24 ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 



sacred orchards of their own planting, and Pliny declares the word " Druid" to 

 have come from the Greek word drus an oak. And while no Druid oaks now 

 remain, there are still in England many very venerable trees. Among them are the 

 Damory oak, of Dorsetshire, 2,000 years of age; Owen Glendower's oak at Shelton, 

 near Shrewsbury, from the branches of which that chieftain looked down upon the 

 battle between Henry IV and Henry Percy in 1403. The great oak of Magdalen 

 College, Oxford, was a sturdy sapling when nine hundred years ago Alfred the Great 

 founded that institution of learning. It received injuries during the reign of 

 Charles I which at the close of the last century caused its decay and death. 



Windsor Forest is notable also for its majestic oaks of great age, one of them 

 known to have withstood more than a thousand years of winter and summer storms. 

 Not many decades have passed since Herue's oak, which had borne that hunter's 

 name from the reign of Elizabeth, was blown down. In the Merry Wives of Wind- 

 sor, Shakespeare has told its story. Elizabeth, who was first saluted at Hatfield as 

 "the Queen of England," in the shade of the towering trees of oak which line its 

 broadest avenues, greatly encouraged agriculture, and was among the first English- 

 speaking advocates of forestry. 



When Columbus was seeking a new world, his crew, anxious and incredulous, even 

 unto mutiny, the waves bore out to his ship twigs and foliage from the forests of 

 the unknown land, giving him hope, faith, victory even, as the dove with the olive 

 branch had carried God's peace to Noah centuries before. 



Nearly two hundred years after Columbus came the Puritans, and then began the 

 war upon the woodlands of America. Since then, ax in hand, the race has advanced 

 from the Atlantic Seaboard westward for more than two centuries, devastating forests 

 with most unreasoning energy, always cutting them down, and never replanting 

 them. Hewing their way through the Eastern and Middle States, the pioneers have 

 wantonly destroyed without thought of their posterity millions upon millions of 

 acres of primeval woodlands. 



Cleaving right and left through Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, felling giant trees, 

 rolling them into log heaps and destroying them by fire, emigration emerged upon 

 the treeless plains of Illinois and the Northwest. 



Nature teaches by antithesis. When sick we learn to value health ; when blind 

 we realize the beneficence, the surprising and delicious sense of sight; when deaf 

 we dream of the music we loved to hear, and melodies forever dead to the ear float 

 through the mind that is insulated from sound like sweet memories of the loved 

 and lost. So these treeless plains, stretching from Lake Michigan to the Rocky 

 Mountains, were unfolded to the vision of the pioneer as a great lesson to teach 

 him, by contrast with the grand forests whence he had just emerged, the indispen- 

 sability of woodlands and their economical use. Almost rainless, only habitable by 

 bringing forest products from other lands, these prairies, by object teaching, incul- 

 cated tree plan ting as a necessity and the conservation of the few fire-scarred forests 

 along their streams as an individual and public duty. Hence out of our physical 

 environments have grown this anniversary and the intelligent zeal of Nebraskans in 

 establishing woodlands where they found only the monotony of plain, until to-day 

 this State stands foremost in practical forestry among all the members of the Amer- 

 ican Union. 



An arboretum is to tree culture what a university is to mental life. The skilled 

 forester gathers in the former all varieties of trees, studies the habits and require- 

 ments of each, and stimulates growth and defines forms by all the appliances of his 

 art. In the universities are collected human intellects of all types and all degrees 

 of strength and quickness. Here, as amcng the trees, are all the inexorable and 

 ineffaceable results of the operations of the law of heredity. Here, as in the 

 arboretum, we arc taught that though nurture may do much, nature does most. 



The cottonwood can never become an oak, but it can pass the oak in the race for 

 maturity. It can even aid the oak to become more stately in form, to grow straighter 



