Next let us have a tree that produces a fashion of confectionery. The manna tree grows in Calabria and Sicily. In August the tree is tapped, and the sap slowly exudes, hardening under the hot southern sun to the consistency of fig paste. The flavor of the manna while sweet is sickish to those unaccustomed to it. A taste for it seems to come by habit. The product of the manna tree is by no means so rich and useful as that of our beautiful sugar maple, but the sap of the maple must be prepared for use by boiling. Next to the confectionery tree let us place in our grove a medicine tree. Who has not seen camphor, the clear white aromatic gum, so useful in medicine and in the arts? This is the product of the camphor tree of Japan. In Borneo, China, and the Malay Peninsula, the camphor trees have the gum formed in the trunk in large lumps. The camphor of other countries is obtained by boiling the wood of the camphor trees, and then crystallizing the camphor so obtained. FOOTNOTES: [61] This tree, called by the natives the Til-tree, has almost entirely disappeared. LESSON XXX. STILL IN THE WONDER GROVE. “Thus the seer With vision clear Sees forms appear and disappear; In the perpetual round of strange Mysterious change.” --LONGFELLOW. The wonders of our grove are not yet exhausted. Indeed we might spend a lifetime here, if we studied thoroughly its curiosities. We can only look cursorily at a few more marvellous plants. Here is a tree from Jamaica, called the life tree because it grows so readily, and is so tenacious of existence. The life tree will grow in a wet place or in a dry one; it cannot be killed by cutting down, for every fibre of its roots seems to possess power to renew the tree. Cut the leaves from the plant one by one, and where you drop them on the ground they grow, sending forth a root from any one of the severed ribs or veins. Cut the leaves into fragments and the fragments will grow. This power in leaves to send forth rootlets and start a new plant, is not confined to the life tree. Gardeners will tell you that the plants of the begonia tribe are grown by cutting off a portion of one of the large handsome leaves which distinguish the begonias, and sticking it in a little damp sandy soil. It soon roots and sends up vigorous leaf-stems.