Children's Department 



Dci'otcd to importing infonnatioii about trees, li'oods and forests to hoxs and (jirls so that they may grow to knozv 

 hozv necessary trees are to the health. 7vealth and future of their country. 



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Bv P.RisTow Adams 



HOW TREES TRAVEL 



OK COURSE a great tree does not move itself 

 from where it has long stood. That is the best 

 thing aljiiut it; it stands steadfast, its leafy 

 crown reared aloft, in sun and rain. It may be beaten 

 by the winds, or weighted down with snows, but still it 

 holds its own. an examjile of courage and sturdincss. 

 Indeed, it has been said that a full-grown tree is prac- 

 tically the only thing that man cannot put up where and 

 when he wants it. 



Ikit the trees, as groups, must travel, or they could 

 not live and spread out to occupy new places. 



It is a well-known fact, and one that all foresters 

 learn at the very first, that trees cannot thrive in dense 

 shade. Foresters have a word for this quality of trees 

 in respect to the demand for a place in the sun. They 

 call it "tolerance," and say a tree will "tolerate," or stand, 

 shade, or will not, in which case it is "intolerant." Some 

 foresters claim that the reason smaller trees cannot grow 

 under the limbs of others is not wholly because the light 

 is kept off, but also because the larger and more numer- 

 ous roots of the bigger tree rob the little one of all its 

 moisture. Xo matter what the cause, the result is the 

 same, and certain trees are not able to get a start unless 

 the\- have a good open space to grow in. Others, the 

 "tolerant" ones, can stand a lot of crowding and over- 

 shadowing; then, if light and freedom come they begin 

 to grow thriftilv even after they have been cramped and 

 dwarfed for many years. The hickories, the sugar maple, 

 and hemlock are examples of trees of this type. Yet 

 even they do better if they can get their full share of 

 light and moisture. 



Thus it can be seen that if the trees dropped their 

 seeds immediately to the ground beneath, the little seed- 

 lings, even if they were able to get a start, would have 

 to struggle against the shade and the dryness caused by 

 the parent tree, even though the greatest effort of the 

 ]iarent tree is spent in making possible the lives of new- 

 trees. So it seems as if some of the trees had thought 

 out wavs to scatter their seeds to a distance and had in- 

 vented all sorts of devices, such as aeroplanes, para- 

 chutes, and even shotguns, like the witch-hazel's. 

 Through the constant but very slow changes that have 

 come about as a result of the success in life of those 

 forms which have met the needs of the life struggle and 

 have won out in this struggle — by means of the process 

 known as evolution — the various devices have been made 

 more and more perfect, until they seem to be the result 

 of special plan and effort. 



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987 



