pileatus; and I cannot help associating the giant bloom, its strength of form and vigor of color, with the scarlet crest and king-like bearing of the bird.  The big trees of California excepted, our tulip-bearing Liriodendron is the largest growth of the North-American forests; for, while the plane-tree and the liquidambar-(sweet-gum) tree sometimes measure more in diameter near the ground, they are usually hollow, and consequently bulged there, while the tulip springs boldly out of the ground a solid shaft of clear, clean, and sweetly-fragrant wood, sixty or seventy feet of the bole being often entirely without limbs, with an average diameter of from three to five feet.  I found a stump in Indiana nearly eight feet in diameter (measured three feet above the ground), and a tree in Clarke County, Kentucky, of about the same girth, tapering slowly to the first branch, fifty-eight feet from the root.

In nearly all the Western and Southern States the tulip is generally called poplar, and the lumber manufactured from it goes by the same name, while in the East it is known as white-wood.  The bark is very thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable; the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to others.  Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit.  Humming-birds and bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the shadowy sprays.  A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew, may often be found in the hollows of the immense petals, in search of which large black ants make pilgrimages from the root to the top of the largest tulip-trees, patiently toiling for two or three hours over the rough bark, among the bewildering wrinkles of which it is, a wonder how the way is kept with such unerring certainty.  I have calculated that in making such a journey the ant does what is equivalent to a man’s pedestrian tour from New York City to the Adirondacks by the roughest route, and all for a smack of wild honey!  But the ant makes his long excursion with neither alpenstock nor luncheon, and without sleeping or even resting on the way.

The tulip-tree grows best in warm loam in which there is a mixture of sand and vegetable mould superposed on clay and gravel.  About its roots you may find the lady-slipper and the dog-tooth violet, each in its season.  Its bark often bears the rarest lichens, and, near the ground, short green moss as soft and thick as velvet.  The poison-ivy and the beautiful Virginia creeper like to clamber up the rough trunk, sometimes clothing the huge tree from foot to top in a mantle of brown feelers and glossy leaves.  Seen at a distance, the tulip-tree and the black-walnut-tree look very much alike; but upon approaching them the superior symmetry and beauty of the former are at once discovered.  The leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor.