I blame the squirrels for the broken branches found under the Norway Spruces in the spring - note of which you made in last number of Gardeners' Monthly.

Although I have never seen a squirrel cut a branch, and know no reason why they should do so, unless it be for sport, the facts are these:

1. In and about our oldest Norways, which are close together, and intermixed with other trees, squirrels are often seen feeding upon the seeds, and the cones are entirely cut up by them, the fragments strewing the ground beneath; and here the broken branches are found in abundance.

2. Isolated trees on the campus retain their cones and their branches. I have never seen squirrels here.

3. I notice the same relation between broken branches, cut up cones and feeding squirrels, among our native Pines (P. rigida) all about us.

4. The branches seem to me to be cut off by squirrels' teeth. I send a few specimens by this mail. State College, Centre Co., Pa.

[These are undoubtedly cut by squirrels, because the cut made is the cut which squirrels make in gnawing a branch. Those which we received from New Hampshire were broken off at a bud - disarticulated as it were - which a squirrel could not do. We are now inclined to think that after the rodent has cut the branch, and drying commences, disarticulation of the side branchlets results, and in this way their presence among the evidently gnawed-off branches will be accounted for. - Ed. G. M].