I never saw land apparently better adapted to the growth of beech and chestnut trees than the bluffs along the western shore of Lake Michigan, from the Wisconsin line to within ten or fifteen miles of Chicago. A sandy, gravelly loam for the most part, intermixed with spots more clayey, sixty feet above the lake, thoroughly drained naturally.

Forty years ago the more sandy knolls were covered with a growth of red oak, and the more clayey-land with white oak trees. Where I reside, I had. the timber cut off in 1845, built my residence, 1850, and commenced planting in 1851. Every kind of tree I can now think of, hardy enough to endure this climate, have done well except the beech and chestnut. When I commenced my ornamental planting in 1851, I had already a number of trees that I had purchased from Benjamin Hodge, of Buffalo, and Custead & Elliott, of Cleveland, in 1848. As far as I recollect, they all grew very well except the chestnut. They had no beech trees. Wishing to have a specimen of every tree that would endure our climate, I sent a man up to the beech woods in Wisconsin, only twenty to thirty miles north, and standing on exactly such land, to all appearances, as this; hundreds of acres of fine beech forests extending from the edge of the bluffs back a mile or two, and although these woods have long been cut down, there are still thousands of beech trees in the pastures and on land that has not been cultivated. The twenty or thirty beech trees brought from Wisconsin were planted, one here and there, on my grounds, skirting the lawn, along the edge of the ravine, etc., and to-day three of them are standing.

The best one, six inches in diameter and about eighteen feet high; the next four inches in diameter, and the next two and three-quarter inches. On the same soil, with the same care, I have grown a Norway spruce that measured, when cut down last year, thirty inches in diameter. It stood within one hundred feet of the largest beech. A larch tree standing near this beech, cut down after standing twenty years, had made an inch in diameter from the time it was planted. Even a sugar maple planted several years later now measures over eighteen inches in diameter. I have planted purple beeches and weeping beeches over and over again, but they would all die in two or three years.

Twenty years or more ago, before the beech woods were cut down, when the wild or passenger pigeons were migrating south, they would invariably fly along the edge of the bluff, and nearly every man who owned a gun would be standing on the bluff shooting them, just after they had filled their crops with beech nuts. Hundreds of them were wounded and left to be eaten by vermin, and the nuts left in the proper places and conditions to grow. Aside from this, scores of hawks were preying on the flocks; and before the white man came here Indians frequented this place in great numbers; yet in all the thousands of beech nuts that must have been scattered here, there has never been a beech tree found either on the bluffs or under the bluffs; but, what is somewhat remarkable, in the ravines that have cut their way through the bluff's, a very few beech trees may be found, not over twenty trees, in all the ravines between Chicago and the State line. Land-slides in these ravines show the different strata, and they are all very much alike, some of almost clear gravel, of clay, of sand and gravel mixed, etc. and as far as I have been able to examine these beech trees, have found but one strata on which they can grow - i. e., a strata in which there is little or no limestone gravel.

Now as to the chestnut, hundreds of trees have been planted in and around our city, mostly twenty to thirty years ago. I do not know if there is one left, but a few years ago I knew of two trees; they had dwindled along for over twenty years and were two or three inches through, while on a sandy loam ridge without gravel, about fifteen miles north and two miles from the bluff, there stood, a few years ago, a number of chestnut trees that were then growing very rapidly, and may be yet.

Now, as nearly all our gravel is limestone, I have long been of the opinion that beech and chestnut trees will not grow in limestone soils. I have never seen anything on this point in print; and although I have inquired of many men living in beech and chestnut districts, I have never been able to get any satisfactory information on this point. My theory got a terrible shaking last month when on the grounds of Mr. A. R. Whitney, of Franklin Grove, 111. Mr. Whitney's land is, in the main, like the ordinary rich prairie lands of Illinois, strongly impregnated with lime; and there I saw a row of chestnut trees and a row of beech trees, of large size and thrifty growth. I remarked to him, that the sight of these trees had dissolved my twenty years' theory into thin air; but when I told him what my theory was, he showed me that this was not limestone land, but near where sandstone rock is cropping out, and where he has quarried out sandstone rock. What is the reason that the beech will not grow?

We should be inclined to the opinion that the beech will yet grow, and that the failures arise from some imperfections in the specimens used. In regard to the indisposition of many forests to produce young trees, in the cases which have come under our notice, it has been from the absence of circumstances favoring the germination of the seeds. Circumstances favoring germination and circumstances favoring the growth and vigor of the tree, are often very different. In most forests, so far as the observation of the Editor goes, it is but occasionally that a good year for seed growth occurs. - Ed. G. M.]