PREFACE. 



A VERY high authority on the natural resources of our Dominion once 

 explained to Lord Lansdowne, in answer to an inquiry, that the chief 

 industry of Canadians was the destruction of forests. There is reason to 

 believe, however, that this stage in our national development has been 

 outgrown, and already there are on all sides evidences of a proper appre- 

 ciation of the permanent value of grove and forest. Both the Dominion 

 and the Provincial governments have applied themselves to the husband- 

 ing of our forest wealth and to the reforesting of our denuded areas, while 

 various associations have been formed to further similar ends. 



With this change of attitude towards the trees has come the very 

 laudable desire to know more of them, to learn their names, their habits, 

 and their uses. Such knowledge has been heretofore confined largely to 

 two sources, the practical experience of the farmer or lumberman and the 

 learned research of the systematic botanist, both of these being equally 

 impracticable to the average observer. The purpose of this little book is 

 to introduce the subject in a popular way to the- intelligent reader, to 

 show that there is more in the woods than is found by the sealer with his 

 rule, and that such may be appreciated without the endless terminology 

 of floral botany. On the other hand, the botanist's exactness in method 

 and description is applied with the fewest possible technical terms, and 

 the guide-marks of the woodman are rendered as definite as language will 

 permit. 



The experience of the author must be his justification in approaching 

 this subject by a method which aims to combine, in a popular manual, the 

 most useful features of both these aspects. Having had the good fortune 

 to spend his childhood and youth on a Canadian farm, which is, under 

 favorable conditions, our best kindergarten yet introduced, he gained in 

 early years a practical knowledge of the botany of the woods. A little 

 later, under the influence of an enthusiastic teacher, he absorbed some of 

 the zeal of the naturalist, and as a result has now for some years made a 

 hobby of the life of the woods and waters as an offset to the routine of a 

 teacher's duties. The trees, especially, so common and so interesting, 

 though so little known, he has tried to introduce to his classes as neigh- 

 bors worthy of attentive study not as mere units in a system, but as liv- 

 ing things solving the problems of life in their own way. In pursuance 

 of this idea there has been established in the grounds of the Gravenhurst 

 High School an arboretum, where practically all the trees and shrubs of 



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