THE TREE MASTERPIECE OF PLANT WORLD 5 



fulfill the highest life of which they are capable. Each can 

 be helped in this search of theirs and each can be injured and 

 killed. The farmer with his ploughing, fertilizing, and irri- 

 gating makes conditions most favorable for the growth of 

 food plants. The forester helps nature develop the most use- 

 ful trees. Man has entered very fundamentally, both for good 

 and bad into this partnership of nature. 



The manifestations of life are wonderfully varied. Certain 

 species in both plant and animal kingdoms seem to possess 

 this spark of life more abundantly. They are more alive, more 

 complex in their nature, better able to adapt themselves to 

 the changes that take place in the world about them, and better 

 able to perpetuate their kind. These we have come to think of 

 as the higher animals and the higher plants. And just as 

 among animals, man is the highest manifestation of nature's 

 power, so in the world of plants the tree is the most majestic 

 creation that the long centuries have produced. 



We have come to think of trees as plants that surpass all 

 other vegetative growth in height and that usually have a 

 single wooden stem or trunk branching at the top. This may 

 serve as a practical definition, although it is well to remember 

 that in different regions trees vary and the tall spruce of our 

 eastern seacoast may be only a struggling shrub a few inches 

 high in the bleak, cold uplands of the north. It is exactly the 

 same kind of tree botanically but so bitter is the struggle to 

 live, battling the cold and storms, starving in sterile soil, that 

 it has just barely been able to exist. It has not been able to reach 

 the size of its more fortunate brothers farther south. So our 

 definition of a tree must be broad enough to include the lowly 

 dogwood that raises its flowering crown hardly twenty feet 



