On the margin of the great rivers of the west, the buttonwood is constantly found to be the loftiest and largest tree of the United States. Often with a trunk of several feet in diameter, it begins to ramify at the height of sixty or seventy feet, near the summit of other trees; and often the base divides itself into several trunks, equally vigorous and superior in diameter to any of the surrounding trees. On a little island in the Ohio, fifteen miles above the mouth of the Muskingum, Michaux mentions a buttonwood which, at five feet above the ground, was forty feet and four inches in circumference, and consequently more than thirteen feet in diameter. The American species is generally thought, in Europe, to possess a richer foliage, and to afford a deeper shade than the Asiatic plane: its leaves are of a beautiful green, alternate, from five to fifteen inches broad, and formed with more open angles than those of the plane of the eastern continent. _Beech._――The species of _Red Beech_ is almost exclusively confined to the north-eastern parts of the United States. In the state of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, it is so abundant as often to constitute extensive forests, the finest of which grow on fertile, level or gently sloping lands which are proper for the culture of corn. The red beech equals the white species in diameter, but not in height; and as it ramifies nearer the earth and is more numerously divided, it has a more massy summit and the appearance of more tufted foliage. Its leaves are equally brilliant, a little larger and thicker, and have longer teeth. Its fruit is of the same form, but is only half as large, and is garnished with firmer and less numerous points. The _White Beech_ is one of the tallest and most majestic trees of the American forests. It grows the most abundantly in the middle and western states. On the banks of the Ohio, the white beech attains the height of more than one hundred feet, with a circumference of eight to eleven feet. In the forests, where these trees vegetate in a deep and fertile soil, their roots sometimes extend to a great distance even with the surface, and being entangled so as to cover the ground, they embarrass the steps of the traveller and render the land peculiarly difficult to clear. This tree is more slender and less branchy than the red beech; but its foliage is superb, and its general appearance magnificent. _Poplar_ or _Tulip Tree_.――This tree, which surpasses most others of North America in height and in the beauty of its foliage and of its flowers, is one of the most interesting from the numerous and useful applications of its wood.