Now that “the rod becomes more mocked than used,” birch sprays are most familiar to us in the humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the other side of the world there were nations that would have been hard put to it to do without this tree, used for many offices, but not for that above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and thick-skinned Huron had a strangely sentimental abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters, which, notes a Jesuit missionary, “will hinder our design to instruct their youth.” But manifold were other services of birch in the wigwam life of the backwoods--for walls, roof, furniture, clothes, torches, powders, poultices, and what not; bark was the Red Man’s cradle and his coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of skill, the canoe; it even at a pinch filled empty stomachs, that could hold out for days on the inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and berries failed his improvident hardihood. In other parts of the world, the coco-nut tree is of still more general utility, since it not only “bears at once the cup and milk and fruit,” but supplies salad from the young shoots and toddy from the quickly fermented juice; bowls and lamps from its shells, and from its pulp, oil to fill them; cordage, mats, ornamental wreaths and plaited armour from its fibre; fans, baskets, thatch from its leaves; torches from the ribs, and countless other articles of daily use. The Malays, who train monkeys to run up the trees and bring down nuts for their master, have contrived an ingenious clock which Dr. Wallace saw used by sailors: in a bucket floats a scraped half-shell with a small hole bored in the bottom to let in a thread of water at a rate so exactly calculated that the shell sinks at the end of an hour. There are South Sea islands where brackish water makes the people wholly dependent on this tree for drink. Then modern trade has given coconuts a new value, dried in the form of copra and shipped to Marseilles and elsewhere, to have the oil pressed out for making soap and candles, not to mention the “best olive oil” of commerce, while the refuse goes as fattening food for cattle. That is the main thing we get from Polynesia and Micronesia in exchange for trousers, sewing-machines, concertinas, and spelling-books. In Museums I. and II. our young friends may see what delicate and finely tinted cloth those islanders could beat out of bark before they learned to depend too much on our manufactures, being often more healthy and moral without the encumbering garments which the early missionaries considered essential to godliness.