A swan that had had a leg run over by a cart-wheel, causing a compound fracture, was recently successfully treated at Otley, England, while yet another swan had an operation performed at Darlington some little time ago that was very much out of the ordinary. In this instance, the unlucky bird had the principal bone in its right wing fractured in several places, the fracture presumably being caused by a brutal blow dealt by some unknown ruffian. A veterinary surgeon was asked to give his advice, and on his recommendation an amputation was decided upon, and this he successfully performed. The bird, sans a wing, was, when last heard of, well on the road to recovery. THE TRIPLET TREE. CHARLES COKE WOODS, PH.D. Matter _per se_ is an evidence of mind. Every material thing enshrines a thought. Essential nature has no superfluities. To the thinker everything means something. In nature nothing happens. Everything is ordered. There can be no portrait of a landscape without a painter. There can be no landscape without a maker. The visible forms that nature takes may be changed. Her invisible forms are changeless. The search for the changeless is the great and delightful task of art, literature, science, philosophy and religion. The ultimate in nature and in art is divine. The permanent principle survives the fleeting form. Nature's principles are relatively few. Her forms are multifarious. Tree life is true life. It is natural. It is therefore true. Nature's garb may be odd. It may even be deformed. But her inner self is never false. Sap, fiber, leaf, blossom, fruit; this is nature's apocalypse. It is Queen Beauty's progressive revelation. Trees usually grow singly. Under certain conditions they may as naturally grow otherwise. The unusual is not necessarily the unnatural. Nature's resources are vast. She may at any time manifest herself in an unfamiliar form. A triplet tree grows on what is known as "Green's Ranch" in Cowley County, Kansas. The ranch is located five miles northeast of Arkansas City. The trees are about three hundred yards from the west bank of the Walnut River. They range in a line running north and south. They are between forty-five and fifty feet high. The first two on the north are eighteen inches apart. The third tree standing at the south end of the row is fifteen feet from the middle one. They are water elms, and average about three and one-half feet in girth. The tree standing at the north end of the row is hollow at the base and, leaning over southward intersects the central tree two feet from the ground; thence it extends to the one at the south end of the row, and intersects it with a limb from either side twelve feet above the ground. The segment of the circle described by the leaning tree is about twenty feet. At the points where the cross tree intersects the other two, it is not merely a case of contiguity, but of actual identification.