gradually disappearing. This is, I suppose, unavoidable, but it is a matter of regret. Forests have so many charms of their own. They give a delightful impression of space and of abund

ance.

Trees, as

The extravagance is sublime. Jefferies says, "throw away handfuls of flower; and in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian-everything on a scale of splendid waste. Such noble, broadcast, openarmed waste is delicious to behold.. Never was there such a lying proverb as 'Enough is as good as a feast.' Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious carpets of petals, green mountains of oakleaves. The greater the waste the greater the enjoyment the nearer the approach to real life."

It is of course impossible here to give any idea of the complexity of structure of our

forest trees. A slice across the stem of a tree shows many different tissues with more or less technical names, bark and cambium, medullary rays, and pith; air-vessels, punctate vessels, woody fibres, liber fibres, scalariform vessels, and other more or less specialised tissues.

Let us take a single leaf. The name is synonymous with anything very thin, so that we might well fancy that a leaf would consist of only one or two layers of cells. Far from it, the leaf is a highly complex structure. On the upper surface are a certain number of scattered hairs, while in the bud these are often numerous, long, silky, and serve to protect the young leaf, but the greater number fall off soon after the leaf expands. The hairs are seated on a layer of flattened cells the skin or epidermis. Below this are one or more layers of "pallisade cells," the function of which seems to be to regulate the quantity of light entering the leaf. Under these again is the "parenchyme," several layers of more or less rounded cells, leaving air spaces and passages between them. From place to place in

the parenchyme run "fibro-vascular bundles," forming a sort of skeleton to the leaf, and comprising air-vessels on the upper side, rayed or dotted tubes with woody fibre below, and vessels of various kinds. The under surface of the leaf is formed by another layer of flattened cells, supporting generally more or less hairs, and some of them specially modified so as to leave minute openings or stomata" leading leading into the air passages. These stomata are so small that there are millions on a single leaf, and on plants growing in dry countries, such as the Evergreen Oak, Oleander, etc., they are sunk in pits, and further protected by tufts of hair.

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complex.

They consist of

The cells of the leaf again are themselves. They consist of a cell wall perforated by extremely minute orifices, of protoplasm, cell fluid, and numerous granules of "Chlorophyll," which give the leaf its green

color.

While these are, stated very briefly, the essential parts of a leaf, the details differ in every species; while in the same species and even in the same plant, the leaves present

minor differences according to the situation in which they grow.

Since, then, there is so much complex structure in a single leaf, what must it be in a whole plant? There is a giant seaweed (Macrocystis), which has been known to reach a length of 1500 feet, as also do some of the lianas of tropical forests. These, however, attain no great bulk, and the most gigantic specimens of the vegetable kingdom yet known are the Wellingtonia (Sequoia) gigantea, which grows to a height of 450 feet, and the Blue Gum (Eucalyptus) even to 480.

One is apt to look on animal structure as more delicate, and of a higher order, than that of plants. And so no doubt it is. Yet an animal, even man himself, will recover from a wound or an operation more rapidly and more perfectly than a tree.1

Trees again derive a special interest from the venerable age they attain. In some cases, no doubt, the age is more or less mythical, as, for instance, the Olive of Minerva at Athens, the Oaks mentioned by Pliny, "which were

1 Sir J. Paget, On the Pathology of Plants.

1

thought coeval with the world itself," the Fig tree, "under which the wolf suckled the founder of Rome and his brother, lasting (as Tacitus calculated) 840 years, putting out new shoots, and presaging the translation of that empire from the Cæsarian line, happening in Nero's reign." But in other cases the estimates rest on a surer foundation, and it cannot be doubted that there are trees still living which were already of considerable size at the time of the Conquest. The Soma Cypress of Lombardy, which is 120 feet high and 23 in circumference, is calculated to go back to forty years before the birth of Christ. Francis the First is said to have driven his sword into it in despair after the battle of Padua, and Napoleon altered his road over the Simplon so as to spare it.

Ferdinand and Isabella in 1476 swore to maintain the privileges of the Biscayans under the old Oak of Guernica. In the Ardennes an Oak cut down in 1824 contained a funeral urn and some Samnite coins. A writer at the time drew the conclu

1 Evelyn's Sylva.