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When the Leaves Begin to Turn: September: Pictured

But if we had our leaf pictures arranged according to form, regardless of family connections,--in other words a Pictured Index, arranged on the same principle as an alphabetical index, we could at the name of any leaf in which we were interested; and the name, like a magic key, opens all the treasures of information in the wide world of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, tree books, periodicals, and everything!

So, with the help of the little girl and of another little girl--my wife--I got up just such a Pictured Index of Treeland for a large number of our trees. We three worked it up together for the benefit of all of us. USEFUL HINTS FOR WOOD SCOUTS Speaking of "The Good the Dead Leaves Do," why burn yours in the fall, as the general custom is? These leaves left in a pit or in a heap, in some convenient place, and covered with dirt, will, by the following autumn, be ready for spreading on the vegetable-garden or mother's flower-beds. Actually it will be like putting money in the bank; for, beside fertilizing the soil by their own decay, leaves are very valuable in other ways. When thoroughly decayed they give the soil that porous, crumbly condition so necessary to plant growth, while, on the other hand, they bind together a sandy soil and make it more compact, so that it will hold moisture better. This decayed matter, or "humus," as it is called, darkens light-colored soils, thus increasing their power to absorb sun-rays. It therefore makes such soils warmer, which stimulates growth.

In the book on the history of the soil, The Adventures of a Grain of Dust, I spoke of the wonderful way in which the forces of Nature work together for the common good, the pebbles and the little roots and the earthworms and the volcanoes and so on, but I didn't say anything about what you may think a still more curious fact. We were near the end of the book at the time, if you remember, and there simply wasn't room. This is the curious fact I refer to: Soils rich in humus are thickly populated with fungi. Fungi are low forms of life that attach themselves to other plants and there are certain kinds that help convert dead leaves into soil. It takes them some little time to do this, but they have "all the time there is," as the saying goes; and, then, there are a lot of them. In a thick bed of old leaves we could, with the aid of a microscope, figure out over a million of them in a space no bigger than your thumbnail.

In the work of converting the leaves into soil, these farmer fungi have a partnership arrangement with certain other little citizens of the dark known as bacteria. Some of these bacteria work with the fungi in manufacturing soil from the humus--both on the same job, as it were, but working independently, like the mason and the carpenter in the building of a house. Others have what, I suppose, your father, if he is a business man, would call a "chain system" or "vertical trust." Take their nitrogen factories, for example. One species makes ammonia from decaying leaves and other dead vegetation; another species takes this ammonia and changes it into nitrite; a third species changes the nitrite into nitrate, from which the higher plants get their nitrogen! I said this thoughtfulness in making use of the leaves that most people burn was like putting money into the bank, and, in a still more important way, it is. The boys that early form the habit of looking after things around the home like that, in all sorts of thrifty and forethoughtful ways that will constantly suggest themselves, are the very kind of boys that are wanted as the managers of business concerns when they grow up. Of this you will find ample proof in the anecdotes of the boyhood of famous business men in my book on the vocations, What Are You Going To Be?

PRACTICAL FORESTRY "PUZZLES" Both in school and in the family reading circle the interest of our Year in the Wonderland of Trees will be much increased, and with corresponding profit, if the young people, before the reading of a given chapter, are asked to try their hands at thinking out some of the practical forestry puzzles, the answers to which are given in these chapters and the "Hints" at the end, as illustrated by the questions following the March chapter.