It is difficult to give the character of the various wood-formations in woods with even a small proportion of that vividness and reality which the landscape painter so readily attains by drawing, foliage, color, and effect of light. Nevertheless, the differences are striking enough to all who approach nature with open senses. Even the fir and pine woods exhibit essential differences in their features; the former with straight stems arranged parallel to each other like columns, with the conical crowns of verticillate branches; the latter bearing on the gnarled, curved trunks, the lines of which cross in all directions in perspective, a flat umbel of foliage, a bearing which is most purely and nobly exhibited by the stone pine. These pine-woods, which extend over miles of country in the Mark of Brandenburg, are repeated in more luxuriant development in the “pine-barrens” of North America. Here, as there, loving a sandy soil, they extend in a broad band several hundred miles long, down to the coast of North Carolina, forming by their mass a very prominent feature in the physiognomy of the whole country. Still more striking is the distinction between the particular formations of the leafy woods; the crowded arrangement of the social beeches, limes, or elms produces woods with dusky shades and a soil void of vegetation, while the proud oak, repressing the growth of all other trees in its immediate neighborhood, stands alone upon a soil pleasantly clothed with grass and herbs, or unites in small groups to form those wonderful woodland landscapes to which the immortal pencil of Ruysdäel so often introduces us. Differently acts the massive lustre of the magnolia woods of the southern part of North America, from the elegant beauty of the African acacia groves, or the ghost-like transparency of the northern birch, and the whole tropical world unfolds a multiformity, the description of which would be an inexhaustible theme.