y the elements
sharpens his ingenuity and strengthens all his facilities. Hence, while
the Oak is the symbol of hospitality and of the arts to which it has
given its aid, the Palm symbolizes the voluptuousness of a tropical
clime and the indolence of its inhabitants.

I have said that the North produces no parasol-trees; but it should be
remarked that all kinds of trees occasionally approximate to this shape,
when they have grown compactly in a forest. The general shape which they
assume under these conditions is what I have termed accidental, because
that shape cannot be natural which a growing body is forced to take
when cramped in an unnatural or constrained position. Trees when thus
situated become greatly elongated; their shafts are despoiled of the
greater part of their lateral branches, and the tree has no expansion
until it has made its way above the level of the wood. The trees that
cannot reach this level will in a few years perish; and this is the
fate of the greater number in the primitive forest. But after they have
attained this level, they spread out suddenly into a head. Many such
trees are seen in recent clearings; and when their termination is a
regular hemisphere of branches and foliage, the tree exhibits a shape
nearly approaching that of a parasol.

The Elm, under these circumstances, often acquires a very beautiful
shape. Unlike other trees that send up a single undivided shaft, the
Elm, when growing in the forest as well as in the open plain, becomes
subdivided into several slightly divergent branches, running up almost
perpendicularly until they reach the level of the wood, when they
suddenly spread themselves out, and the tree exhibits the parasol shape
more nearly even than the Palm. When one of these forest Elms is left by
the woodman, and is seen standing alone in the clearing, it presents
to our sight one of the most graceful and beautiful of all arborescent
forms.

The rows of Willows, so frequent by the way-side where the road passes
over a wet meadow, afford the most common examples of the pollard forms.
Some of these willows, having escaped the periodical trimming of the
woodcutter, have become noble standards, emulating the Oak in the sturdy
grandeur of their giant arms extending over the road. Most of them,
however, from the repeated cropping which they have suffered, exhibit a
round head of long, slender branches, growing out of the extremity of
the beheaded trunk.

My remarks th