Pines, oaks, beech, chestnut, hazels, horn-beams, walnuts, hickories, birches, alders, plane trees, poplars, willows |
Common terms and phrases
acorn alder aments anthers axil bark base beautiful beech beneath birch branches branchlets brown buds calyx catkins cedar chestnut chestnut oak color common hazel cones corolla covered cultivated deciduous diameter dots downy drupe durability England Europe FAMILY feet high fertile flowers Figured in Michaux fleshy foliage footstalk forest four fruit fuel gray grayish green ground growing growth hairy height hemlock hickory inches long lanceolate larch leaf leaves lobes Loudon maple Massachusetts mature native nearly numerous ovary petioles pignut hickory pine Pinus Pistil pitch pine pitch-pine plane tree plants Platanus Plate poplar purple Quercus recent shoots red oak reddish resemblance resin roots rough roundish scales seeds sessile shellbark shrubs side slender smooth soil sometimes species spruce stamens stem sterile stigmas surface Sylva tapering thin three inches timber trunk usually valuable variety walnut white oak white-pine willow wind wood yellow yellow birch yellowish
Popular passages
Page 276 - O, woman ! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made ; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou...
Page xv - Before these fields were shorn and tilled, Full to the brim our rivers flowed ; The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless wood ; And torrents dashed and rivulets played, And fountains spouted in the shade.
Page 141 - E'er wore his crown as loftily as he Wears the green coronal of leaves with which Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower With...
Page 12 - The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours And Poets sage ; the Firre that weepeth still : The Willow, worne of forlorne Paramours ; The Eugh, obedient to the benders will ; The Birch for shaftes ; the Sallow for the mill ; The...
Page 181 - ... easiest mattresses in the world to lay under our quilts instead of straw ; because, besides their tenderness and loose lying together, they continue sweet for seven or eight years long, before which time straw becomes musty and hard.
Page 14 - Plants imbibe from the air carbonic acid, and other gaseous and volatile products, exhaled by animals or developed by the natural phenomena of decomposition. These the trees, more than the smaller plants, absorb, and instead of them pour into the atmosphere pure oxygen, essential to the life of animals. The carbon, the very substance of wood, is taken from the carbonic acid thus absorbed. " Humid air," says Bequerel, " charged with miasmata, is deprived of them in passing through the forest.
Page 6 - ... Worcester tells me, that he attributes the greater difficulty now experienced in the cultivation of the more delicate fruits in that town, to the fact, that the encircling hills, formerly crowned with trees, are now, to a considerable degree, laid bare. The laws of the motion of the atmosphere are similar to those of water. A bare hill gives no protection. The wind pours over it as water pours over a dam. But if the hill be capped with trees, the windy cascade will be broken as into spray. Its...
Page 9 - These have been kept in constant operation until within about twenty or thirty years, when the supply of water began to fail. The pond owes its existence to a stream which has its source in the hills which stretch some miles to the south. Within the time mentioned, these hills, which...
Page 108 - The bark upon the body is slightly furrowed, smooth to the touch and very white when the tree stands exposed. The wood is reddish, somewhat odorous, very light, soft and fine-grained : in the northern part of the United States and in Canada it holds the first place for durability.
Page 106 - This plantation extended up the face of a hill from two hundred to four hundred feet above the level of the sea. The rocky ground of which it was composed was covered with loose and crumbling masses of mica slate, and was not worth above £3 a year altogether.