roups,
but farther north, upon river-banks, they form woods of considerable
extent and remarkable beauty; and with their tall shafts, and their
smooth white bark, resembling pillars of marble, supporting a canopy of
bright green foliage, on a light feathery spray, they constitute one of
the picturesque attractions of a Northern tour. Nature seems to indicate
the native habitat of this noble tree by causing its exterior to bear
the whiteness of snow, and it would be difficult to estimate its
importance to the aboriginal inhabitants of Northern latitudes. Yellow
Birch woods are not inferior in their attractions: individual trees
of this species are often distinguished among other forest timber by
extending their feathery summits above the level of the other trees.

The small White Birch is never assembled in large forest groups. Like
the Alder, it seems to be employed by Nature for the shading of her
living pictures, and for producing those gradations which are the charm
of spontaneous wood-scenery. In this part of the continent, a Pitch-Pine
wood is commonly fringed with White Birches, and outside of these with
a lower growth of Hazels, Cornels, and Vacciniums, uniting them
imperceptibly with the herbage of the plain. The importance of this
native embroidery is not sufficiently considered by those industrious
plodders who are constantly destroying wayside shrubbery, as if it were
the pest of the farm,--nor by those "improvers," on the other hand, who
wage an eternal warfare against little spontaneous groups of wood, as
if they thought everything outside of the forest an intruder, if it was
planted by accident, and had not cost money before it was placed there.
Give me an old farm, with its stone-walls draped with Poison-Ivy and
Glycine, and verdurous with a mixed array of Viburnums, Hazels, and
other wild shrubbery, harboring thousands of useful birds, and smiling
over the abundant harvests which they surround, before the finest
artistical landscape in the world!

Pines are remarkably social in their habit, and cover immense tracts in
high latitudes, extending southward, on this continent, as far as the
very boundary of the tropics, where they are found side by side with the
Dwarf Palm of Florida. But in the region of the true Palms the Pine is
wanting. It is worthy of remark, however, that in the fossil vegetation
of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated.
This fact, it seems to me, should be