ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 39 



easily our word paper, while to go back to liber, we have from that our 

 word library, or a collection of books, and from bibles again our word 

 Bible, or the book of books. And now our books are often literally 

 made of the trees. Only instead of taking chips or blocks of the 

 beech tree to write upon, as our ancestors did, we grind the trees up 

 into pulp, and having spread it out into thin sheets, the printer then 

 prints upon them lessons of geography or arithmetic or history, and lo, 

 the beech tree and other trees also come into the school room to help 

 us in our studies. Every time also that we turn the leaves in our books 

 we are reminded of the trees, which have given us the word. 



And then the word academy causes us to think of the trees, for it 

 points us back to that celebrated school which Plato, the Greek phi- 

 losopher, taught in the grove of Academus. It was a school among 

 the trees. It was as he walked with his pupils under the branches 

 of the trees that he taught those lessons of wisdom which have been 

 the delight of scholars down to our own time. 



Fitly, then, are the pupils in our schools invited to take part in the 

 observance of Arbor Day, and if there is any spot peculiarly appropri- 

 ate for the planting of trees on such an occasion it is that where chil- 

 dren assemble for instruction, that thereby they may have around them 

 the beauty and pleasantness which trees afford and every school place 

 may become another "grove of Academe." 



TREES AS LIVING THINGS. 



All things in the world may be divided into two 

 classes, things which have life and things which are 

 without life. What life is we do not know. We 

 know only its effects what it does. We can 

 neither see it nor feel it. We can not perceive 

 it by any of our senses. 



We recognize life most commonly as something 

 which produces motion. So we say an animal is 

 alive or has life, because we see it move. The stone 

 is not alive; it has no motion. It does not change 

 its shape or color. It looks to day as it did years 

 ago; it is no larger now than it was then. So of a piece of 

 iron or any other metal. But the animal moves about; it 

 changes its shape; it increases in size; it grows, as we say. From a 

 small and very feeble thing it becomes large and strong. It is because 

 it is a living thing or has life that it grows. The life in it has the 

 power of laying hold of other things and building them up into the 

 body of the animal, so that it enlarges until it has reached the size which 



