I was surprised to find how closely the American forests resemble those of Europe. I suppose this settles the point that at some remote epoch of geological time the two continents were united. The two commonest species, and which often constitute the whole forest, are the never-failing pine and the oak. They both reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The former, to unscientific eyes, is only a small edition of the Scotch fir; and the oak, in its several varieties, as you pass along the railway, has much the same physiognomy as our English oak. The same may be said of the elm, the ash, the birch, the maples and the poplars. In the woods there is generally no undergrowth; on the embankments and outskirts of the woods a rubus, very like some forms of our English blackberry, is abundant. What is most striking in the forests is the want of fine trees. Except in the Rocky Mountains, I never saw one in the United States. Their oaks and pines die at the top before they have got much beyond what we should call poles. They never seem to branch freely. I suppose their progenitors having grown in the forest for so many thousand years, the race has acquired the habit of growing straight. In the heart, however, of the city of New York, in Broadway between the Fifth Avenue Hotel and the Coleman House, I noticed the trunk (for not much more is now left) of an occidental plane that must once have been a noble specimen of its kind. I was told that in Kentucky and Ohio there were fine trees, but I saw none. I have heard from travelled Americans similar remarks to those I have just been making on the dearth of large trees in the United States. This of course is said of those States that lie to the east of the Alleghany Mountains. [Sidenote: _Republican Relations of Father and Son._]