more rigid branches cannot stand the buffetings of the more mobile and flexible deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine, and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere of a pine or a hemlock forest, how different from that of a beech or a maple! Most trees tend to associate themselves together in large bodies, as did primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that matter. The conifers are more clannish than the deciduous trees. Are not a generation of leaves and a generation of men subject to about the same laws of chance? The baby leaves have their enemies in insects that devour them, in blight that withers them, in frost that cuts them short, and when they are matured, how the winds buffet them (Nature doesn’t temper the wind to the tender leaf), how the gales lash them, how the hail riddles them! If they had powers of thought, what a struggling, agitated, unstable world they would think themselves born into! When a summer tempest strikes a maple- or an oak-tree, the strain and stress of the foliage is almost painful to witness. Yet when the tempest subsides, hardly a leaf is torn or detached, and when autumn comes, the ranks of the vast army of the leaves are but little thinned, and the great majority of leaves ripen and fall to the ground unscathed. They have come through the campaign of life and have experienced many ups and downs, and yet, on the whole, they have each had an active and useful life. The leaf-rollers have made their nests in a few of certain kinds of them, the leaf-cutters have made holes in certain other kinds, the gall insects have made their nurseries at the expense of still other kinds; but all these things amount to a small fraction of the whole. When a plague of forest worms comes and strips the maples or the beeches, or a plague of elm-beetles strips the elms, and the invasion of a foreign deadly fungus kills all the chestnuts, these calamities are paralleled by the plagues that in past times have swept away large numbers of human beings and depopulated whole countries, or by epidemic diseases, such as infantile paralysis, that now and then rage over widespread areas.