yed! Here are histories in every bud
and twig and scar, of the seasons, of the accidents and deaths, the
records of the tree as there are records of families.

These records are not written in numbers or in letters, nor yet in
hieroglyphs; yet are they understandable. Alphabet is not needed, and
the key is simple.

From the brush pile of records I took one. I must describe it in part
by a picture (Fig. 14). On the living trees at this writing the petals
mostly have fallen and the leaves are nearly full grown. This branch
was cut in winter. It has lain in the snow and rain, putting forth no
flowers or leaves. Yet we can read it.

It is May, 1921. The terminal shoot is obviously of 1920; we shall
name it No. 1. It is a foot long, smooth and glossy, terminating at
the base (_o_) in a "ring" and at a short stub or branchlet. If we
count the buds on all sides of the shoot and at the tip we find them
to be 13. The largest one is at the tip, and they are mostly
successively smaller toward the base. Apparently the growth-energy was
expended in the upper parts of the twig, making large full buds. In
fact, the three or four lowermost buds are scarcely developed and
would not grow unless the limb were broken off above them; they are
dormant buds.

[Illustration: 14. A three-year record.--In a leisure hour, trace the
history of these parts; it will open your eyes.]

Looking along the shoot, I find that every six buds stand in the same
line: the sixth bud is over the first, seventh over the second, eighth
over the third. If I were to fasten a string to bud No. 1 and wind it
around the stem to my left, passing over every bud until I had reached
the sixth, I should find that it had made two circuits of the stem
(passed twice around it) and had passed over five spaces between buds.
This is the leaf-arrangement or phyllotaxy of the apple-tree,
expressed by the fraction 2/5. The space between two buds is
two-fifths of a diameter, and two circuits (ten-fifths) must be passed
before a bud comes over the one from which we started. The 2/5
leaf-arrangement obtains on cherry, peach, apricot, pear, raspberry
and many others; but a very different order is that of the linden,
grape, currant, lilies, elm, maple.

We cannot understand this simple unbranched terminal twig (No. 1)
until we know what took place last year. A year ago, in the spring of
1920, a terminal bud that had formed in 1919 expanded and gave rise to
this rapidly growing s