PRESENT FORESTRY ISSUES SI 



old gods of the trees. You think that is too strong a statement? How many 

 times have you tapped wood yourself, as a matter of superstition, of appealing 

 to the gods to avert some threatening evil? This is the last instinct that re- 

 mains to us of that primitive religion, the worship of trees, as gods, by the 

 recognition of the beneficent influence which the trees exert on human life, 

 which even the savages of prehistoric days, in their crude way, did understand, 

 magnifying a natural necessity into the existence of a tutelary divinity. 



You remember the traces, the familiar ones, of that old worship. Go to 

 Vienna. On the Graben, the fashionable shopping district of Vienna, you will 

 see there in the corner of the street, the Stock im Eisen, where every journey- 

 man workman, before starting on his journey in which he was to practice his 

 trade throughout Europe, before settling down as a master mechanic in his own 

 shop, where every journeyman artisan, when starting on his travels went to 

 this old tree stump and drove in a nail for luck in the last remaining stump 

 of the ancient sacred grove, the Wienerwald. 



Do you remember that when Charlemagne overwhelmed the Saxons he 

 found them impossible to conquer until he had come to their sacred grove and 

 cut down their Irminsul, as it is called in the French chronicles, Herman's 

 Saule, the pillar of Herman, the Teutonic hero, better known in the Latin 

 chronicles as Arminius. The tree was worshipped before Arminius won his 

 victory. It was the last relic of a sacred grove, where the worship of trees 

 had at one time been the overwhelming, universal worship of the entire people. 



We know very little about the Druids, that strange race of priests, who 

 dominated France and England, but we do know that the worship of the oak 

 tree and the use of the mistletoe were known far before the dawn of history. 

 I do not know whether the special use we now make of the mistletoe was 

 permitted in the special rights of the tree worshippers, but certainly it was 

 a very charming custom if it was. Last of all, in our daily life, what is the 

 Christmas tree? Why do we have a tree at Christmas? Why, you know that 

 this Christian festival was built upon the ruins of Pagan rites, which in one 

 form or another, took place in almost every country of Europe at the winter 

 solstice, at the turning of the sun in December. The sacred tree was, before 

 the coming of Christianity, a feature in most of those ceremonies. The Christ- 

 mas tree of Germany is a relic of older tree worship copied in the Teutonic 

 religion of Odin and Thor and Valhalla. The German Christmas tree is the 

 survival of the great tree Ygdrasil which, according to the Scandinavians and 

 Teutonic myths, supported the entire earth. 



Of all natural products of the earth the trees perform for humanity the 

 greatest and most varied service. Respect for trees is as naturally supported 

 by sentiment as by common sense. Mankind began, as it hopes to end, in 

 Paradise. What is Paradise? The Greeks and the Hebrews borrowed the 

 word from the Arabs. Paradise, or Paradeisos, means nothing but a park, a 

 place of shrubs and flowers and trees, where the springs rise and the brooks 

 flow and the birds sing out their messages of beauty and of peace. To the 

 mind of the Arab on his parched sands, the most beautiful thing in the world 

 was the oasis where the trees grew and the water sprang, life-giving, from the 

 ground. Our birthplace and our Heaven, in name at least, are one. Not 

 without reason did the poet sing of them : '"The groves were God's first 

 temples." 



