ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 25 



and taller than when left to itself, without the competition of more swiftly shooting 

 trees. A row of acorns planted between two lines of infant cottonwoods will come 

 up and make an effort to reach sunlight, up beyond the shadows of their soft-wood 

 competitors, which oaks never make when planted by themselves. Thus in the 

 arboretum the less is made to net as a nurse and guardian to the more valuable 

 timber. At Arbor Lodge some years since, in 1865, I planted a long row of black 

 walnuts between two ranks of swiftly growing soft-wood trees maple on one side 

 and cottonwood on the other. During these twenty years I have watched the 

 walnuts growing symmetrically and beautifully to great height, in their struggle to 

 reach the light up and beyond the shade of their less valuable contemporaries and 

 co-tenants. They are higher, better trees than they would have been without the 

 rivalry of their neighbors their classmates. 



So mind by contact with mind and struggle of brain with brain is improved. The 

 mediocrity of one is almost obliterated by contests with the superiority of another. 

 Just as trees seek must have sunlight, just as they reach up into the sky for it out 

 from shade, so the mind in competitive seeking after knowledge ever exalts itself, 

 perfects and embellishes itself. A dull brain developing in solitude is dwarfed and 

 gnarled like a lone oak on the prairie ; "but associated with the sharp, quick perceptions 

 of its superiors, it becomes a better brain, and bestows benefits upon mankind where 

 in solitude it would have withered into fruitlessness. The wonderful similitudes 

 between tree life and human life are almost innumerable. They have been recog- 

 nized in all ages, and man's metaphors for all that is beautiful, useful, desirable, 

 and immortal have been, since written language began, largely drawn from sylvan 

 life. The "Tree of Knowledge/' the "Tree of Liberty," the "Tree of Everlasting 

 Life" have been planted in all poesy; they have bloomed in all literature from the 

 remotest of historic times. Books not drawing simile, metaphor, or other figure of 

 speech from tree life have been rare indeed. But the most beautiful tree, with its 

 sheltering arms and its many-voiced foliage singing in the breeze, dancing in the 

 sunbeams, and motioning to its own reflections on the greensward mirror below, with 

 all its lustrous burden of fruit or flowers shimmering in the light, has a lower life 

 invisible to us. Deep in the dark, damp earth its rootlets are groveling for exist- 

 ence seeking here and there all manner of rottenness and feeding thereon with 

 gluttonous avidity. Up in the clouds, gilded with sunshine, resplendent with color- 

 ing, nods the stately head ; but down in the darkness and dirt are its supporters. 



And as trees thus lead a dual life, an upper and a lower, so does man. The intel- 

 lect, the reason, bathes in the light of knowledge. It scales the height of the firma- 

 ment and reads the story of the stars. It descends into the profoundest depths of 

 the sea and wrenches the secrets of creation from the rocks and shoals. Beautiful, 

 symmetrical, flashing, and entrancing as a grand oak in autumn when crowned with 

 gorgeous gold and crimson and purple leaves is the sturdy mind of a mature man, 

 who, in temperance and tranquillity, has during a useful life grown strong in 

 knowle 'ge, in truth, fidelity, and honor. 



Man's intellectual life must dominate. His lower life must be subservient. His 

 mentality, like the tree top with its foliage, flowers, and luscious fruit, alone bestows 

 the blessings. That is man's higher life, and where it governs, man is man as nature 

 meant man to be. The small trees of to-day's planting will develop into the groves 

 and forests of the future. They will contribute the materials for ships, railroads, 

 business edifices, and homes, to be used by those who are born in coming centuries. 



The almost infinite possibilities of a tvee germ came to my mind last summer when, 

 traveling in a railway carriage amid the beautifully cultivated fields of Belgium, a 

 cotton wood seed on its wings of down drifted into my compartment. It came like a 

 materialized whisper from home. Catching it in my hand I forgot the present and 

 wandered into the past to a floating mote like that, which had years and years 

 before been planted by the winds and currents on the banks of the Missouri. That 

 inote had taken life and root and growing to splendid proportions until in 1854 the 



