Under the Maples

John  Burroughs

Under the Maples

PREFACE

It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds, the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.

Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind, one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it Under the Maples!"

His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory wood to handle – a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain, hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the year round."

Clara Barrus

The Nest at Riverby West Park on the Hudson

New York

I

THE FALLING LEAVES

The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in our morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures while we slept.

How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color are their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath their heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues which other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often an exception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside in hues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it is so chary of color upon its fruit.

But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all summer.

The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate when it first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates to walk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have thrown down for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! The summer robes of the groves and the forests – more than robes, a vital part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches! The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but the last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. The leaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet they age not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated over and over.

The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all the forest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowed with inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to dispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much less degree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak at times are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees just named for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves of the sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather.

The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture her prey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the tree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs its leaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest, or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked. To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till death ensues.

To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. The rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, on the other – earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption from the earth and air.

The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of its structure – the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crude world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.

A tree does not live by its big roots – these are mainly for strength and to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fitting themselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin says those rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities. They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plant wants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia. The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pea rootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. The individuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable. The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want from the soil, as of course they do.

The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points – in the leaves, in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and rootlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generative layer – the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer bark and the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size. Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is still youthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-bellied woodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thus drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages are rarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on an apple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling.

What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a plant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for us the raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devices for rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue their activity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge the tree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree or vine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to the roots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air through the leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flows upward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree a kind of double circulation.

A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to a knowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so. We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor of the roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; we admire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to ourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those that build up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up out of the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray of leaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we should realize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of water is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward against gravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters at the rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leaves by a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which the tree builds up its woody tissues, – its osseous system, so to speak, – the instruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which it obtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Its function is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce and other material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud of invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a similar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not a food; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation and elimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two ties between the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainly mechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical.

As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to which point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis. Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shoot out beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sends forth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity in matter – some matter – that we call vital.

Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begets myriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finally builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activity alike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in – a disorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and living organisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after the book is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they are of a different kind from those which build up the body in the first instance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex of coördinating organs and functions – what attended to that? The cells build the parts, but what builds the whole?

How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysterious gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on – in our bodies; and many of the same vital functions – respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation, reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called lacteals.

Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature is. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they are reservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies came originally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea with them. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in solution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulk small in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the slumbering and liquid trees." They awaken from their slumber in the spring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them are unsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking into leaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays.

II

THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST

I

How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life, especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogical museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry, shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den. Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.

The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body. This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand, sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature, blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see an egg protest.

Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to eye or ear.

The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn the leaves.

A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair. And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up the opening.

II

My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that the hummer bathed at all.

I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can see only one at a time – to the right or left of you. It also is a fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints. In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position, and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at one time.

In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment. These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most workmanlike manner.

In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and, holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the period of hatching, I do not know.

III

Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day! Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!

IV

We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which, except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night prowlers – skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls – yes, and mice.

The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.

Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the small folk beneath it, – ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders, – all objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil, but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep, and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.

V

In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature, Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:

Well may we affirm that every part of the world is inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains – warm mineral springs – the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of perpetual snow – all support organic beings.

Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the mud – he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or zoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil shells."

His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge. Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.