On " The Point " — Second Excursion 



pinnate leaves are of the largest and coarsest. As 

 timber, the hickory renders the most menial, yet a most 

 important, service, rising no higher in utilitarian art 

 than the manufacture of farming implements and parts 

 of carriages, and unsurpassed as fuel ; whereas the oak, 

 hardly less coarse-natured on the exterior, has so fine a 

 grain as to be adequate for the choicest cabinet work. 



Yet this very roughness — a sort of brutal masculinity 

 — secures for the hickory a distinctive interest, some- 

 thing as Satan, in " Paradise Lost," has a " bad pre- 

 eminence " that makes him the fascinating hero. We 

 must certainly honor a tree whose brawn and muscle 

 enable it to play so responsible a part in life's utilities. 

 In its own sphere, although farthest from ornamental, it 

 stands pre-eminent. 



I feel a pity for some of our trees with rather colorless 

 individualities ; not strong-fibred enough to be down- 

 right serviceable, not refined enough to be ornamental 

 — prosy characters, a sort of drone in the universal hive 

 of industry. As the world is constituted, utility has the 

 precedence of beauty, and the hickory is a good illustra- 

 tion of the providence that looks out for our lowest 

 even more than for our highest needs. Enumerate the 

 greatest blessings of life — health, food, sunlight, water, 

 air — the lowest creatures possess them as much as we, 

 they are the indispensables. And so the hickory, 

 though it never veneers our furniture like the oak, does 

 quite as much to keep the machinery of life in motion. 



Most of the hickories — we have nine of them in Amer- 

 ica, and no other continent has any — are distinguish- 

 able from each other in foliage by rather small differences, 



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