In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority of bee-trees were tulips.  I have found two of these wild Hyblas since I began my studies for this paper; but the trees have become so valuable that the bees are left unmolested with their humming and their honey.  It seems that no more appropriate place for a nest of these wild nectar-brewers could be chosen than the hollow bough of a giant tulip,—­a den whose door is curtained with leaves and washed round with odorous airs, where the superb flowers, with their wealth of golden pollen and racy sweets, blaze out from the cool shadows above and beneath.  But the sly old ’coon, that miniature Bruin of our Western woods, is a great lover of honey, and not at all a respecter of the rights of wild bees.  He is tireless in his efforts to reach every deposit of waxy comb and amber distillation within the range of his keen power of scent.  The only honey that escapes him is that in a hollow too small for him to enter and too deep for his fore-paws to reach the bottom.

Poe, in his story of the Gold-Bug, falls into one of his characteristic errors of conscience.  The purposes of his plot required that a very large and tall tree should be climbed, and, to be picturesque, a tulip was chosen.  But, in order to give a truthful air to the story, the following minutely incorrect description is given:  “In youth the tulip-tree, or Liriodendron Tulipiferum, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem” The italics are mine, and the sentence italicized contains an unblushing libel upon the most beautiful of all trees.  Short branches never “appear on the stems” of old tulip-trees.  The bark, however, does grow rough and deeply seamed with age.  I have seen pieces of it six inches thick, which, when cut, showed a fine grain with cloudy waves of rich brown color, not unlike the darkest mahogany.  But Poe, no matter how unconscionable his methods of art, had the true artistic judgment, and he made the tulip-tree serve a picturesque turn in the building of his fascinating story; though one would have had more confidence in his descriptions of foliage if it had been May instead of November.

The growth of the tulip-tree, under favorable circumstances, is strong and rapid, and, when not crowded or shaded by older trees, it begins flowering when from eighteen to twenty-five years old.  The blooming-season, according to the exigences of weather, begins from May 20 to June 10 in Indiana, and lasts about a week.  The fruit following the flower is a cone an inch and a half long and nearly an inch in diameter at the base, of a greenish—­yellow color, very pungent and odorous, and full of germs like those of a pine-cone.  The tree is easily grown from the seed.  Its roots