Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/716

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��Popular Science Monthly

��One Tree Grows Through Another

IN a West Virginia forest nature has played an unusual prank upon two trees. One of them is a maple and the other an oak. Close inspection reveals the interesting fact that the oak tree has beyond doubt grown up through the maple. The oak being the more rug- ged of the two trees is causing the maple where its bifurcated trunk joins, a few feet above the ground, to split.

Asleep On the Sleepers

WHEN the f^rst railways were built in China it was necessary, first to force the coolies to work upon them at the point of the bay- onet, and later, to protect these coolies by force of arms from the outraged inhabitants of the countryside through which the railways ran. This feeling passed rapidly, how- ever, as the Chinaman's phil- osophical disposition asserted itself. The accompanying photograph illustrates graphically the way in which the Ce- lestial has taken the railway.

The sop- ,j^^^, ,*i

ori f i c indi-

���An oak tree growing through a maple

���viduals are section hands on the Shang- hai-Nanking Railway, and because the little wooden pillows on which they and their ancestors have been resting their heads for a good many thousands of years were almost exactly similar— both in height, cross- section and hardness — to the eighty- pound "T" along which they were working, they were not long in adapting the convenient met- als to the same pur- pose. There is one swift express which speeds over the straight and well- ballasted track be- tween Shanghai and Nanking at the rate of sixty miles an hour, and in the first days that the "noon- day sleep" habit be- came popular it was no uncommon thing to have two or three decapitated coolies reported at headquarters every evening. This finally became so troublesome that orders were sent out prohibiting the prac- tice absolutely, and holding the section bosses respon- sible for the men in their gangs, but even to this day, 'casu- al ties from sleeping on the track sti 1 1 occur.

��The Chinaman's pillow is a hard wooden bench, the size and shape of rails. So wiij oUj-iidii the coolies use these nice pillows the railroad laid down

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