When travelling through the coast forests of pine trees in the Landes of Western France, one notices great bare gashes on the stems leading round and down the trunk to a small tin cup or spout. These trees are being tapped for resin, from which rosin is manufactured. It would be difficult to find any obvious connexion between music and the Giant Sawfly. Yet the rosin used by Paganini and Kubelik has probably been developed in Conifers to keep away sawflies and other enemies. This very district, the Landes in France, was once practically a desert, and famous as such in French history. The soil was so barren that no villages or cultivation were found over the whole length of it. Now that it is planted with trees which are able to yield firewood and rosin, it is comparatively rich and prosperous. Storms are also very dangerous for tree-life. One can only realize the beauty of a tree by watching a pine or ash in a heavy gale of wind. The swing of the branches, the swaying of the trunk, the balancing support of the roots which, buttress-like, extend out into the soil, give some idea of the extraordinary balance, toughness, and strength in trees. Except in the case of the common umbrella, which is an inefficient instrument in high wind, engineers have never attempted the solution of the problem satisfactorily solved by trees. A factory chimney only 51 feet in height will have a diameter at the base of at least three feet. This means that the height is about seventeen times its diameter. But the Ryeplant, with a diameter at base of 3 millimetres, may be 1500 mm. high! That is, the height is five hundred times its diameter, and the Ryeplant has leaves and grain to support as well as its own stem! In Pine forests on exposed mountain sides there is almost always at least a murmuring sound, which in a storm rises into weird howls and shrieks. With Greek insight and imagination, the ancients supposed that spirits were imprisoned in these suffering, straining pines. That is most beautifully expressed in _The Tempest_, where the dainty spirit Ariel had been painfully confined in a pine tree for a dozen years, and "his groans did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts of ever-angry bears." One of the most interesting points in botany depends on the fact that evil conditions of any sort tend to bring about their own remedy. Endymion's spear was of "toughest ash grown on a windy site" (Keats). The prosaic chemical analyses of German botanists have, in fact, confirmed the theory there suggested, for it is found that the wood of trees grown in exposed windy places is really denser and tougher than that of others from sheltered woods.[11]