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Then the character of the forest began to change. Soon they were in a mixed growth, and not long afterward they found practically nothing but deciduous trees about them. "We're not far from the line now," suggested Lew. "This must be the stand of hardwoods we saw from the lookout tree. I doubt if it is more than half a mile to the line." "Keep your eyes open for blazed trees," said Charley.
We had long ago left the deciduous foliage behind us; but the pines themselves were smaller, interspersed with what is called "crooked timber," which grows in grotesque dwarf-like forms. The forest at last diminished into mere sparse shrubs, and finally we reached the treeless region, called in German the Alpen, where there is rich pasturage for cattle and sheep during the summer.
Here, within the same geographical limits of the north temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other débris, as are the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of 'band-keramik' in Central Europe.
Twilight reigns in this maze of tall deciduous trees. There is thick undergrowth, too; and I measured an old lentiscus a shrub, in Italy which was three metres in circumference. But the exotic feature of the grove is its wealth of creeping vines that clamber up the trunks, swinging from one tree-top to another, and allowing the merest threads of sunlight to filter through their matted canopy.
STYRAX AMERICANA and S. PULVERULENTA are not commonly cultivated, being far less showy than the Japanese species. They bear white flowers. S. OFFICINALIS. Storax. Levant, 1597. This is a small deciduous shrub, with ovate leaves, and short racemes of pretty pure white flowers. A not very hardy species, and only second-rate as an ornamental flowering shrub. Japanese Storax. Japan.
The long, incurved appendages, in the shape of a crown, and placed so as to protect the style and anthers, render the flowers of peculiar interest. Though often used as a greenhouse plant, it is perfectly hardy, and makes a neat, deciduous wall or arch covering, thriving to perfection in rich soil that is well-drained. It is readily propagated from cuttings. Prickly Heath. Magellan, 1828.
The forest of gigantic trees on the Himalaya, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark grey foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high. Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are smaller, more varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast with grey limestone and red sandstone rocks.
In the second place, the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to have been merely a form of Diana, and Egeria is definitely said to have been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak. Elsewhere in Italy the goddess had her home on oak-clad mountains. Thus Mount Algidus, a spur of the Alban hills, was covered in antiquity with dark forests of oak, both of the evergreen and the deciduous sort.
In general, as we go from north to south in the region of deciduous forests, we find that among the early Indians agriculture became more and more important and the people more sedentary, though not always more progressive in other ways. The Catawbas, for instance, in South Carolina were sedentary agriculturists and seem to have differed little in general customs from their neighbors.
Originally the reverse was doubtless true, for in the existing delta of the Mississippi those clays in which the innumerable roots of the deciduous cypress and other swamp trees ramify in all directions are seen to withstand far more effectually the undermining power of the river, or of the sea at the base of the delta, than do beds of loose sand or layers of mud not supporting trees.
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