172 



^ ' ^ FORESTRY 



Charles D. Stewart 



The Tree as an Invention 



Reprinted with the permission of the author 

 and publisher from the Atlantic Monthly, 

 April 1929. 



A man without bones would lie flat and lifeless matter. The heartwood of 

 as a flounder. He would be as unable a tree, the heaviest and solidest part, 

 as an oyster to raise his head or stand extending a considerable distance from' 

 upright. The skeleton, that core of life the center, is dead in every sense of 

 he leaves behind him to be dug up by the word. Its tubes no longer convey 

 the ologist and displayed in all its the sap upward, because their walls 

 completeness behind glass, is the thing have become thickened and filled with 

 by which he performed his comings lignin. From the heartwood outward 

 and his goings, and without which he to a point very near the surface we find 

 would have lived a life without works, the water-conve\ing structure consist- 

 It was bones that raised him up and ing of long tubes; and these tubes are 

 made him the king of beasts, an animal mere conduits, inert and lifeless. They 

 standmg on end with a tool in either serve a useful purpose in conveying the 

 ^^"^- . water upward, but thev are not them- 



But while the stiffening structure selves alive. At first, when they were 



is thus important, it is far from being being built, there were live cells work- 



thc vital part of him. This is lime and ing inside of them, little bags of proto- 



not life; mere mineral from the quarry, plasm, but once they were completed. 



Those hinges did not work themselves, the live tenants disappeared, 



nor did those bones keep their own When a tree is cut down, the cir- 



balance. It is but a trellis-those tubu- cling grain on the stump teils some- 



lar legs and those latticelike ribs-by thing of the age and the stor\- of 



which the living creature lifted itself growth. But if we were to saw' the 



from earth and stood a few feet nearer whole tree into small sections or divide 



heaven. ^ it lengthwise with a view to tracing the 



A tree is in much the same case. Its course of these rings all the way to the 



solid body is all skeleton, and the skele- top, we should learn something more of 



ton is essentially dead. In any tree, how- a tree's inner nature. A cut across a tree 



ever live and growing, the substance near the ground mav show three hun- 



composmg trunk and branch is inert dred annual rings, while cuts at higher 



