22 ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 



It will be well for the pupils to assemble with, their teachers at the 

 schoolroom in the morning and spend a portion of the day parents 

 and friends being present also in listening to addresses from any who 

 may have been invited beforehand to speak to them. Essays may also 

 be read by the older pupils. These may be interspersed with songs 

 and recitations and familiar talks about trees and plants. Later in the 

 day, in the afternoon, perhaps, the planting of the trees will take 

 place, songs, addresses, and recitations accompanying the planting of 

 each tree. The character of the weather will determine how much of 

 the exercises shall take place in the open air and how much in the 

 schoolroom or elsewhere. It is the custom in some places, and a very 

 good custom it is, for all the schools to come together at some central 

 place, after the planting is finished, and for the older people, who have 

 been engaged in tree planting, to meet with them and all report what 

 they have done, and end the day with an hour or two around a Avell 

 spread table, and with music, songs, and perhaps pleasant games. 



ADDRESSES AND EXTRACTS. 



The following address by Hon. J. Sterling 

 Morton, delivered April 22, 1887, at the State 

 University, Lincoln, Nebr., has a fitting place in 

 a manual of Arbor Day : 



ARBOR DAY: ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH. 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Just as stars in the sky 

 brighten all the firmament with light, so holidays and 

 anniversaries commemorate exalted characters, recall 

 noble deeds, and perpetuate pure principles, illumine the arena of human life, and 

 light up the higher pathways for manly effort and ambition. 



Ordinary holidays are retrospective. They honor something good and great which 

 has been, and, by its exaltation, commend it to the emulation of mankind. Thus the 

 past is made to inspire the present, and the present to reach into and influence the 

 immeasurable and unknowable future. 



But "Arbor Day" Nebraska's own home-invented and home-instituted anniver- 

 sary which has been already transplanted to nearly every State in the American 

 Union, and even adopted in foreign lands, is not like other holidays. Each of those 

 reposes upon the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future. It contemplates, 

 not the good and the beautiful of past generations, but it sketches, outlines, estab- 

 lishes the useful and the beautiful for the ages yet to come. Other anniversaries 

 stand with their backs to the future, peering into and worshipping the past; but 

 Arbor Day faces the future with an affectionate solicitude, regarding it as an artist 

 his canvas, and etches upon our prairies and plains gigantic groves and towering for- 

 ests of waving trees, which shall for our posterity become consummate living pictures, 

 compared to which the gorgeous colorings of Rubens are tame and insignificant. 



The wooded landscape in sunlight and in shadow, which you in the trees you 

 have planted to-day have only faintly limned, shall in the future fruition of their 

 summer beauty compel the admiration and gratitude of men and women now unborn, 



