However, in eight or ten years more another coat can be stripped off, and this is fine and beautiful cork that will bring a good price. A cork tree will live for one hundred and fifty years, during which time the bark may be regularly stripped at intervals of eight or ten years. The stripping is done in July and August by making a cut entirely around the stem, just above the ground, and a second cut just below the branches, then three cuts are made lengthwise the tree, and the bark is taken off in long strips. The greatest care is used to avoid injuring the inner bark. These slabs of bark are heated and slightly scorched; this causes them to flatten, closes up the pores, and gives toughness to the whole material. What should we do without cork for jackets, cork legs and arms, cork apparatus in lifeboats, and other appliances for saving people from drowning? Our cork tree with its marvellous bark is by no means the least valuable specimen in our wonder grove. What is this beautiful tree, tall and stately, with delicate oblong leaves, lovely flowers, and fruit like a plum? It is the tree from which our gutta percha comes, and without that valuable product what should we do for many instruments, for piping, and for a good covering for telegraph wires? As the Chinese and Malays always cut down these noble trees to get the juice which hardens into gutta percha, sometimes three or four millions of the trees are killed each year. At that rate they will all soon be gone. What next? Why, the tree that bears india-rubber toys, overshoes, and water-proof coats. By good luck the people of South America, Central America, Asia, and Africa, where the varieties of india-rubber, or caoutchouc, producing trees are found, have learned to tap the trees and take care of them and do not kill them for a single harvest. The rubber is the hardened juice of the tree; when it first runs out it is like milk or cream, and hardens very quickly. It is sent to market in flat cakes called “biscuits.” Trees producing various kinds of “rubber” abound in most tropical countries. Now, finally, here is yet another specimen in our grove, a small shrub, only a tree by courtesy, but one of the wonders of the world, nevertheless, and happily a harmless curiosity,--if let alone! This is the electric plant. We have long known of the electric eel, and the electric fish, that can give a powerful shock to anything touching them. A French naturalist has found and investigated, in the forests of India, a shrub endowed with amazing magnetic powers. At a distance of six yards it affects the magnetic needle. If you break a leaf from the plant, you receive a powerful shock. Touch it with the tips of your fingers, and you receive a shock as from an induction coil. No birds or insects light upon it, they know the result too well; it would be certain death. How do birds and insects learn what is safe and what is dangerous for them to do? I cannot tell you.