It is interesting to find how many distinct shapes the American elm takes. These are so varied that many people think that each form is a separate species, but they are all different types of the same tree. The Etruscan vase is one of the most familiar shapes of this elm. Its trunk divides a short way from the ground into several equally large branches, and the top of the tree is flat, with down-sweeping lateral branches. The beautiful Lancaster elm, from which the accompanying photograph was taken, belongs to this Etruscan vase form. Another well-known shape is the plume, which may be either single or compound. In these trees the single trunk or two or three parallel limbs rise to a great height without branches, and these spread into one or two light waving plumes. Many of these plume elms are found in the Berkshire Hills and throughout New England where the woods have been cut away and the elms have been left standing. The oak form, still another shape the elm occasionally takes, is broad and round-headed, with heavy lateral branches which extend in a horizontal direction in a manner very suggestive of the white oak. This is not so common as the vase and plume elms, and only occurs when the tree has grown in an open situation with plenty of air and light. A fine specimen of this tree stands near the Pratt house, in Concord, Massachusetts. “Feathered” elms are those which have a growth of little twigs along the trunk and branches. They may feather any of the different forms already described, and they come from latent buds which may have been dormant for years before opening. “The white elm,” Professor Charles S. Sargent says, “is one of the largest and most graceful trees of the Northeastern States and Canada. It is beautiful at all seasons of the year,—when its minute flowers, harbingers of earliest spring, cover the branches; when in summer it rises like a great fountain of dark and brilliant green above its humbler companions of the forest or sweeps with long and graceful boughs the placid waters of some stream flowing through verdant meadows; when autumn delicately tints its leaves; and when winter brings out every detail of the great arching limbs and slender pendulous branches standing out in clear relief against the sky.