share, and last but not least are the numerous batrachians, all songsters, from the basso profundo bullfrog, to the high pitched hyla. Through, above, and dominating all other songs is the ceaseless tremolo of the chipping sparrow. It is said that nature never makes a discord, probably the nearest approach she allows herself is the stridulous chirpings of this bird and its ally the grasshopper. Not by day alone is the mid-summer chorus kept up, but by night as well. Even then, harsh against the ceaseless hum of the insects, falls the cry of the night-jar, or night-hawk as he is more familiarly called. He is described as a bird of the dusk, but often waking in the night I have heard that familiar sound, and have seen him in my mind's eye smoothly soaring, apparently without the least effort, and picking up a meal by the way. An occasional soloist, too, is the whippoorwill, and we must not forget the long-drawn shivering cry of the little screech-owl. It makes one tremble as one hears it, so instinct with woe does it quiver from the woods. By mid-summer the great chorus at dawn is comparatively stilled, and it is largely to our little friends here mentioned, that we must give thanks that we are not quite tune less. NOTES. One of the greatest charms of Dame Nature is her infinite variety. No two seasons are exactly alike, and this year the differences from last have been great and interesting. For example, here in Rochester, the robin came eighteen days in advance of last year. Bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, and purple grackles were all here by March 18, and I note that the robin and song sparrow sang as early as halfpast five in the morning. On April 3 there was a fierce snow-storm, fully seven inches covered the ground, and the birds took themselves off somewhere, though I provided food and water. By the middle of April conditions were more natural, and in addition to the regular residents that had come in advance, some migrants began to appear. On the 15th I noted the first hermit thrush, and they came in increasing numbers, till I counted twenty in a nearby thicket on April 17. On April 19 there was more snow, but the golden-crowned kinglets came with followed by rain and cold weather, checked the arrival it, one day later than last year. This second snow, of the warblers, and at no time during the first two weeks in May have there been the numbers or variety that I saw last year. While the birds and flowers fill the largest place in our affection, there are many other creatures whose life habits present much entertainment and food for study. We give a picture of one of these creatures. You may come across him any day. Do you know his name, his home, and his habits? plants were ahead of time. On May 1 the bleeding heart in the garden was a mass of bloom, all the tulips were in blossom, and at Buffalo on the Pan-American grounds, amid mud and disorder of every description, the air, and adorning the barren earth. thousands of hyacinths of every color were perfuming Now, while the birds were late, the flowers and Warblers that were most abundant in 1900, like the black-throated blue, were very scarce this year, and when they began to arrive in numbers about May 9 the foliage on all sides was so fully out that it was almost impossible to see them. On May 6, on a trip to some woods near the lake, I noted thirty varieties, among them three warblers, myrtle, black-throated blue, and yellow palm. On May 11, in an orchard, I noted eighteen varieties, in about two hours, with a stiff wind blowing, an unfavorable condition for birding. This day, May 11, was the most glorious day this year. Picture to yourself a cherry tree in full blossom, and seated near the top three perfect two-year-old male rose-breasted grosbeaks! Never have I seen specimens where the rose was rosier, nor the black and white more vivid. They were in attendance on a female, sober in her striped gown, but seemingly quite coquettish. Lower down in the tree sat a scarlet tanager, pluming himself and resting; while all about roamed a Blackburnian warbler, picking a meal from the cherry blossoms. All this beauty in just one tree! I also heard for the first time the gay little song of the chestnut-sided warbler, and saw a pair of hummingbirds for the first time this year. The orioles seem as abundant as last year, and in my walks I have nearly stepped upon three whippoorwills. One may often go three years without seeing even one. If half the pleasure of life is in anticipation, the other half must be in retrospection and living over again the rich pleasures one has found in field and wood. HOW THE SEQUOIAS GROW. BY COUNSELOR H. W. WARREN, D. D., LL. D. HIS article is not designed to show by what means, but in what manner the sequoias grow. No man could successfully solve the first problem. The mysterious power which resides in that little mustard-like seed overcomes gravitation, cohesion, chemical affinity; finds food in wide acres of earth and wider miles of air; mixes chemical elements with sunshine for solvent and cement, makes dead matter alive, and for thousands of years greatens the gigantic structure till it has no fellow on the face of the earth. How this minute potentiality does all this by mastery of several universal laws of matter is known only to the Creator. In what manner the power manifests itself is our study. Of course a tree that reaches that great height must attend strictly to the business of growing up. It cannot spread over broad acres. I write this paragraph under a live-oak that is five feet in diameter, only thirty feet high, but with a spread of limb, including both sides, of one hundred feet. Picture an arm fifty feet long supporting cords of wood. What Laocoon muscles it needs at the shoulder! It has them, huge and rugose, in the tree. I cannot walk erect under one limb one and a half feet in (FIG. 1.) GROUP OF SEQUOIAS AMONG OTHER FOREST TREES. diameter. The 325-foot tree cannot love its mother earth in that way. Figure 1 shows a group in the distance rising above ordinary trees, indicating the manner in which sequoias put out limbs. One that was a century old when Solomon was a boy, grew in three thousand one hundred years to be three hundred and twenty-five feet high, having a circumference of ninety-three feet at the base, and contained two hundred and fifty thousand feet of lumber. What could be done in an interior ballroom or dining-room of such a tree, thirty feet in diameter, or what caravans could be driven between its dissevered legs is not to our purpose. Coniferous trees: tribe Abietinea, sub-tribe Taxoding-oval cone, persistent woody scale, fine ovules, each dilated upward in fruit, into rhomboidal, wrinkled, flattened, slightly prickle tipped apex. Flowers monœcious terminal or axillary on young shoots, scales spirally set. The small and involucrate staminate flower consists of an oblong column of united stamens bearing crowded ovate connective scales, each with three to five anthers. They bear acute compressed and keeled decurrent leaves which are alternate and spirally inserted. Geographically, the sequoias grow on a line two hundred and forty miles long extending northward from the south side of Tulare county, Cal. They are mostly in groups, with plenty of other forest trees about them. grove of them within five miles of Santa Cruz is easily accessible by wheel of any kind, or on foot. A The first thing that strikes one, after amazement at the enormous size, is the intense virility, vitality, or, to use the old botanical word, vivaciousness of the species. Most of the trees are gnarled near the base (FIG. 4.) SHOWING CAVITY IN WHICH 14 MEN HAVE SLEPT AT ONCE. with all sorts of protuberances, as if life could not exhaust itself in heaving this mighty mass three hundred feet high, but must in its progress cavort like a horse, play like a dolphin, and put forth nature's exuberance of life all the way. One tree has the head of an elephant on one side, and is called Jumbo in consequence. The wood of these gnarled excrescences has every con of Egypt," or any other imaginative man who sees a cloud "backed like a weasel or a whale," sees plenty of pictures in its varied contortions of grain, and new ones every day. (FIG. 2.) SHOWING THE FIBER OF SEQUOIA WOOD. ceivable tangle of fiber, and when sawed and polished is of extraordinary beauty. The lover who can see "Helen's beauty in a brow Though the fiber of these trees is usually of remarkable straightness of grain, it sometimes crimps itself to the beauty of a lady's waving tresses just out of the crimping pins. Figure 2 was taken from a clean, straight split from an ordinary log. It seems as if the sap in its ascent to such a great height sought to do it by easy zigzag stages, like the way, without stairs, up the Campanile of Venice. I have seen stumps completely grown over the top with a great wart, without branches or leaves. It is quite common to find a stump that has put up a straight, fine shaft of a tree a foot or two in diameter from one edge, or two shafts of trees from two sides, and the stump grown over between them (Fig. 3). When a fire ravages this resinous wood and burns out the dry interior to a height of one hundred or more feet, the tree does not stop growing in consequence, but goes right on, heals its wounds, and overgrows its scars. A window cut to let light into the interior of the tree called General Fremont grew up in a few years. A man living in the spacious interior cut the window for the be fit of his family. This tree with the window is shown in Figure 4, with General and Mrs. Fremont and daughter standing before it. The picture shows another peculiarity of sequoias. They send up supplemental trees from the base. Three are shown. If a tree is felled by wind, or because of its old age, a new (FIG. 5.) SHOWING A TREE IN THE SANTA CRUZ GROUP. At the grove springs up in a circle from the roots, after the manner of the olive tree. left of Figure 4 is a group called the Nine Muses, growing from a stump. The group of trees of which the tree called General Fremont is one has seven such large trees in an irregular circle sixty-six feet in diameter, and around these seven are twentyseven smaller trees with diameters of two feet and under. One cannot help thinking that in other days, when time was young, the enormous circle was measurably filled by a single tree. A few rods away is a collection called the Y. M. C. A. group. It was so named May 17, 1887, by a delegation to the twentyseventh international convention. It consists of an enormous boulder of vegetable life about ten feet high, from which spring ten great trees, some of them six feet in diameter. What kind of lumber this gnarled boulder would make taxes the imagination. However rugged and contorted a tree may be at its base, it becomes perfectly straight and columnar when it attempts the serious business of life. Figure 5 represents one of the Santa Cruz group only sixty-three feet in circumference, now two hundred and ninety-six feet high, from the top of which seventy feet was broken off by the wind. It is a delight to the eye, a joy to the heart, to see this beautiful shaft, straight toward the zenith, whatever the slant of the surface from which it springs. At the root these trees are stayed or buttressed - according to whether one speaks nautically or architecturally with wide-spreading braces, as if each knew it must wrestle with the tempests of the upper air. It stands so straight and sturdy that when one was bored through after a labor of six weeks with pump augurs, it refused to fall even when a nearby giant pine was felled against it. Wedges were then driven in on one side till the line of the center of gravity fell outside the base, when, sighing in every branch and leaf, this product of nature came down by man in an instant. The sequoia is far better braced than another member of the coniferous family, the sugar pine, Pinus Lambertiana. This tree rises from a basal diameter of a dozen to twenty feet to a height of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, straight as an arrow, beautiful as a poem. Its cones are as much as sixteen inches long and four inches in diameter, full of sweet, nutritious seeds. These seeds are highly prized, and are laid up for winter store by squirrels and other wild creatures and by the Indians. The tree has a light reddish-brown color on the south side, but loses its blush on the north side, and by the storms of hundreds of winters takes on a sober gray. The bark of the sequoias is not so attractive. It is (FIG. 3.) of a bright cinnamon color, and sometimes is as much as twenty-two inches thick. It is so soft and porous that a small section set on end makes an admirable pincushion. Having gone over some of the general results of how the sequoia grows, we may ask when it grew. Perhaps it would be better to ask when it did not grow. The first of all plants were the cryptogamous or flowerless mosses, ferns, and others even more simple. Then came this universally prevalent family of the Conifera, adapted to every climate, stage of development, and condition of the earth. This enormous family constitutes one threehundredth of all varieties of vegetable growth. Solomon wrote of the cedars of Lebanon as well as of the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. The Romans made garlands of pine, used the seeds to flavor their wines, and the wood for torches in their sacred ceremonies and for funeral pyres. Include the cypress, juniper, yew, larch, and fir, with many varying tints of color and shape of leaf, and one sees how large a family it is. It left its imprint or autograph on the coal of the carboniferous period. It has extended to all lands. I have found Conifera the courageous advancing color-bearers of the army of vegetable life storming the snow-crowned heights of Popocatapetl near the equator, and I have seen them so far north that a tree only three feet high would have a spread of thirty feet, the branches keeping near the ground for warmth and protection from the wind. How does this sequoia member of the family begin? From a little winged seed. The home in which it is born and matured is shown in Figure 6. It sends its tender juicy radicle into the soft earth, and lifts its amber plumule in air. It seems like a more appropriate start for a succulent lily than for a sturdy giant. inches in circumference and twenty-five feet high. It is a double tree from its base, and each top twiglet just keeps pace with the other in its upward reach. Three thousand years from now, if all goes well, it will be quite a tree. I will get a spray to show its style of leaf (Fig. 7). Its leaves are not large, but many. In this, however, it is surpassed by the Norfolk Island pine of the same family, fifty feet away. Its leaves are little prongs, slightly curved, half an inch long and set thickly as possible on mid-veins, say a foot and a half long, that grow on a limb, forty (FIG. 7.) SEQUOIA LEAVES. to the foot, so that a branch eight feet long, and only an inch in diameter, would have the incredible and unappreciable number of 184,320 leaves. The limbs of this particular species of pine are put forth only in regular whorls eighteen to twenty-four inches apart. I notice that the tree has just forgotten how to count. It has put forth the top whorl with seven branches instead of the regulation six. Perhaps it has just done this for joy at our coming, not having been here for three years. If the trees of the field can clap their hands before you for gladness, why not put forth more hands to clap? The sequoia leaves are 66 spreading, needle-shaped, sharp-pointed, scattered spirally around the branches, finally scale-shaped, imbricated, mostly appressed, generally with acute apex: numerous and persistent, light green color," very like hemlock leaves. The specimen shows only mature leaves. The new growths differ from them as a tender baby from a man. I take up the severed branch, and its pungent, pervasive, resinous, aromatic odor of a sweet smell assures me of pardon for scientific terminology. It is as Moore says: "like those plants that throw Their fragrance from the wounded part." However much the sequoias may grow in the deep leafy mold of the soil, on mountain |