nuts, chestnuts, and acorns the moisture of
the ground and the covering of leaves seem congenial, though too much
warmth and moisture often cause the acorns to germinate prematurely. I
have found the ground under the oaks in December covered with nuts,
all anchored to the earth by purple sprouts. But the winter which
follows such untimely growths generally proves fatal to them.

One must always cross-question nature if he would get at the truth,
and he will not get at it then unless he frames his questions with
great skill. Most persons are unreliable observers because they put
only leading questions, or vague questions.

Perhaps there is nothing in the operations of nature to which we can
properly apply the term intelligence, yet there are many things that
at first sight look like it. Place a tree or plant in an unusual
position and it will prove itself equal to the occasion, and behave in
an unusual manner; it will show original resources; it will seem to
try intelligently to master the difficulties. Up by Furlow Lake, where
I was camping out, a young hemlock had become established upon the end
of a large and partly decayed log that reached many feet out into the
lake. The young tree was eight or nine feet high; it had sent its
roots down into the log and clasped it around on the outside, and had
apparently discovered that there was water instead of soil immediately
beneath it, and that its sustenance must be sought elsewhere and that
quickly. Accordingly it had started one large root, by far the largest
of all, for the shore along the top of the log. This root, when I saw
the tree, was six or seven feet long, and had bridged more than half
the distance that separated the tree from the land.

Was this a kind of intelligence? If the shore had lain in the other
direction, no doubt at all but the root would have started for the
other side. I know a yellow pine that stands on the side of a steep
hill. To make its position more secure, it has thrown out a large root
at right angles with its stem directly into the bank above it, which
acts as a stay or guy-rope. It was positively the best thing the tree
could do. The earth has washed away so that the root where it leaves
the tree is two feet above the surface of the soil.

Yet both these cases are easily explained, and without attributing any
power of choice, or act of intelligent selection, to the trees. In
the case of the little hemlock upon the partly submerged log, r