he is obliged to struggle with difficulties sufficient to require the
constant exercise of the mind and body to overcome them. Science and Art
have built their altars in the region of the Oak, and in valleys which
are annually whitened with snow, where labor invigorates the frame, and
where man's contention with the difficulties presented by the elements
sharpens his ingenuity and strengthens all his facilities. Hence, while
the Oak is the symbol of hospitality and of the arts to which it has
given its aid, the Palm symbolizes the voluptuousness of a tropical
clime and the indolence of its inhabitants.

I have said that the North produces no parasol-trees; but it should be
remarked that all kinds of trees occasionally approximate to this shape,
when they have grown compactly in a forest. The general shape which they
assume under these conditions is what I have termed accidental, because
that shape cannot be natural which a growing body is forced to take
when cramped in an unnatural or constrained position. Trees when thus
situated become greatly elongated; their shafts are despoiled of the
greater part of their lateral branches, and the tree has no expansion
until it has made its way above the level of the wood. The trees that
cannot reach this level will in a few years perish; and this is the
fate of the greater number in the primitive forest. But after they have
attained this level, they spread out suddenly into a head. Many such
trees are seen in recent clearings; and when their termination is a
regular hemisphere of branches and foliage, the tree exhibits a shape
nearly approaching that of a parasol.

The Elm, under these circumstances, often acquires a very beautiful
shape. Unlike other trees that send up a single undivided shaft, the
Elm, when growing in the forest as well as in the open plain, becomes
subdivided into several slightly divergent branches, running up almost