never been trimmed up, as if to imitate a gigantic Brussels sprout, as have many poor hedgerow elms on the lands of some of our strictly utilitarian and economical farmers. The tiny twiglets on the topmost boughs appear as delicate lace-work, far exceeding in fineness the minutest ornament of the Gothic architect, and yet graduating downwards into mighty beams, so as to suggest at once the strength of Nature's framework and the delicacy of her finish.

But in these over-venturesome horizontal limbs, without a correspondingly buttressed stem or sufficiently well-knit woody tissue, the elm seems to offer a contrast to the more sturdy oak. The suggestions of the noble proportions of the latter tree, which served Smeaton as a model for his Eddystone lighthouse, cannot be better described than in the following passage by the late Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, an enthusiastic lover of trees :

"There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest trees. All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity: the oak alone 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. You will find that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At ninety degrees the oak stops short: to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organisation."

But while admiring these massive arms we must not fail to notice the outward spread of the oak stem at its base; and to-day the curiously tortuous branchlets also demand our attention, twisting in zigzag fashion almost rectangularly towards every point of the compass, owing to the terminal shoots becoming abortive. Apropos of the weeping willow, it is moreover noteworthy that, in spite of the extreme downward droop of the branches, they do not leave the stem in a downward direction, but on the contrary at rather an acute angle. Such acute angles are indeed common enough in the main

branches of many trees. If when we were in the kitchen-garden yesterday we had noticed the large pear tree, we should have seen that its main branches are only less erect than the slender ones of this row of Lombardy poplars, or the great silver-grey columns that rise, like the pillars of a grand triforium, from the summit of this massive beech stem. It is often no easy matter to climb a pear tree, one's feet becoming wedged in these acute angles.

Even when not pollarded, the beech tree frequently forks naturally into two or more of these grand vertical columns, while from them the secondary branches descend with an outward sweep, covered with their pointed copper-tinted buds, and giving to the whole tree one of those evenly-rounded outlines the symmetrical form of which is an unceasing marvel.

How characteristic too is the branching of this horse-chestnut ! Starting, like the leaves which now strew the ground beneath, in opposite pairs, the boughs rise from the stem at an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and then bend outwards and downwards in a graceful curve, almost at a right angle to their former direction, so as to make an inclination of sixty or seventy degrees from the upper part of the stem. They turn up at their points, thus describing in their entire course of growth a complex curve of unique beauty, which it is impossible adequately to picture in words. At the same time the thickness of even the youngest shoots, whose large terminal buds are not yet viscid, suggests the rapid growth and spongy wood of the tree.

As we pass through the avenue of lindens, and look towards the belt of trees and shrubs that forms the boundary of the park, there seems to be a purplish, almost smoky haze, between the dark clumps of the rhododendrons. As we get nearer, it appears redder in some places, and we recognise the mass of fine twigs that are borne by a grove of young birches. Some of their main stems are already hanging in silvery rags, looking as if rusty beneath their smooth white rind; but the polished twigs vary a little in colour, some more red, others more purple, producing the striking effect that attracted our notice. Among them, if the sharp frost has not altogether quenched it, we may find St Gudula's lamp. This curious vegetable product, dedicated to the patron saint of the city of Brussels, looks for all the world like a little lump of quaking orange jelly. This tremulous character and its slimy surface have earned for it the scientific name of Tremella

deliquescens; but shapeless as it is, and destitute of organisation as it appears, this fungus, for fungus it is, has a somewhat close affinity to the ordinary toadstools and puff-balls, and the microscope would show its outer surface to be covered with spores, not unlike those on the gills of the mushroom.

We cross a little patch of waste ground, where a few blossoms still open on the furze-bushes suggest that, in the absence of insects, this plant may perhaps become self-fertilising, despite the complex structure of its pea-like flowers, and we enter a lane bounded on one side by the park palings, and on the other by a low mossy bank and a tall quickset hedge. We remember the spot of old. Year after year, as January comes round, we have not been disappointed. Among the moist feathermoss and trailing, five-pointed, grey-veined ivy-leaves lie many rotting twigs from the hawthorn hedge and from neighbouring oaks. Some of these twigs are tasselled with grey lichens, but not a few of them are adorned with that most exquisite of our winter fungi, which many children know as the fairy's bath. Here they are! One, two, three, four on a single twig, ranging in size from the tiny flesh-coloured "button," only just showing the rich scarlet of its interior, up to the irregular tazza nearly an inch and a half across, and barely showing its pink edge, so slightly is it incurved over the richly-coloured inner surface. It belongs to a group very different from that of St Gudula's lamp, the whole of this brilliant scarlet cup being lined, not with spores, but with microscopic club-shaped cells, each of which contains eight spores. There is little fear, therefore, that we shall exterminate this lovely and apparently harmless fungus, if we take a few of them home to ornament a soup-plate filled with moss and edged with lichens and ivy. Some crystal drops of melted hoar-frost have run down into one of the cups, rolling like globules of quicksilver over the slightly gelatinous surface, and certainly the fairy must be hard to please who can wish for a more beautiful bath.

SNOW-CRYSTALS

"He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like morsels; who can stand before his cold?"-PSALM cxlvii. 16, 17.

THE true lover of Nature does not confine his appreciation to her living children, the plants and animals around us. True, nothing can well be of greater interest to an intelligent human being than the study of life, biology in its truest and fullest sense. None of the many mysteries with which we are surrounded is more profound than that of life, life originating in the germ, how or whence we know not, life dormant, but with all the potentialities of the particular species, in the egg or in the seed, life re-awakening in the bursting bud or from the discarded pupa-case, life passing away as silently and as undemonstratively as it came! We share this thing we call life with the plant and with the beast. We recognise in them gradations, a lower and a higher life; and we perceive in our own life added powers, and, still more, wider aspirations. There is the lowliest type of life, we were almost saying the grossest type, in which all existence is well-nigh summed up in the one word nutrition. And yet what intricate marvels of the most complex chemistry that the human student can imagine are implied in that word!

Let us take one of the fleshy scales of the bulb of a hyacinth, or one of the green leaves now emerging from its summit, or the leaf stalk of any begonia we may happen to have in the conservatory, and cut with a razor as thin sections as we can, lengthwise in the two former cases, transversely in that of the leaf-stalk. Lift these tiny slices on the point of a paint-brush into a drop of water on a glass slide, and place it under the microscope. In the bulb scale and leaf of the hyacinth we shall then see that a number of the tiny cells, of which the bulk of the structure is made up, contain bundles of needle-like crystals. In the leaf stalk of begonia many cells contain crystals, but they are not needle-shaped. Now the chemical composition of these crystals is simplicity itself, as compared to that of the tissue in which they occur. The varieties of crystalline form presented by so simple a substance as carbonate of lime are reckoned by the thousand; and yet the merest animalcular speck of living jelly,

which your microscope will show you any day in a drop of pond water, is more complex in its chemistry than the most elaborately crystalline of mineral substances.

The nutrition of a living plant means the power by which it takes such simple substances as are contained in air and in natural waters, and builds them up into the complex compounds of which its body is composed. We cannot, when we think of the chemical aspect of this wondrous life, bring ourselves to apply to it such an adjective as gross. And if this is so as regards nutrition, what shall we say as to the faculty possessed by every kind of plant or animal of multiplying itself? If the splitting into two similar halves of the little speck of jelly to which I have just alluded appear simple, or the branching of the cells you can see if you examine some yeast under a high power of the microscope, what can we say of all the marvellous and beautiful adaptation in a flower? We see the green calyx protecting the other parts in the bud-stage; the gay petals with their perfume, their honey, their bright colours, their varied forms, and their lined or variegated surfaces; the stamens, sensitive perhaps to the slightest touch, discharging their clouds of pollen at an insect visitor; and the viscid stigma, ready to receive the fertilising pollen grains and to nourish them until they send out their delicate tubes down to the ovules, or immature seeds, in the ovary.

And all this is unintelligent life! How vastly more wonderful seems the life of the higher animal, with its instincts, its power of memory, and in its affection, though this in its turn is far inferior to the life of man with its imagination and its reasoning powers. Certainly to an intelligent living being, no study can transcend in interest that of life itself in its multiform manifestations.

We may yet, however, have some attention to spare for inanimate nature, for nature in the simpler revelation of the potentialities of matter without life. To-day, at any rate, we shall not have much more opportunity of consulting our microscope, unless indeed we draw the curtains, shutting out altogether what daylight there is, and take to lamp-light.

A black cloud has spread over a large part of the dull grey sky, and already a few large fleecy snowflakes are falling slowly and silently past our cottage windows. The old woman, we say, is plucking her geese. Soon the flakes become smaller and fall proportionately