44 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



Mrs. A. Kerr, of Madison, read a paper in regard to 



TREE PLANTING. 



A small boy who knew more about trees than he did about 

 grammars and dictionaries, was asked by his younger brother 

 what the word idiot meant. " Don't you know," said Ben, "an 

 idiot is a person who doesn't know an Arbor Yitae from a Pine — 

 he doesn't know anything." There are a good many people in the 

 world who would hardly be sane, judged by Ben's "terrible test." 

 To them a tree is a tree; something to be cut down and hauled 

 off. The farmer whose home is in the woods look's on the trees 

 about him as interlopers, who have pre-empted the land which he 

 wants to sow with wheat or plant with corn. They are not friends 

 but foes which he must exterminate before he can have acknowl- 

 edged ownership of the land for which he has paid his hard- 

 earned dollars. The lumberman sees in trees so many feet of 

 logs to be taken to the saw-mill, destined to reappear at no distant 

 day in the form of houses and fences. 



For more than two centuries the one great achievement of 

 Americans, has been to cut down trees. When the Pilgrims 

 landed on Plymouth Rock, an unbroken forest stretched from the 

 Atlantic Ocean to the western prairies, and. tree by tree, that 

 forest has been felled. The man with the ax has been hailed as 

 the herald of progress, and the echo of his sturdy blows resound- 

 ing through the woods has been the announcement of advancing civ- 

 ilization. The first president of these United States was the boy 

 with the little hatchet who cut his father's cherry-tree, while the no- 

 ble Lincoln is known to every one as "Honest Abe, the rail splitter." 

 But now a change has come. The warnings of the clerk of the 

 weather are being emphasized by our own experience. The signs 

 of the times are really alarming. Our springs are later, our sum- 

 mers are dryer, our winters are more unreliable, and we are as- 

 sured by the scientists of two continents, that these evils, and other 

 more serious evils which threaten us, are caused by the wholesale 

 destruction of these forests. Something ought to be done. We 

 must not only stop cutting down the trees which remain but we 



