84 State Horticultural Society. 



forests and trees are found in literature expressed in his pleasing words. 

 But his greatest literary production — greatest, because of the good it has 

 done and will do humanity, is "The Planting of the Apple Tree." The 

 memorizing of this poem by thousands, not only in our own land but 

 across the waters, and the repetition of it in school rooms and at literary 

 societies and during the ceremony of planting an apple tree on Arbor Day 

 has resulted and will result in the planting of thousands of apple trees to 

 scatter their blessings far and wide to humanity. The gloomy words of 

 "Thanatopsis," which made Bryant famous, the product of an immature 

 mind and feeble health, will sink into oblivion while his later poem, "The 

 Planting of the Apple Tree," the product of a more mature and cheerful 

 mind, will ring on down the ages, bringing good to those who hear it. But 

 perhaps the one to whom most honor is due for the planting of forests 

 is J. Sterling Morton, who in 1872 originated Arbor Day. It has not only 

 resulted in changing Nebraska from a treeless state to a well-timbered 

 one, but its results are now felt in every state in the Union. When in 

 1884 it was voted a legal holiday in the public schools in every state in the 

 Union it reached the point from which all great reforms must start. 



When the government passed the timber claims laws it had a worthy 

 object in view. That the law resulted in good cannot be denied, but the 

 results fell far short of the expectation of those who designed or passed 

 the law. The fault lay in the lack of appreciation and the lack of 

 knowledge on the part of the people. Had they been taught in childhood 

 the observance of Arbor Day, they would have been prepared to make the 

 best of the advantages the law offered to them and to future generations. 



There is something wrong in the education that leads people to travel 

 thousands of miles and face hardships to gaze with awe and reverence at 

 the pyramids and the ugly face of the Sphinx of Egypt. What do they 

 represent? Only the miseries of toiling, tortured, bleeding armies of 

 wretched subjects, guided by the lash of cruel masters, directed by 

 tyrannical monarchs, building a place wherein their own dead bodies 

 might be, as they imagined in their ignorance, preserved forever. There 

 is something very wrong in the system of education that encourages the 

 spending of millions to visit these places and the tombs of monarchs 

 and warriors noted in history, and yet, without a protest, sees our giant 

 trees of the Pacific coast laid low by the woodman's ax to furnish an 

 inferior grade of lumber. Our Indian predecessors looked at them with 

 too much awe, reverence and admiration to harm them, but we, as a 

 nation, have stood indifferently and witnessed their partial destruction. 

 Nature's oldest living beings upon earth! — monuments of ages past in 

 living green, built by Nature's mighty forces, by the cheerful sunshine, 



