22 October 1860 – 28 October 1860

P. M.— To Walden Woods. See in the yard many chip-birds, but methinks the chestnut crown is not so distinct as in the spring, — has a pale line in middle of it, —and many, maybe females or young, have no chestnut at all. I do not find them so described. Are not maples inclined to die in a white pine wood? There was the one in Merriam’s grove and the sickly ones in our grove in the yard. I notice that the first shrubs and trees to spring up in the sand on railroad cuts in the woods are sweet-fern, birches, willows, and aspens, and pines, white and pitch; but all but the last two chiefly disappear in the — thick wood that follows. The former are the pioneers. Such sandy places, the edges of meadows, and sprout- lands are almost the only localities of willows with us. In the Deep Cut big wood (Stow’s), pines and oaks, there are thousands of little white pines as well as many oaks. After a mixed wood like this you may have a mixed wood, but after dense pines, commonly oak chiefly, yet not always; for, to my surprise, I find that in the pretty dense pitch pine wood of Wheeler’s blackberry-field, where there are only several white pines old enough to bear, and accordingly more than a thousand pitch pine seeds to one white pine one, yet there are countless white pines springing up under the pitch pines (as well as many oaks), and very few or scarcely any little pitch pines, and they sickly, or a thousand white pine seedlings to one pitch pine, — the same proportion reversed (in inverse proportion). It is the same in the pigeon-place lot east of this. So if you should cut these pitch pines you would have next a white pine wood with some oaks in it, the pines taking the lead. Indeed, these white pines bid fair to supplant the pitch pines at last, for they grow well and steadily. This reminds me that, though I often see little white pines under pines and under oaks, I rarely if ever (unless I am mistaken) see many young pitch pines there. How is it? Do the pitch pines require more light and air? You may conveniently tell the age of a pine, especially », white pine, by cutting off the lowest branch that is still growing and counting its rings. ‘Then estimate or count the rings of a pine growing near in an opening, of the same height as to that branch, and add the two sums together. I found in the midst of this pitch pine wood a white oak some eight feet high and an inch and a half thick at ground, which had borne a great many — say sixty or a hundred — large oak-balls, and the ground beneath and near by was strewn with the fragments of fifty of them, which some creature, probably a squirrel, — for a bird could hardly have opened the hard nut-like kernel within, — had opened, no doubt for their living contents, and all the inside was gone. They looked like egg-shells strewn about. Opening one, I found within the hard kernel a humpbacked black fly nearly half an inch long, body and wings, with a very large or full shining black abdomen and two small black spots on each wing. The only two that I open have flies in them. Harris says that this fly is the Cynips confluens, and that the grub becomes a chrysalis in the autumn and not, commonly, a fly till spring, though he has known this gall-fly to come out in October. It must have been squirrels (or mice) that opened them, for birds could not break into the hard kernel. Counted the rings of a white pine stump in Hub- bard’s owl wood by railroad. Ninety-four years. So this was probably second growth. Swamps are, of course, least changed with us, — are nearest to their primitive state of any woodland. Commonly they have only been cut, not redeemed. I see how meadows were primitively kept in the state of meadow by the aid of water, — and even fire and wind. For example, Heywood’s meadow, though it may have been flowed a hundred years ago by the dam below, has been bare almost ever since in the midst of the wood. ‘Trees have not grown over it. Maples, alders, birches, pitch and white pines are slow to spread into it. I have named them in the order of their slow- ness. The last are the foremost, — furthest into the meadow, — but they are sickly-looking. You may say that it takes a geological change to make a wood-lot there. Looked at stumps in J. Hosmer’s lot, hillside south of first Heywood meadow, cut eleven (?) years ago. One white pine perfect in shape, forty-one rings; two large oak stumps, each one hundred and nine rings; and a large pitch pie, probably same age. ‘These stumps are all well preserved. The whole outline and the rings can for most part be counted; but they are successive ridges, and the bark is ready to fall off, and they are more or less mossed over with cockscomb moss. The main part of this lot north of this hole is apparently oak sprouts next railroad. I next look through Emerson’s lot (half-burned ~ cut last spring). The last year’s growth (and present) chiefly oak, with a little pine. The stumps are chiefly oak and pitch pine, with apparently some hemlock (? ) and chestnut and a little white pine. (So it seems the pitch pine and hemlock did not survive the old cutting; the pitch pine did not come up under itself.) The pitch pine stumps are all decayed but the core and the bark, ™~ and hardly in any instance show a trace of the axe. They are low rounded mounds, yet the inmost parts are solid fat, and the bark edge is very plain. The oak stumps are very much better preserved, — have half or two thirds their form, and show that proportion of the cutting, — yet the sap-wood is often gone (with the bark), and as often the inmost heart. You can partially count rings even. Yet some of these are as decayed as the pines, and all flaky, and, turned up, look like stumps of old teeth with their prongs. They (the oaks) are all loose to the foot, yet you will see the white bark lying about a white oak stump when all the rest is about gone. Most of the old stumps, both oaks and pines, can easily be found now, but the rings of not one oak even can be wholly counted, or nearly. I could not be sure about the hemlock and chestnut, only that there was some of both. ‘There was little moss on these stumps, either pine or oak; the latter too crumbly. The southeast part of this lot, beyond the deep cove, is apparently an oak sprout-land and good part pine. I see what were sprouts from a scarlet oak stump eighteen or more inches in diameter and from white oaks one foot in diameter; yet in the other lot, though there were so many large oak stumps, I did not notice that trees had ever sprung from them. You find plenty of old oak stumps without their trees in the woods, which (if nothing else) shows that there is an end to this mode of propagation. I could tell a white pine here when it was for the most part a mere rotten mound, by the regularity crosswise of the long knots a foot from the ground m the top of the rotten core, representing the peculiarly regular branches of the little white pine and the best preserved as the hardest and pitchiest part. It is apparent that fires often hasten the destruction of these stumps. They are very apt to be charred. I dug m the hollow where an oak had been, and though it was so completely decayed that I found not a particle that looked like decayed wood or even bark and my spade met with no resistance, yet there were perfectly open channels raying out from this hollow with the pellicle of the root for a wall still, which for a hundred years the earth had learned to respect. Indeed, these stumps, both of this age and more recent, are the very metropolis of the squirrels and mice. Such are their runways. Yet what is the character of our gratitude to these squirrels, these planters of forests? We regard them as vermin, and annually shoot and destroy them in great numbers, because —if we have any excuse — they sometimes devour a little of our Indian corn, while, perhaps, they are planting the nobler oak-corn (acorn) in its place. In various parts of the country an army of grown-up boys assembles for a squirrel hunt. They choose sides, and the side that kills the greatest number of thousands enjoys a supper at the expense of the other side, and the whole neighborhood rejoices. Would it [not] be far more civilized and humane, not to say godlike, to recognize once in the year by some signifi- cant symbolical ceremony the part which the squirrel plays, the great service it performs, in the economy of the universe ? The Walden side of Emerson’s main wood-lot is oak (except a few pines in the oaks at the northwest or railroad end), and the oaks are chiefly sprouts, some thirty years old. Yet, not to mention the pitch pine stumps, there are a great many oak stumps without sprouts, and yet not larger stumps than the others. How does this happen? They are all of the same age, z. €. cut at the same time. Sometimes, evidently, when you see oak stumps from which no trees have sprung in the midst of a pine or birch wood, it may be because the land was cleared and burned over and cultivated after the oaks were cut.

Anthony Wright tells me that he cut a pitch pine on Damon’s land between the Peter Haynes road and his old farm, about *41, in which he counted two hundred and seventeen rings, which was therefore older than Concord, and one of the primitive forest. He tells me of a noted large and so-called primitive wood, Inches Wood, between the Harvard turnpike and Stow, some- times called Stow Woods, in Boxboro and Stow. Also speaks of the wood north of Wetherbee’s mill near Annursnack and belonging to W., as large and old, if not cut. Melvin thinks that a fox would not on an average weigh more than ten pounds. Says that he saw a flock of brant yesterday by day. (Rarely seen by day or even by night here.) He says that Hildreth collects moss (probably cladonia) from the rocks for kindling.

P. M. —'To Walden Woods. See three little checkered adders lying in the sun by a stump on the sandy slope of the Deep Cut; yet sluggish. They are seven or eight inches long. The dark blotches or checkers are not so brown as in large ones. There is a transverse dark mark on the snout and a forked light space on the back part [of] the head. \/ Examine again Emerson’s pond lot, to learn its age by the stumps cut last spring. I judge from them that they were some five (?) years cutting over the part next the water, for I count the rmgs of many stumps and they vary in number from twenty-four or five to thirty, though twenty-six, seven, and eight are commonest, as near as I can count. It 1s hard to distinguish the very first ring, and often one or more beside before you reach the circumference. But, these being almost all sprouts, I know that they were pretty large the first year. I repeatedly see beside the new ~N tree (cut last spring) the now well-rotted stump from which it sprang. But I do not see the stump from which the last sprang. I should like to know how long they may continue to spring from the stump. Here are shoots of this year which have sprung vigorously from stumps cut in the spring, which had sprung in like manner some twenty-eight or thirty years ago from a stump which is still very plain by their sides. I see that some of these thirty-year trees are sprouts from a white oak stump twenty inches in diameter, — four from one in one case. Sometimes, when a white pine stump is all crumbling beside, there is a broad shingle-like flake left from the centre to the circumference, the old ridge of the stump, only a quarter of an inch thick, and this betrays aaty the axe in a straight inclined uc uh ‘. surface. The southeast part of Emerson’s lot, next the pond, is yet more exclusively oak sprouts, or oak from oak, with fewer pine stumps. I examine an oak seedling in this. There are two very slender shoots rising ten or more inches above the ground, which, traced down- ward, conduct to a little stub, which I mistook for a very old root or part of a larger tree, but, digging it up, I found it to be a true seedling. This seedling had died down to the ground six years ago, and then these two slender shoots, such as you commonly see in oak woods, had started. The root was a regular seedling root (fusiform if straightened), at least seven eighths of an inch thick, while the largest shoot was only one eighth of an inch thick, though six years old and ten inches high. The root was probably ten years old when the seedling first died down, and is now some sixteen years old. Yet, as I say, the oak is only ten inches high. This shows how it endures and gradually pines and dies. As you look down on it, it has two turns, and three as you look from the side, so firmly is it rooted. Anyone will . be surprised on digging up some of ~~@ ~“ these lusty oaken carrots. a Look at stumps in Heywood’s lot, southeast side pond, from Emerson’s to the swim- ming-place. They are white pine, oak, pitch pine, etc. I count rings of three white pine (from sixty to seventy). There are a few quite large white pine stumps; on one, ninety rings. One oak gives one hun- dred and sixteen rings. A pitch pine some fifteen or sixteen inches over gives about one hundred and thirty-five. All these are very easy, if not easier than ever, to count. The pores of the pines are distinct ridges, and the pitch is worn off. (Many white and pitch pines elsewhere cut this year cannot be counted, they are so covered with pitch.) I remember this as a particularly dense and good-sized wood, mixed pine and oak. Mrs. Heywood’s pitch pines by the shore, judging from some cut two or three years ago, are about eighty- five years old. As far as I have noticed, the pitch pine is the slowest-growing tree (of pines and oaks) and gives the most rings in the smallest diameter. i Then there are the countless downy seeds Y (thistle-like) of the goldenrods, so fine that we do not eg cae ee, > notice them in the air. They cover our clothes like dust. No wonder they spread over all fields and far into the woods. I see those narrow pointed yellow buds now laid bare so thickly along the slender twigs of the Salix discolor, which is almost bare of leaves.

P. M.— To Eb. Hubbard’s wood and Sleepy Hollow. See a little reddish-brown snake (bright-red beneath) in the path; probably Coluber amenus. Cut one of the largest of the lilacs at the Nutting wall, eighteen inches from the ground. It there mea- sures one and five sixteenths inches and has twenty distinct rings from centre, then about twelve very fine, not thicker than previous three; equals thirty-two in all. It evidently dies down many times, and yet lives and sends up fresh shoots from the root. Jarvis’s hill lot is oak, pitch pine, and some white, and quite old. ‘There are a great many little white pines springing up under it, but I see no pitch. Yet the large pitch are much more common than the large white. Nevertheless the small white have come on much faster and more densely in the hollows just out- side the large wood on the south. E. Hubbard’s mound of pitch pines contains not one seed-bearing white pine, yet there are under these pines many little white pines (whose seed must have blown some distance), but scarcely one pitch pine. The latter, however, are seen along its edge and in the larger openings. So at Moore’s pitch pine promontory south of the Foley house, cut off lately by Walcott. Where the large pines had stood are no little ones, but in the open pasture northward quite a little grove, which had spread from them. Yet from a hasty look at the south end of the Sleepy Hollow Cut pitch pines, it appeared that small pitch pines were abundant under them. Vide again. I have seen an abundance of white oak acorns this year, and, as far as I looked, swamp white oak acorns were pretty numerous. Red oak acorns are also pretty common. Black and scarlet oak I find also, but not very abundant. I have seen but few shrub oak, com- paratively. Of the above, only the white oak have decayed so remarkably. The others are generally sound, or a few wormy. The red oak, as far as [ notice, are remarkably sound. ‘The scarlet oak I cut this afternoon are some of them decaying, but not like the white oak. Only the white have sprouted at all, as far as I perceive. I find some scarlet oak acorns on the back side northeast end of Sleepy Hollow which are rounder than usual, considerably like a filbert out of the shell. They are indistinctly marked with meridional lines and thus betray a relation to the black and black shrub oak.’ I see an immense quantity of asparagus seed in the mist of its dead branches, on Moore’s great field of it, near Hawthorne’s. There must be a great many bushels of the seed, and the sight suggested how extensively the birds must spread it. I saw, accordingly, on Haw- thorne’s hillside, a dozen rods north of it, many plants ~, (with their own seed) two or three feet high. It is planted in the remotest swamps in the town. Saw in E. Hubbard’s clintonia swamp a large spider with a great golden-colored abdomen as big as a hazel- nut, on the wet leaves. There was a figure in brown lines on the back, in the form of a pagoda with its stories successively smaller. ‘The legs were pale or whitish, with dark or brown bars. Find many of those pale-brown roughish fungi (t looks like Loudon’s plate of Scleroderma, perhaps verrucosum), two to three inches in diameter. ‘Those which are ripe are so softened at the top as to admit the rain through the skin (as well as after it opens), and the interior is shaking like a jelly, and if you open it you see what looks like a yellowish gum or jelly amid the dark fuscous dust, but it is this water colored by the dust; yet when they are half full of water they emit dust nevertheless. They are in various states, from a firm, hard and dry unopen[ed] to a half-empty and flabby moist cup. See the yellow butterfly still and great devil’s-needles. Dug up and brought home last night three English cherry trees from Heywood’s Peak by Walden. There are a dozen or more there, and several are as handsome as any that you will find in a nursery. They remind me of some much larger which used to stand above the cliffs. This species too comes up in sprout-lands like the wild rum cherry. The amount of it is that such a tree, whose fruit is a favorite with birds, will spring up far and wide and wherever the earth is bared of trees, but since the forest overpowers and destroys them, and also cultivation, they are only found young in sprout-lands or grown up along fences. It looks as if this species preferred a hilltop. Whether the birds are more inclined to convey the seeds there or they find the light and exposure and the soil there which they prefer. ‘These have each one great root, some- what like a long straight horn, making a right angle with the stem and running far off one side close to the ~ surface. The thistles which I now see have their heads re- curved, which at least saves their down from so great a soaking. But when I pull out the down, the seed is for the most part left in the receptacle (?), in regular order there, like the pricks in a thimble. A slightly convex surface. The seeds set like cartridges in a circular car- tridge-box, in hollow cylinders which look like circles crowded into more or less of a diamond, pentagonal, or hexagonal form. The perfectly dry and bristly involucre which hedges them round, so repulsive externally, is very neat and attractive within, — as smooth and tender toward its charge as it is rough and prickly externally toward the foes that might do it injury. It is a hedge of imbricated thin and narrow leafets of a light-brown color, beautifully glossy like silk, a most fit receptacle for the delicate downy parachutes of the seed, a cradle lined with silk or satin. The latter are kept dry under this unsuspected silky or satiny ceiling, whose old and weather-worn and rough outside alone we see, like a mossy roof, little suspecting the delicate and glossy lining. I know of no object more unsightly to a care- less glance than an empty thistle-head, yet, if you ex- amine it closely, it may remind you of the silk-lined cradle in which a prince was rocked. Thus that which seemed a mere brown and worn-out relic of the summer, sinking into the earth by the roadside, turns out to be a precious casket. I notice in the pitch pine wood behind Moore’s the common pinweed (Lechea major or the next) growing on the top of a pitch pine stump which is yet quite in shape and firm, one foot from the ground, with its roots firmly set in it, reaching an inch or two deep. Probably the seed was blown there, perhaps over the snow when it was on a level with the stump.

P. M.— To Baker’s old chestnut lot near Flint’s Pond. As I go through what was formerly the dense pitch pine lot on Thrush Alley (G. Hubbard’s), I observe that the present growth is scrub oak, birch, oaks of various kinds, white pines, pitch pines, willows, and poplars. Apparently, the birch, oaks, and pitch pines are the oldest of the trees. From the number of small white pines in the neighboring pitch pine wood, I should have expected to find larger and also more white pines here. It will finally become a mixed wood of oak and white and pitch pine. There is much cladonia in the lot. Observed yesterday that the row of white pines set along the fence on the west side of Sleepy Hollow had grown very fast, apparently from about the time they were set out, or the last three years. Several had made about seven feet within the three years. Do they not grow the fastest at just this age, or after they get to be about five feet high? I see to-day sprouts from chestnut stumps which are two and a half feet in diameter (2. e. the stumps). One of these large stumps is cut quite low and hollowing, so as to hold water as well as leaves, and the leaves prevent the water from drying up. It is evident that in such a case the stump rots sooner than if high and roof- like. I remember that there were a great many hickories with R. W. E.’s pitch pies when I lived there, but now there are but few comparatively, and they appear to have died down several times and come up again from the root. I suppose it is mainly on account of frosts, though perhaps the fires have done part of it. Are not hickories most commonly found on hills? There are a few hickories in the open land which I once culti- vated there, and these may have been planted there by birds or squirrels. It must be more than thirty-five years since there was wood there. I find little white pines under the pitch pines (of E.), near the pond end, and few or no little pitch pines, but between here and the road about as many of one as of the other, but the old pines are much less dense thai way, or not dense at all. This is the season of the fall when the leaves are whirled through the air like flocks of birds, the season of birch spangles, when you see afar a few clear-yellow leaves left on the tops of the birches. It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there some. twenty years ago. He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow. It is now one of those frosty hollows so common in Walden Woods, where little grows, sheep’s fescue grass, sweet-fern, hazelnut bushes, and oak scrubs whose dead tops are two or three feet high, while the still living shoots are not more than half as high at their base. They have lingered so long and died down annually. At length I see a few birches and pines creeping into it, which at this rate in the course of a dozen years more will suggest a forest there. Was this wise ? Examined the stumps in the Baker chestnut lot which was cut when I surveyed it in the spring of ’52. They were when cut commonly from fifty to sixty years old (some older, some younger). The sprouts from them are from three to six inches thick, and may average — the largest — four inches, and eighteen feet high. The wood is perhaps near half oak sprouts, and these are one and a half to four inches thick, or average two and a half, and not so high as the chestnut. Some of the largest chestnut stumps have sent up no sprout, yet others equally large and very much more decayed have sent up sprouts. Can this be owing to the different time when they were cut? The cutting was after April. The largest sprouts I chanced to notice were from a small stump in low ground. Some hemlock stumps there had a hundred rings. Was overtaken by a sudden thunder-shower. Cut a chestnut sprout two years old. It grew about five and a half feet the first year and three and a half the next, and was an inch in diameter. The tops of these sprouts, the last few inches, had died in the winter, so that a side bud continued them, and this made a slight curve in the sprout, thus: There was on a cross-section, of course, but one ring of pores within the wood, just outside the large pith, the diameter of the first year’s growth being just half an inch, radius a fourth of an inch. The thickness of the second year’s growth was the same, or one fourth, but it was dis- tinctly marked to the naked eye with about seven con- centric lighter lines, which, I suppose, marked so many successive growths or waves of growth, or seasons in its year. These were not visible through a microscope of considerable power, but best to the naked eye. Prob- ably you could tell a seedling chestnut from a vigorous sprout, however old or large, provided the heart were perfectly sound to the pith, by the much more rapid growth of the last the first half-dozen years of its exist- ence. There are scarcely any chestnuts this year near Britton’s, but I find as many as usual east of Flint’s Pond.

Emerson planted his lot with acorns (chiefly white oak) pretty generally the other day. There were a few scarlet oak acorns planted there on the south side in spring of ’59. There is on the Lee farm, west of hill, a small wood-lot of oak and hickory, the south end chiefly hickory. I have come out this afternoon to get ten seedling oaks out of a purely oak wood, and as many out of a purely pine wood, and then compare them. I look for trees one foot or less in height, and convenient to dig up. I could not find one in the last-named wood. I then searched in the large Woodis Park, the most oaken parts of it, wood some twenty-five or thirty years old, but I found only three. There were many shrub oaks and others three or four feet high, but no more of the kind de- scribed. Two of these three had singularly old large and irregular roots, mere gnarled oblong knobs, as it were, with slender shoots, having died down many times. After searching here more than half an hour I went into the new pitch and white pine lot just southwest, toward the old Lee cellar, and there were thousands of the seedling oaks only a foot high and less, quite redden- ing the ground now in some places, and these had per- fectly good roots, though not so large as those near the Corner Spring (next to Rice’s wall). Here is a new but quite open pitch and white pine wood (with birches on south) on cladonia ground. It is so open that many pitch pies are springing up. E. Wood’s dense pitch (and white) pine wood in front of Lee house site conforms to the rule of few or no little pitch pines within it, but many white pines (though not many far within), while the pitch pines are springing up with white pines on the edge and even further toward the road. The white pine wood southeast of this and not far north of railroad, against Wood’s open land, is a new wood. As Iam coming out of this, looking for seedling oaks, I see a jay, which was screaming at me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. This was one, perhaps the most effectual, way in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which I saw under that dense white pine grove. Where will you look for a jay sooner than in a dense pine thicket? It is there they commonly live, and build. By looking to see what oaks grow in the open land near by or along the edge where the wood is extensively pine, I can tell surely what kinds of oaks I shall find under the pines. What if the oaks are far off? Think how quickly a jay can come and go, and how many times in a day! ' Swamp white oak acorns are pretty thick on the ground by the bridge, and all sound that I try. They have no more bitterness than the white oak acorns. I have now examined many dense pine woods, both pitch and white, and several oak woods, in order to see how many and what kind of oak seedlings there were springing up In them, and I do not hesitate to say that seedlings under one foot high are very much more abuni- dant under the pines than under the oaks. ‘They prevail and are countless under the pines, while they are hard to find under the oaks, and what you do find have com- monly — for whatever reason — very old and decayed roots and feeble shoots from them. If you expect oaks to succeed a dense and purely oak wood you must depend almost entirely on sprouts, but they will succeed abundantly to pine where there is not an oak stump for them to sprout from. Notwithstanding that the acorns are produced only by oaks and not by pines, the fact is that there are comparatively few seed- ling oaks a foot or less in height under the oaks but thousands under the pines. I would not undertake to get a hundred oaks of this size suitable to transplant under a dense and pure oak wood, but I could easily get thousands from under pines. What are the reasons for this? First it is certain that, generally speaking, the soil under old oaks is more exhausted for oaks than under old pines. Second, seedling oaks under oaks would be less protected from frosts in the spring just after leafing, yet the sprouts prevail. Third, squirrels and jays resort to evergreens with their forage, and the oaks may not bear so many acorns but that the squirrels may carry off nearly all the sound ones. These are some of the reasons that occur to me. To be more minute :— I dug up three oak seedlings in the Woodis Park oaks, nine in the small open pitch and white pine and adjoin- ing on southwest, and ten in the pitch and white pine of wood between road and railroad. Woodis Park is oak and pine some twenty-five years old (the oak). I chose the oaken parts, but there was always a pine within a rod or two. I looked here till I was discouraged, finding only three in three quarters of an hour. One was like those in pine woods; the other two had singular gnarled and twisted great roots. You would think you had come upon a dead but buried stump. The largest, for stance, was perhaps a red oak nine inches high by one eighth inch at ground and apparently three years old, a slender shoot. The root broke off at about eighteen inches depth, where it was one eighth inch thick, and at three inches below the surface it was one and three eighths inches thick by one inch (being flattish). Two or three of the side or horizontal fibres had developed into stout roots which ran quite horizontally twenty inches and then broke off, and were apparently as long as the tap-root. One of these at three inches below surface was about half an inch thick and perfectly horizontal. It was thus fixed very firmly in the ground. I counted the dead bases or stubs of shoots (beside the present one) and several two or three times as large as this, which had formerly died down, being now perfectly decayed. If there was but one at a time and they decayed successively after living each three years only, — and they probably lived twice as long, — then the root would be thirty years old. But supposing there were one and a half shoots at a time, it would then be some twenty years old. I think that this root may be as old as the large oaks around, or some twenty-five years, more or less. My next nine oaks, from the pmes southwest, may be put with the ten from the E. Wood pines (leaving out one which was twice the required height). Their average age, 2. 'e. of the present shoot, was four years, and average height seven inches. (This includes white oak, shrub oak, black, and apparently red oak.) The roots averaged about ten inches long by three eighths thick at thickest part. Quite a number were shrub oak, which partly accounts for their slenderness. But the rest were not so thick as those near Rice’s wall. Of all the above roots, or the whole twenty-two, none ran di- rectly and perpendicularly downward, but they turned to one side (just under the acorn) and ran more or less horizontally or aslant one to five inches, or say three inches on an average. Of the last nineteen, more than half had died down once at least, so that they were really considerably older than at first appeared. There are, in all cases, at the surface of the ground or head of the root, a ring of dor- mant buds, ready to shoot up when an injury happens to the original shoot. One shoot at least had been cut off, and so killed, by a rabbit. See a very large flock of crows. To speak from recollection of pines and oaks, I should say that our woods were chiefly pme and oak mixed, but we have also (to speak of the large growth, or trees) pure pine and pure oak woods. How are these three produced? Are not the pure pine woods com- monly new woods, 2. e. pioneers? After oaks have once got established, it must be hard to get them out without clearing the land. A pure oak wood may be obtained by cutting off at once and clean a pure and dense pine wood, and again sometimes by cutting the same oak wood. But pines are continually stealing into oaks, and oaks into pines, where respectively they are not too dense, as where they are burned or otherwise thinned, and so mixed woods may arise.

In a pine wood are the little oak seedlings which I have described, also, m the more open parts, little oaks three to six feet high, but unnoticed, and perhaps some other hardwood trees. The pines are cut, and the oaks, etc., soon fill the space, for there is nothing else ready to grow there. Are not the most exclusively pine woods new woods, 2. €., those which have recently sprung up in open land, where oaks do not begin a forest ? It may be that where evergreens most prevail in owr woods, there at the date of their springing up the earth was most bare. P. M. — To Lincoln. Do I not see tree sparrows ? I see little larches two to six feet high in the meadow on the north side the Turnpike, six to twelve rods from Everett’s seed-bearing ones. The seed was evidently blown from these. There is quite a dense birch wood in the field north of the Cut on the Turnpike hill. See much cat-tail whose down has recently burst and shows white on the south side of the heads. The Polyg- onum aviculare is in bloom as freshly and abundantly in some places as ever I saw it. Those great tufts of sedge in the meadows are quite brown and withered. I suppose they have been so since the beginning of the month. Smith’s black walnuts are about half of them fallen. Measure the chestnut stump near the brook northeast of the old Brooks Tavern on Asa White’s land. Its height from the ground will average but twenty inches. Measured one way, its diameter is six feet nine inches, and at right angles with this, eight feet five inches. Its average diameter seven feet seven inches. You might add three to four feet more for the whole stump above ground. Beginning at the outside, I count one hundred and two rings distinctly and am then fif- teen inches from the apparent centre of the tree, for the middle is mostly rotted and gone. Measuring back fifteen inches and counting the rings, I get thirty-nine, which, added to one hundred and two, equals one hun- dred and forty-one for the probable age of the tree. This tree had grown very fast till the last fifty years of its existence, but since comparatively slowly. It had grown nine inches in the last forty-nine years, or one seventh [szc] of an inch in a year, but fifteen inches in the previous forty, or three eighths of an inch in a year. There may possibly have been two shoots or trees grown together, yet I think not. I measured this June Ist, 1852, and it had then been cut, as I remember, but a short time, —a winter, perhaps two winters, before. This would carry its origin back to about 1710. Probably chestnuts did not grow so large in the primi- tive woods, and this was a forest tree, which, as it stood near the edge of the meadow, was left standing. Another much smaller was cut apparently at the same time near by. Having light and air and room, it grew larger than it would have done if its neighbors had not been cut. I also measured the stumps of the two great chestnuts which were cut on Weston’s land south of the pond some five or six years ago. They are cut low, some eight or nine inches above ground. The southeasternmost one measures four feet in diameter and has about eighty rings only (I estimate the first five or six, the heart or core being gone). The other is four and five twelfths feet in diameter and has seventy-three rings only. Or, putting both together, you have an average growth of about a third of an inch in a year. These were as large as any I know standing hereabouts except the Strawberry Hill one, and yet it seems they [were] only some eighty years old. Another, half a mile east of there, cut perhaps some dozen years ago, was twenty-three inches in diameter and had sixty- three rings, and I saw one which had grown faster than any of the above. Yet another stump near the last on the high woodland near the pond was but just two feet in diameter and had one hundred and one rings distinct to the very core, and so fine there I think it was a seedling. From this sprouts had grown some fifteen years ago and [had been] cut last winter on account of a fire, and fresh shoots several feet high had put out from the last. The one that had grown slowly was soundest at the core. None of the three largest stumps described had sprouts from them. Is not the very rapid growth and the hollow or rotten core one sign of a sprout? We make a great noise going through the fallen leaves in the woods and wood-paths now, so that we cannot hear other sounds, as of birds or other people. It reminds me of the tumult of the waves dashing against each other or your boat. This is the dash we hear as we sail the woods. Cut a limb of a cedar (near the Irishman’s shanty- site at Flint’s Pond) some two inches thick and three and a half feet from the ground. It had about forty-one rings. Adding ten, you have say fifty years for the age of the tree. It was one foot in diameter at one foot above ground and twenty or more feet high, standing in the young wood. A little cedar five feet high near it had some fifteen to seventeen rings. See a great many chestnut sprouts full six feet high and more and an inch or more thick the first year. Aaron’s-rod has minute chaffy seeds, now ripe, which by their very lightness could be blown along the high- ways.