Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1890 — Its Tail in the Air. [ARTICLE]

Its Tail in the Air.

Yes, a tree is an undergrohnd creature, with its tail in the air. All its intelligence is in its roots. Think what sagacity it shoivs in its search after food and diiok. Somehow or other, the rootlets, which are its tentacles, find out that there is a brook at a moderate distance from the trunk of the tree, and they mqke for it with all their might. They find every crack in the rocks where there are a few grains of the nourishing substanco they care for and insinuate themselves into its deepest recesses. When spidng and summer come they let their tails grow, and delight in whisking them about in tho wind, or letting them be whisked about bv it; for those tails are poor, passive things, with very little will of their own and bend in whatever direction the wind chooses to make them. The leaves make a good deal of noise whispering. I have sometimes thought I could understand them as they talked with each other, and that thev seemed to think they made the wind as they wagged forward and back. Remember what I say. The next time you see a jtree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the tail of a great underground many-armed, polypus-like creature which is as proud of its caudal appendage, especially in summer time, as a peacock of his gorgeous expanse of plumage. Do you think there is anything so very odd about this idea? Once get it well into your heads and you will find it renders the landscape wonderfully interesting. 'There are as many kinds of tree tails as there are of tails to dogs and other quadrupeds. Study them as Daddy Gilpin studied them in his “Forest Scenery,” but don’t forget that they are only the appendage of the underground vegetable polypus, the true organism to which they belong.—Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the Atlantic.