TREES IN THEIR LEAFLESS STATE.

As the season for Arbor Day and tree-planting comes on, just before
the buds begin to swell and are getting ready to cover the trees with
a fresh mantle of leaves, it is well--as it is also when the leaves
have fallen from the trees in autumn--to give attention to the bare
trees and notice the characteristic forms of the various species, the
manner in which their branches are developed and arranged among
themselves, for a knowledge of these things will often enable one to
distinguish the different kinds of trees more readily and certainly
than by any other means. The foliage often serves as an obscuring
veil, concealing, in part at least, the individuality and the
peculiarities of the trees. But if one is familiar with their forms of
growth, their skeleton anatomy, so to speak, he will recognize common
trees at once with only a partial view of them.

Some trees, as the oak, throw their limbs out from the trunk
horizontally. As Dr. Holmes says: "The others shirk the work of
resisting gravity, the oak defies it. It chooses the horizontal
direction for its limbs so that their whole weight may tell, and then
stretches them out fifty or sixty feet so that the strain may be
mighty enough to be worth resisting." Some trees have limbs which
droop toward the ground, while those of most, perhaps, have an upward
tendency, and others still have an upward direction at first and later
in their growth a downward inclination, as in the case of the elm, the
birch, and the willows. Some, like the oak, have comparatively few but
large and strong branches, while others have many and slender limbs,
like many of the birches and poplars.

The teacher should call attention to these and other characteristics