep, which was the game we were 
seeking. 
To most of her wild creatures nature has given 
a wonderful defense in their adaptation to their 
surroundings, and whether it be—as in the picture 
referred to—a stately bull elk or a timorous deer, 
or a little chief hare sitting on the top of a rock 
near his burrow, they are all alike—hard to see. 
Those - 

VOLE LXVI—No. 2: 
| No. 346 Broadway, New York 
AS GOOQDLY, TREE. 
THE giant bombax, ceiba or silk cotton tree near 
the Government building in Nassau, is one of 
the famous trees of the world.’ In size it is a 
veritable prodigy. The aerial roots have grown 
into immense buttresses, giving strength to the 
trunk in its support of the massive branches, which 
in their proportions rival the goodly trunks of 
lesser trees. The buttresses radiate forty-five feet 
from the center; the great limbs span a circle of 
110 feet. The tree is venerable as well as mighty. 
It was planted by one John Miller more than two 
centuries ago. An old print of Nassau in 1802 
shows the tree as it was at that date; and it was 
then very much as it is now. The extraordinary 
aerial development of the roots is explained by 
the impenetrableness of the soil. The Bahamas 
are of coral formation; they are bare reefs of 
rock, with extremely scanty soil. The roots of 
trees cannot penetrate the rock; they must develop 
above the surface—a form of growth which has 
familiar illustration in our own forests in the 
pines and hemlocks which spring from the inter- 
stices of rocks and expand and intrench them- 
selves by conforming to the surface and fitting 
into every point of vantage. 

The ceiba is one of the most magnificent trees 
of the tropics. It is indigenous to warm climates 
in Asia, Africa and America. The name of the 
genus is Bombax, which is a Greek word mean- 
ing cotton. The name is applied with reference 
to the pods of cotton the tree bears. A common 
name is silk cotton tree. The species to which the 
Bahama and Cuba ceiba or silk cotton belongs 
furnishes a cotton which cannot be spun, but 
which has a use for stuffing pillows and other 
like purposes, There is in Mexico another genus 
which produces textile cotton. The ceiba attains 
majestic growth. There are in Cuba specimens 
too feet in height, the trunks rising seventy-five 
feet smooth and round without knot or limb, 
the great umbrella top spreading out a hundred 
feet, and the tree supported and upheld against 
the tempests by the great buttresses at the base, 
which are everywhere characteristic of the ceibas’ 
growth. We show among our pictures another 
Nassau ceiba, illustrating this buttressed expan- 
sion of the aerial roots in the form of a wooden 
wall, which has been utilized by the indolent land 
owner to piece out the stone wall of his grounds. 
Everywhere forming a conspicuous feature of 
the landscape and commanding admiration, the 
ceiba is one of the forms of tropical vegetation 
the traveler remembers most vividly, and which 
allure him back to the land of forest monarchs. 
In Havana is piously cherished a ceiba tree 
which is a direct descendant of the original ceiba 
under which Velazquez, the founder, celebrated 
mass at the establishment of the town; and San- 
tiago has a ceiba of historic interest, as the tree 
under which took place the surrender of the 
Spanish forces to the Army of the United States. 
