ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 23 



who shall see with interest and satisfaction their symmetry and loveliness. As one 

 friend hands to another a bouquet, so this anniversary sends greetings and flowers, 

 foliage and fruit, to posterity. It is the sole holiday of the human family which 

 looks forward and not backward. 



Arbor Day originated in Lincoln on January 4, 1872. Upon that day the festival 

 was instituted by a resolution of the Nebraska State board of agriculture. It was 

 my good fortune to have thought out this plan for popularizing arboriculture and to 

 have originated the term or phrase "Arbor Day" and to have written, submitted, 

 and advocated that resolution, and thus to have established this anniversary. It 

 will grow in popular esteem from year to year, until finally it shall be observed uni- 

 versally throughout the Union of American States. 



It has become the scholastic festival of our times. Common schools, colleges, and 

 universities have taken its practical observance under their own special and intelli- 

 gent direction. The zeal of youth and the cultured love of the beautiful combine to 

 perpetuate and to popularize it. 



That which should survive in America must harmonize with education and refine- 

 ment. Whatsoever the schools, the teachers, and the pupils shall foster and encour- 

 age, shall live and flourish, mentally and morally, forever. Students, scholars, and 

 philosophers have ever been associated with trees and their conservation. The 

 Academeia of Athens where Socrates and Plato taught was only a grouse of plane 

 trees. There rhetoric, logic, and philosophy were given to the youth of Greece by 

 those majestic men, whose great thoughts more than two thousand years after their 

 death are still vitalizing and energizing the world of mind. The plane tree that 

 Agamemnon planted at Delphos; the one grown by Menelaus, the husband of Helen 

 of Troy ; and that one which so charmed Xerxes with its surpassless beauty, when 

 invading Greece with his great army, that he remained one entire day wrapped in 

 its admiration, encircling it with a gold band, decking it with precious jewels, hav- 

 ing its figure stamped upon a golden medal, and by his delay losing his subsequent 

 battle with the Greeks these are all historic trees and yet strangers almost to the 

 average reader. 



But the beautiful avenues and tranquil shades of the grand plane tree, which 

 adorned the Academeia of Athens, are familiar to every student. The voice of 

 Socrates mingled with the music of their waving boughs and Plato mused beneath 

 their far-extending shadows. Thus the first fruits of philosophy are borne to us 

 with the fact that Grecian civilization was a tree-planting civilization. And the 

 transmitted wisdom of those ages illustrates how marvelously trees and learning 

 have always been intimately associated together. 



Upon the inner bark, called "liber," of trees came the annals, the lore of all the 

 ancient world's written life inscribed by the stylus. Not only from tree bark has 

 the intellect of man taken the record of its early development, but even the word 

 "library," which embraces all the conserved thoughts of all the thinking ages, 

 comes from the inner bark of a tree. And the word "book," take either derivation 

 you choose, comes from one in German or Saxon or Scandinavian, meaning beech 

 wood, because in the dawn of learning all records were written on beech boards, 

 and the leaf and the folio which make up the book came to us also from the trees. 



But leaving ancient times, ceasing to trace tree ancestry from words, and reluc- 

 tantly remaining silent as to many delightful delusions concerning the sacred groves 

 of Greece and Rome and their storied genii, who gave wisdom to sages and judgment 

 to lawmakers, and skipping likewise all the tree lore and tree metaphor in the 

 Bible and that is indeed self-denial on an occasion like this let us see how forests 

 and our English ancestry are indissolubly connected, and how, by the very law of 

 heredity, we should all become amateur foresters. 



The Druids first planted forests and groves in England. In the misty twilight 

 between barbarism and civilization the teachers and students of Great Britain were 

 Druids. All their discourses and ceremonies transpired in the oaken groves and 



