Spring Work-1. At what date do the young leaves appear upon your tree? What color are they? Look carefully to see how each leaf was folded in the bud. Were all the leaves folded in the same way? Are the young leaves thin, downy and tender? Do they stand out straight as did the old leaves last autumn, or do they droop? Why? Will they change position and stand out as they grow stronger? the twigs in order to get sunshine? all its leaves in spring and summer? the leaves do for the tree?

Why do the leaves stand out from What would happen to a tree if it lost Tell all of the things you know which

2. Are there any blossoms on your tree in the spring? If so, how do they look? Are the blossoms which bear the fruit on different trees from those that bear the pollen, or are these flowers placed separately on the same tree? Or does the same flower which produces the pollen also produce the seed?. Do the insects carry the pollen from flower to flower, or does the wind do this for your tree? What sort of seeds are formed by these flowers? How are the seeds scattered and planted?

3. At what date does your tree stand in full leaf? What color is it now? What birds do you find visiting it? What insects? What animals seek its shade? Do the squirrels live in it?

4. Measure the height of your tree as follows: Choose a bright, sunny morning for this.. Take a stick 31⁄2 feet long and thrust it in the ground so that three feet will project above the soil. Immediately measure the length of its shadow and of the shadow which your tree makes from its base to the shadow of its topmost twigs. Supposing that the shadow from the stick is 4 feet long and the shadow from your tree is 80 feet long, then your example will be: 4 ft. :3 ft.:: 80 ft.:? Which will make the tree 60 feet high.

To measure the circumference of the tree, take the trunk three feet from the ground and measure it exactly with a tape measure. To find the thickness of the trunk, divide the circumference just found by 3.15.

Supplementary Reading-Among Green Trees, Rogers; Chap. I in A Primer of Forestry, Pinchot; Part I in A First Book of Forestry, Roth; Chapter IV in Practical Forestry, Gifford.

LESSON CLXXXIX

HOW TO MAKE LEAF PRINTS

A very practical help in interesting children in trees, is to encourage them to make portfolios of leaf-prints of all the trees of the region. Although the process is mechanical, yet the fact that every print must be correctly labeled makes for useful knowledge. One of my treasured possessions is such a portfolio made by the lads of St. Andrews School of Richmond, Va., who. were guided and inspired in this work by their teacher, Professor W. W. Gillette. The impressions were made in green ink and the results are as beautiful as works of art. Professor Gillette gave me my first lesson in making leaf prints.

Material-1. A smooth slate, or better, a thick plate of glass, about 12 X 15 inches.

2. A tube of printer's ink, either green or black, and costing 50 cents; one tube contains a sufficient supply of ink for making several hundred prints. Or a small quantity of printer's ink may be purchased at any printing office.

3. Two six-inch rubber rollers, such as photographers use in mounting prints, which cost 15 cents each. A letter-press may be used instead of one roller.

4. A small bottle of kerosene to dilute the ink, and a bottle of benzine for cleaning the outfit after using, care being taken to store them safe from fire.

5. Sheets of paper 81⁄2 x 11 inches. The paper should be of good quality, with smooth surface in order that it may take and hold a clear out

line. The ordinary paper used in printers' offices for printing newspapers works fairly well. I have used with success the paper from blank notebooks which cost five cents a piece.

To make a print, place a few drops of ink upon the glass or slate, and spread it about with the roller until there is a thin coat of ink upon the roller and a smooth patch in the center of the glass or slate. It should never be so liquid as to "run," for then the outlines will be blurred. Ink the leaf by placing it on the inky surface of the glass and passing the inked roller over it once or twice until the veins show that they are smoothly filled. Now place the inked leaf between two sheets of paper and roll once with the clean

roller, bearing on with all the strength possible; a second passage of the roller blurs the print. Two prints are made at each rolling, one of the upper, and one of the under side of the leaf. Dry and wrinkled leaves may be made pliant by soaking in water, drying between blotters before they are inked.

Prints may also be made a number at a time by pressing them under weights, being careful to put the sheets of paper with the leaves between the pages of old magazines or folded newspapers, in order that the impression of one set of leaves may not mar the others. If a letter-press is available for this purpose, it does the work quickly and well.

SAP

Strong as the sea and silent as the grave,

It flows and ebbs unseen,

Flooding the earth, a fragrant tidal wave,

With mists of deepening green.

-JOHN B. TABB.

THE MAPLES

Teacher's Story

HE sugar maple, combining beauty with many kinds of utility, is dear to the American heart. Its habits of growth are very accommodating; when planted where it has plenty of room, it shows a short trunk and oval head, which, like a dark green period, prettily punctuates the summer landscape; but when it occurs in the forest, its noble bole, a pillar of granite gray, rises to uphold the arches of the forest canopy; and it attains there the height of 100 feet. It grows rapidly and is a favorite shade tree, twenty years being long enough to make it thus useful. The foliage is deep green in the summer, the leaf being a glossy, dark green above and paler beneath. It has five main lobes, the two nearest the stem being smaller; the curved edges between the lobes are marked with a few, smoothly cut, large teeth; the main veins extend directly from the petiole to the sharp tips of the lobes; the petiole is long, slender, and occasionally red. The leaves are placed opposite. The shade made by the foliage of the maple is so dense that it shades down the plants beneath it, even grass growing but sparsely there. If a shade tree stands in an exposed position, it grows luxuriously to the leeward of the prevailing winds, and thus makes a one-sided record of their general direction.

It is its autumn transfiguration which has made people observant of the maple's beauty; yellow, orange, crimson and scarlet foliage make these trees gorgeous when October comes. Nor do the trees get their color uniformly; even in September, the maple will show a scarlet branch in the midst of its green foliage. I believe this is a hectic flush and a premonition of death to the branch which, less vigorous than its neighbors, is being pruned out by Nature's slow but sure method. After the vivid color is on the maple, it begins to shed its leaves. This is by no means the sad act which the poets would have us believe; the brilliant colors are an evidence

that the trees have withdrawn from the leaves the green life-substance, the protoplasm-machinery for making the starch, and have stored it snugly in trunk and branch for winter keeping. Thus, only the mineral substances are left in the leaf, and they give the vivid hues. It is a mistake to think that frost causes this brilliance; it is caused by the natural, beautiful, old age of the leaf. When the leaves finally fall, they form a mulch-carpet for the tree that bore them, and add their substance to the humus from which the tree draws new powers for growth.

After every leaf has fallen, the maple shows why its shade is dense. It has many branches set close and at sharp angles to the trunk, dividing into fine, erect spray, giving the

tree a resemblance to a giant whisk-broom. Its dark, deepfurrowed bark smoothes out and becomes light gray on the larger limbs, while the spray is purplish, a color given it by the winter buds. These buds are sharp-pointed and long. In February, their covering of scales shows premonitions of spring by enlarging, and as if due to the soft influence, they become downy, and take on a sunshine color before they are pushed off by the leaves. The leaves and the blossoms appear together. The leaves are at first, yellowish, downy and drooping, thus shunning the

Sugar maple leaves.

too hot sun and the violent pelting rains and fierce spring winds. The flowers appear in tassellike clusters, each downy drooping thread of the tassel bearing at its tip a five-lobed calyx, which may hold seven or eight long,

drooping stamens or a pistil with long, double stigmas. The flowers are greenish yellow, and those that bear pollen and those that bear the seeds may be borne on separate trees or on the same tree, but they are always in different clusters. If on the same tree, the seed-bearing tassels are at the tips of the twigs, and those bearing pollen are along the sides.

The ovary is two-celled, but there is usually only one seed developed in the pair which forms a "key;" to observe this, however, we have to dissect the seeds; they have the appearance of two seeds joined together, each provided with a thin, closely veined wing and the two attached to the tree by a single long, drooping stem. This twin-winged form is well fitted to be whirled off by the autumn winds, for the seeds ripen in September. I have seen seedlings growing thickly for rods to the leeward of their parent tree, which stood in an open field. The maples bear blossoms and seeds every year. There are six species of native maples which are readily distinguishable. The silver and the red maples and the box elder are rather large trees; the mountain and the striped (or goosefoot) maples are scarcely more than shrubs, and mostly grow in woods

along streams. The Norway and the sycamore maples have been introduced from Europe for ornamental planting. The cut-leaf silver maple comes from Japan.

The maple wood is hard, heavy, strong, tough and fine-grained; it is cream-color, the heart-wood showing shades of brown; it takes a fine polish and is used as a finishing timber for houses and furniture. It is used in construction of ships, cars, piano action and tool handles; its fine-grained quality makes it good for wood-carving; it is an excellent fuel and has many other uses.

MAPLE-SUGAR MAKING

Although we have tapped the trees in America for many hundred years, we do not as yet understand perfectly the mysteries of the sap flow. In 1903, the scientists at the Vermont Experiment Station did some very