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Half an hour of intense silence passed, and then a lusty shout startled the air. Surely, I thought, the wayfarer who makes such outcry in this unpeopled wilderness is an uncouth fellow who has lost his way and thinks to dialogue with echoes for relief of loneliness. Presently the cracking of branchlets and a rumble of discontented phrases told of someone blundering along through the mangroves.
The mature cones, about three-fourths of an inch long, born on the ends of the plumy branchlets, serve to enrich still more the surpassing beauty of this winter-blooming tree-goldenrod. The Silver Firs
The main branches are sometimes found to be forty feet in length, yet persistently simple, seldom dividing at all, excepting near the end; but anything like a bare cable appearance is prevented by the small, tasseled branchlets that extend all around them; and when these superb limbs sweep out symmetrically on all sides, a crown sixty or seventy feet wide is formed, which, gracefully poised on the summit of the noble shaft, and filled with sunshine, is one of the most glorious forest objects conceivable.
The fertile cones are about three fourths of an inch long, borne on the outside of the plumy branchlets, where they serve to enrich still more the surpassing beauty of this grand winter-blooming goldenrod. We come now to the most regularly planted of all the main forest belts, composed almost exclusively of two noble firs A. concolor and A. magnifica.
Sereno Watson takes away Lawson's cypress from Cupressus and puts it in the genus Chamæcyparis, the chief points of distinction being the flattened two-ranked branchlets and the small globose cones maturing the first year. All the cypresses are undoubtedly valuable from a garden point of view, but the various species vary in degree as regards their utility as ornamental subjects.
I have seen a sub-peduncle thickly covered with flower-buds, with one of its higher lateral branchlets bearing from some cause only two buds; and this one branchlet had become much elongated and had spontaneously caught hold of an adjoining twig; in fact, it formed a little sub-tendril.
The metallic starlings have again built on a favourite tree not massive and tough, but a slim though tall Moreton Bay ash, the branchlets of which are not notoriously brittle. They withstand a certain weight, beyond which they snap. Why do these otherwise highly intelligent birds so overstrain branches with groups of nests that "regrettable incidents" cannot be averted?
I must preface this with a few words upon the homology of the roots of the Rhizocephala, i.e. the tubules which penetrate from its point of adhesion into the body of the host, ramify amongst the viscera of the latter, and terminate in caecal branchlets. I have therefore supposed these appendages to be the rudiments of the future roots.
The leaves are arranged in two horizontal rows along branchlets that commonly are less than eight years old, forming handsome plumes, pinnated like the fronds of ferns. The cones are grayish-green when ripe, cylindrical, from three to four inches long, and one and a half to two inches wide, and stand upright on the upper horizontal branches.
The sierra, or mountain range, over which they passed was about thirty miles in extent, being in some places quite level and open, but in others somewhat rugged and covered with large but thinly scattered trees, the most common of which had fine dark-green glossy leaves, with spikes of bright-yellow flowers terminating the branchlets.
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