POSSESSIONS IN THE APPALACHIAN FORESTS 141 



to meet with any adequacy their needs. Here and there private philanthropy 

 and devotion has established some admirable schools, such, for example, as 

 Miss Berry's school in Georgia; Miss Pettitt's school in the mountains of 

 Kentucky ; and Archdeacon Neve's school in the ragged mountains of Virginia. 

 And there is a college or two. the most noted of which is Berea College in the 

 mountains of eastern Kentucky. All of these are doing great work, but what 

 are they among so many. They are but lights on the mountain to show the 

 wanderer that human sympathy still exists and to encourage the lost not to 

 despair. The writer feels that he could not render the cause of forest conser- 

 vation a greater benefit than to call to public attention the fact that in this 

 great forest clad region which so clearly demands preservation at this time is 

 a population kindred to the best element of our people, constituting a great 

 reservoir of conservation of those traits of the Anglo-Saxon which made this 

 country the home of liberty and to which we may hereafter have to turn for 

 the salvation of the Union as the Union turned to it in the fighting sixties. 



In those mountain regions, when the fire in the cabin has been extin- 

 guished, they often have to send to a neighbor across the mountain to borrow 

 fire. All they ask of us now is "Lend us fire." Should we not do so? Let us 

 apply ourselves and our powers along this line of conservation. If we do, we 

 may be very sure that the time will come when they will return into our bosom 

 a hundred fold for all the gifts that we now bestow upon them. 



It is interesting to observe in the literature of the ages the part that trees 

 represent in the history of the race. In that wonderful record in Genesis, 

 God's first creation was the heaven and the earth. Light from the spirit of 

 God was the primal act. In the first day and in the second He created the 

 firmament and divided the waters from the waters, and in the third day he 

 created the dry land and the sea and the grass and the tree before he created 

 man, thus before He created the inhabitants of the sea and of the earth He 

 created the tree. And when He had created man in His own image and had 

 given him dominion "over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," he 

 said to him, "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the face 

 of all the earth and every tree in the earth which is the fruit of a tree yield- 

 ing seed, to you it shall be for meat." To the beast of the earth and the fowl 

 of the air and the thing that creepeth upon the earth He gave the green herb 

 for meat; but He gave to man the tree for meat. 



In the other and briefer account of the creation it is said that the Lord 

 God planted a garden and there He put man whom He had formed. And out 

 of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the 

 sight, and good for food, the tree of Life also in the midst of the garden and 

 the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Thus the beauty of the tree was placed 

 even before its usefulness. 



Now from this earliest record on down you will find that the tree is an 

 object of peculiar reverence to the poet and the seer, and are they not the 

 leaders of the race? 



There are those who would maintain that our aboriginal ancestors made 

 their homes not only among but in the trees — were, to use the scientific phrase, 

 "arboreal" in their habits. It is not necessary to enter on this discussion ; it 

 may be passed with the simple recall of the old woman's speech to the young 

 evolutionist, that "if he preferred to think his ancestors were the same with 

 those in the 'Zoo,' well and good; but she preferred to think hers were in the 

 garden of Eden." 



So all the way down history sacred and profane we find the tree men- 

 tioned with respect and with reverence; for even then without doubt in those 

 regions inhabited by the older races the disappearance of the forests had be- 

 come a matter of public concern. 



