6 TH BSA UsDsU BONS BU see heeies 
others carry a powerful sting. The bag on top is filled with air and flaunts 
a puckered crest which may be turned in any direction to steer by wind 
currents. Apparently only a limpid mass of gorgeous color, this creature is 
in reality one of the many peculiar but singularly successful dwellers of 
salt water. 
Late one night, Dr. Harold Humm, the Duke botanist, took us down to 
the pier to witness a most unusual sight. He lowered an oar into the inky 
black water and waved it back and forth. As though by magic, millions of 
small electric lights flashed on in the agitated area, glowed for a minute, 
then faded. Other movements in the water produced the same results. 
We were watching luminescent bacteria and protozoa, microscopic creatures 
which produce some chemical change in their own bodies when agitated and 
form lucifren, the same material which makes the firefly glow. Dr. Humm 
told us that he once walked along the shoreline at night and could see his 
footprints for 150 yards behind him. 
With this last fascinating experience, we left the ocean behind and 
turned inland toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. How inviting they looked 
as we circled higher and higher through the verdant hills that climbed as a 
ladder to their summits. Soon we were among them. I know now why 
some Americans call the southern Appalachians the most beautiful moun- 
tains in the world. They don’t tower 14,000 feet in the air, rugged, defiant, 
and breath-takingly magnificent like the mighty Rockies. Their beauty lies 
in the serene, peaceful charm of rolling mountains partly hidden in a pale 
blue haze, even on the clearest day. In those mountains are heavily-wooded 
slopes, dark ravines where rushing streams surge downward past rocky 
banks, wide flat valleys where tobacco grows and the haze seems to love to 
settle. Most of the ridges range between 2500 and 4000 feet elevation and 
reflect those varying shades of green which are the pride of a mixed hard- 
wood forest. But there was another color trying to fit into the pattern, an 
unharmonious one that should not have been there. The color was silver 
and we found it all over the mountains on the trunks of dead chestnut trees. 
A century ago the American chestnut was one of the most useful of all our 
forest trees and one of the best loved. So abundant was it in eastern North 
America that ecologists named certain regions as oak-chestnut communities. 
About fifty years ago a tiny fungus (Endothea parasitica) accidentally was 
brought into this country on some introduced plants. No one could even 
guess the tremendous destruction that small oversight would cost. The tiny 
plant found a happy home immediately in the bark of the chestnut tree and 
began to multiply by the thousands. There were no enemies to curb its 
efforts; they had all been left behind on foreign soil, and it takes hundreds 
of years for new ones to develop in a strange land. So the fungus spread, 
its microscopic spores carried innocently by the wind, on the feet of birds, 
squirrels, and insects, the length of the Appalachian mountains and west- 
ward as far as the chestnuts ranged. Everywhere it struck, chestnuts died. 
They could not survive with their bark destroyed anymore than man can 
live without a skin. The millions of dead trees left standing on the 
Allegheny ridges bear mute testimony to the thoroughness of the chestnut 
blight. Fortunately chestnuts sprout from the base of a dead tree as well 
