woods, are the wild rose and
honeysuckle signs of unwholesome air?

"And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the lone crags and ruined wall.
I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all his round surveyed."

It seems to me, in the nooks most haunted by honeysuckle in my own wood,
that the reason for its twining is a very feminine one,--that it likes to
twine; and that all these whys and wherefores resolve themselves at last
into--what a modern philosopher, of course, cannot understand--caprice.[36]

7. Farther on, Figuier, quoting St. Hilaire, tells us, of the creepers in
primitive forests,--"Some of them resemble waving ribands, others coil
themselves and describe vast spirals; they droop in festoons, they wind
hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves from one to
another, and form masses of leaves and flowers in which the observer is
often at a loss to discover on which plant each several blossom grows."

For all this, the real reasons will be known only when human beings become
reasonable. For, except a curious naturalist or wistful missionary, no
Christian has trodden the labyrinths of delight and decay among these
garlands, but men who had no other thought than how to cheat their savage
people out of their gold, and give them gin and smallpox in exchange. But,
so soon as true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit
of God enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the
physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous snake, and poisonous
tree, pass away before the power of the regenerate human soul.

8. At length, on the structure of the tige, Figuier begins his real work,
thus:---

"A glance of the eye, thrown on the section of a log of wood destined for
warming, permits us to recognize that the tige of the trees of our forests
presents three essential parts, which are, in going from within to without,
the pith, the wood, and the bark. The pith, (in French, marrow,) forms a
sort of column in the centre of the woody axis. In very thick and old stems
its diameter appears very little; and it has even for a long time been
supposed that the marrow ends by disappearing altogether from the stems of
old trees. But it does nothing of the sort;[37] and it is now ascertained,
by exact measures, that its diameter remains sensibly invariable[38] from
the moment when the young woody axis begins to consolidate itself, to the
epoch of its most complete develop