NEWS AND NOTES 



247 



Children Plant Trees 



The prairie town without trees is cheer- 

 less and unattractive. Few things add more 

 to the attractiveness of a town than rows of 

 thrifty shade trees planted along its streets. 



Village and town improvement societies 

 and civic associations have done much to 

 promote tree-planting, especially in the 

 prairie regions of the middle West. Where 

 trees adapted to local conditions have been 

 planted, and where the citizens have cared 

 for them and taken an interest in them, the 

 results have been remarkable. 



A public-spirited man residing in a city 

 in Missouri has been doing commendable 

 work along this line, in connection with the 

 Civic Improvement League of his city. In 

 the year 1901 he planted a large quantity of 

 seeds of various trees in nursery rows. He 

 carefully tended the young seedlings, and, a 

 few years later, dug them up, labeled them, 

 and turned them over to the school children 

 free, upon condition that they should be 

 planted and cared for. 



Since the trees started life with the begin- 

 ning of the present century, they were called 

 ''century trees," and this gave them addi- 

 tional interest. 



Each child was given printed directions, 

 which were headed as follows : 



"Ornament your homes. Plant century 

 trees, seedlings of 1901. They are living 

 monuments; watch them develop. They be- 

 gan with the century, and the century, as it 

 advances, marks the record of their age 

 year by year." 



Those who received trees were directed to 

 dig holes two feet in diameter and one and 

 one-half feet deep. They were told to keep 

 the roots of the trees moist and covered un- 

 til planted, to see that all torn ends of roots 

 were cut off smoothly, and to cut back the 

 side branches about a quarter or third of 

 their length, or, if the tree was a straight 

 shoot, without branches, to cut back the tip 

 a few inches. This pruning was to balance 

 the loss of roots in digging up the trees. 



In planting the tree, they were told to 

 spread the roots out into natural position, 

 and to set the tree about an inch deeper 

 in the ground than it stood in the nursery; 

 touse good, rich soil, but to allow no fer- 

 tilizer or mulch to come into direct contact 

 with the roots; to work the soil carefully 

 about the roots, and to water the tree plenti- 

 fully every few days after it was set out, 

 and_ during the dry weather of summer. 



Five or six thousand trees were given away 

 in this manner. Two or three trees were 

 given to each child who asked for them, and 

 almost every child did so. There were many 

 species, and naturally some died, but few 

 children lost all that they planted. Each 

 child who received trees was required to fill 

 out a slip giving his name and address, and 

 the place where the tree was planted. The 

 trees in public places will be labeled when 

 they have grown somewhat larger. 



The town is now dotted with these little 

 "century trees," which have become the 

 pride of those who planted them. 



«? 5^ &' 



Utilizing Natural Gas 



Speaking of the ineffective attempts of 

 the states of Oklahoma and Indiana to pre- 

 vent the export of natural gas, Mr. Godfrey 

 L. Cabot, of Boston, writing to the Boston 

 Transcript, says : 



"There is no commodity whose export and 

 freedom of transportation is relatively so 

 important as natural gas, because there is 

 no forrn of wealth, from its physical nature, 

 so subject to waste. By far the greater 

 portion of natural gas which has been pro- 

 duced up to this time has been absolutely 

 wasted, and it is not likely that five per cent, 

 of the natural gas at present produced in 

 Oklahoma is put to any useful purpose. The 

 greatest waste results from the fact that 

 most of the petroleum oil produced in this 

 country, and in particular the petroleum oil 

 foimd _ in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania. West 

 Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennes- 

 see, Illinois, Louisiana, and New York, is 

 associated with a large amount of gas, which 

 is usually allowed to escape into the open 

 air. Even the large operators such as the 

 Standard Oil Company, or rather the va- 

 rious producing branches of the Standard 

 Oil Company, have made little attempt to 

 utilize the gas off the oil, except locally in 

 connection with the production of the oil 

 itself, and considering the fact that the 

 amount of gas sold in the year 1907 was 

 estimated by the United States Geological 

 Survey at nearly fifty-three millions of dol- 

 lars, there is no question that many hundreds 

 of millions of dollars' worth of natural gas 

 have been absolutely wasted in this country 

 since the systematic exploitation of oil began 

 in the year 1859, and it is very regrettable that 

 the Standard Oil Company, and other large 

 operators, who have shown great econom}'^ 

 and wisdom in the handling of oil, have in 

 most cases ignored the immense waste of 

 gas. 



"I am, myself, buying this gas off the oil 

 in very large quantity, at a cent and a half a 

 thousand, and gas having more than half 

 again as much energy per cubic foot as the 

 best illuminating gas, and I seek through your 

 columns to give the widest possible pub- 

 licity to the fact that here is an immense 

 field for legitimate enterprise, to gather to- 

 gether this gas off the oil ; pump it through 

 gas lines to market, and thus utilize a nat- 

 ural resource which cannot be replaced by 

 any method known to man, and which is, at 

 present, subject to greater proportional waste 

 than any other valuable asset that I can 

 think of." 



