APPENDIX. 177 



TREES AND THEIR INFLUENCES — SILVIA t'ULTURI-:: AS A DUTY. 



The writer has no hesitation in confessing that he owes much of happiness 

 of a long life to the influence of trees, both as massed in woodlands and for- 

 ests, and to individual trees of particular beauty, strength, or grandure of 

 dimensions. A well-grown fruit tree, in full bloom or laden with ripe, 

 lucious fruit, is a joy to contemplate. A fine oak or other gi'eat forest tree, 

 impells the dullest mind to dwell on creative power and to "look through 

 nature up to nature's God," and so warrants the poet in saying : 



"The groves were lieaven's first temples." 



Starting from beneath the trees, which are natural shelter from the cold 

 of winter or heat of summer, the natural man must have early in the 

 world's age reasoned upward to the beneficient power we call *'God."' So 

 that man now. when his inventions have taken him far from the wild, natural 

 life, cannot frame the story of his own evolution in a manner more probable 

 than that of the story of Eden — the garden consisting of every herb and 

 tree-bearing fruit — yielding seed — "pleasant to the sight and good for 

 food," into which man was put '"to dress it and to keep it." 



It is highly probable that there was not on the face of the earth a district 

 ■so extended, carrying trees of so great variety, suitable for the highest uses 

 of man, as North America was at the time of the landing of the Pilgrim 

 Fathers at Plymouth Rock. The native energy of those immigrants, and the 

 natural nursery of further development of energy they found in the climate 

 and other conditions to which they came, made them destroyers of living 

 limber of necessity, in order to clear land from which to raise food. After 

 that, to convert the living trees into merchandise, as logs, structural tim- 

 bers, plank, and the finer manufactures of wood, was a natural evolution of 

 economics, hastened in development by the mother country's policy of pro- 

 hibiting the founding of other lines of manufacturing industry in her col- 

 onies already established in England — a market for the products of which 

 the American colonies were long held by the mother land. Yet, adding to 

 land-clearing and sales of wood in various forms, including the arrow-marked 

 kings trees of colonial days, and destroying it by great labor in many ways, 

 it has taken the industries of the Atlantic seaboard states over two hundred 

 and fifty years to note they may have overcut their timber lands. Happily, 

 this perception has not come too late. Intelligence and public spirit has be- 

 gun work, and many of the highest schools have taken up the teaching of 

 forest management and silvia culture. 



Under the leadership of a comparatively few enthusiastic lovers of trees, 

 however, the American Forestry Association has reached out beyond these 

 overcut localities, and induced the adoption of a forest reserve policy by the 

 national government, on grounds of questionable policy, in withdrawing 

 the public lands from private ownership. The wisdom of sufficient fore; t 

 preservation and care for the future is not only undeniable as good policy, 

 but believed by the writer to be a high duty of the citizens of every state. 



I believe the people can be trusted. On almost every area of one hun- 

 dred and sixty acres in every portion of the United States oa which falls an 

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