ranches at its outer extremity, so as to form a greater outer
curve, whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species.
That is to say, the general type or idea of a tree is not as _a_, Fig.
17, but as _b_, in which, observe, the boughs all carry their minor
divisions right out to the bounding curve; not but that smaller
branches, by thousands, terminate in the heart of the tree, but the idea
and main purpose in every branch are to carry all its child branches
well out to the air and light, and let each of them, however small, take
its part in filling the united flow of the bounding curve, so that the
type of each separate bough is again not _a_, but _b_, Fig. 18;
approximating, that is to say, so far to the structure of a plant of
broccoli as to throw the great mass of spray and leafage out to a
rounded surface. Therefore beware of getting into a careless habit of
drawing boughs with successive sweeps of the pen or brush, one hanging
to the other, as in Fig. 19. If you look at the tree-boughs in any
painting of Wilson's you will see this structure, and nearly every other
that is to be avoided, in their intensest types. You will also notice
that Wilson never conceives a tree as a round mass, but flat, as if it
had been pressed and dried. Most people in drawing pines seem to fancy,
in the same way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the
trunk, instead of all round it: always, therefore, take more pains in
trying to draw the boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you than those
that go off to the sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the
foreshortened ones are not so easy. It will help you in drawing them to
observe that in most trees the ramification of each branch, though not
of the tree itself, is more or less flattened, and approximates, in its
position, to the look of a hand held out to receive something, or
shelter something. If you take a looking-glass, and hold your hand
before it slightly hollowed, with the palm upwards, and the fingers
open, as if you were going to support the base of some great bowl,
larger than you could easily hold; and sketch your hand as you see it in
the glass with the points of the fingers towards you; it will materially
help you in understanding the way trees generally hold out their hands:
and if then you will turn yours with its palm downwards, as if you were
going to try to hide something, but with the fingers expanded, you will
get a good type of the action of the