with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off the nuts
to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they commonly make pretty
clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was old, the sprouts will be
feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about the soil being, in a
measure, exhausted for this kind of crop.

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks may be
expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded, instead
by an edging of shrub-oaks, then you will probably have a dense shrub-oak
thicket.

I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while the
wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, the
squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks and walnuts
into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up.

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional examination
of dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has long been known to
observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but I am not aware that
any one has thus accounted for the regular succession of forests.

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet, in
this town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some herbage,
with something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot of a hemlock,
within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a hole with its
forefeet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and retreated part way
up the trunk of the tree. As I approached the shore to examine the
deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no little anxiety
about its treasure, and made two or three motions to recover it before it
finally retreated. Digging there, I found two green pig-nuts joined