and infectious diseases—were as deadly as the upas shade to other forms of life. How widely different is it with the oak! This of all trees—of all living things—is the most hospitable; and in this respect it is well chosen as the badge of England, which has the proud distinction of affording a refuge to every political outcast and victim of ecclesiastical tyranny throughout the world, and fosters by its love of freedom and constitutional government, every type and variety of human life. A whole book might easily be written upon the multitude of living things that obtain food and shelter from the oak. The natural history of its inmates and boarders is like that of a garden, or, indeed, a county. Some creatures are peculiar to it, and find their home nowhere else; and to many more that are free to come and go, it extends a kindly welcome. Were it to perish altogether from off the face of the earth, many insects and plants would disappear utterly. The insect population alone of the oak tree, including beetles, butterflies, and a great variety of tiny creeping things which none but a naturalist cares for, or is aware of, would furnish materials for study of a most interesting and absorbing kind for many summer weeks together. When we do not see themselves, we see the evidence of the existence and working of the insects in the great variety of curious galls which they produce upon the trunk and branches: oak apples that hang on the twigs like some mysterious unknown fruit, and are as wondrously fashioned, although excrescences and abortions of the vital sap, as the legitimate acorn cups and eggs themselves; and beautiful golden-brown spangles that crowd all the under-surface of the withering leaves in autumn like the seeds, or the “fairy’s money,” as it is called, on the back of the ferns, thus linking the oak leaf and the fern leaf—the highest and the lowest type of vegetation—together in the wondrous unity of nature by a strange similitude of appearance. But it is among the plants that we find the most beautiful occupants of the oak tree. The ivy climbs up its trunk, which affords admirable support for its myriads of little feet, and changes its glossy leaves, as it creeps higher and higher, from the deeply-cut angular pattern to the oval and pointed one; and at the top it waves its airy sprays among the oak leaves, and produces beside the acorns at the extremities of the branches, the light-green flowers that blossom only when the plant has nothing to cling to and must shift for itself; as if nature were taking care that when the life of the individual was in danger, the life of the race should at least be made sure. Then there is the mystic mistletoe, with all its dim and sacred associations with the Druid-worship of our remote ancestors. It clings still closer to the oak, for it is not an epiphyte like the ivy—merely making use of the tree for support—and finding its food independently from the soil and air—but a partial