TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 45 



cause; even the poor little evergreen that is snatched, quivering, from its 

 fellows, and dragged through snows, to be decked with candles and candies 

 and toys for the brief hour of the children's Christmas cheer, fills no mean 

 place in the world's economy. But, to be amid the grand primeval forests, 

 so full of potential wealth and blessing to mankind, and find these nature's 

 noblemen disvalued, contemned; to hear the ring of the woodman's axe, 

 endlessly reverberating through the forest ; to see the wedge driven 

 relentlessly into the sound old heart; to see that grand stature of two or 

 three hundred feet pause for minutes long, while the low crack — crack, 

 sounds like the breaking of its heart-strings asunder; and then the awful, 

 slow, but resistless fall of that stark, grand form, striking down upon his 

 sorrowful way a dozen of his comrades and making the very earth to 

 tremble and bellow out in thunder at his blow; or to see one of these trees 

 burning by night, the flames eating out its stately heart by slow degrees 

 of days and weeks, and then running in swift, livid lines to its very crown, 

 till at last it falls feebly upon itself, like a martyr sinking into his funeral 

 pyre, these were sights which would make me shed helpless tears, but 

 which moved the owners with satisfaction that the timber, for which there 

 is yet no market, can thus be disposed of through the agencies of total 

 destruction. 



Surely we are in need of some humanizing influence upon our dealings 

 with nature. Not only do we need to impress upon the world the frightful 

 waste involved, but we need, in all ways possible, to foster in the people, 

 especially the young, a sentiment for beauty as " its own excuse for being," 

 which shall breed compunctions against any sacrifice that is not made in 

 the interests of genuine utility. And what a heritage for any child! Well 

 may he say with James Thompson, that passionate lover of nature : 



" I care not, Fortune, what you me deny. 

 You can not rob me of free Nature's grace ; 

 You can not shut the windows of the sky. 

 Through which Aurora shows her brightening face. 

 You can not bar my constant feet to trace 

 The woods and lawns by Hving stream at eve." 



That you may learn thus to love nature, go not as a hunter, a despoiler, 

 for savage pleasure's sake, of the gay wealth of life in forest, field, and 

 stream. Go not with eye fixed on any benefit, but simx)ly, as a child to 

 its mother's knee. There stand reverently, and in reverence open the 

 book she offers you — this book, of wondrous binding, wherein is mingled 

 the verdure of forest and the purple of the vintage, the gold of harvests, 

 and the iridescent plumage of all beautiful birds. But open the book, 

 follow her patient finger, and spell out the more wondrous story, written 

 in all lovely and ministering forms, of thy law, thy heritage, thy duty now 

 and here. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, as we stand under the 

 star-lit dome of sky, or in the noon-dark forest, for man to jolt our elbow 

 and croak a moral in our ear is sacrilege. We can see, we can feel, and no 

 other soul is so close akin to ours as that All-embracing Soul that breathes 

 upon us through these avenues of majestic beauty. 



Mr. Garfield: A practical, hard-headed business man once said to me, 

 it is not the occasional widely spread advertisement, but the constant and 

 persistent one, even though smaller, that sells the goods. Mr. E. W. 

 Baeber of Jackson, who furnishes the next paper, says we must continu- 

 ally agitate and agitate these questions of forestry and we will at last sue- 



