THE PEDIGREE OF A SPLENDID TREE 



IF "blood tells" in human beings, and in the lower 

 animals as well, why should not pedigree count in the 



vegetable world also? 



Take the yellow poplar for an example. This is the 

 finest hardwood tree in the world, if judged by size, form, 

 foliage, bloom, and the wide range of uses in which its 

 wood is employed. In girth of trunk it may not equal 

 the largest hollow sycamores; but it overtops in height 

 all its competitors among American hardwoods; and in 

 grace of form, and in yield of excellent lumber, no hard- 

 wood of this country equals it. The oak, which is justly 

 called king of hardwoods, if the utilization of its wood is 

 alone considered, must take a back seat when size of trunk 



cretaceous age. It was after the coal beds were formed, 

 but before the ice age. Coal was formed of palms, ferns, 

 and the like, in vast swamps, as is supposed; but after 

 that the land became dry, and it was then that the hard- 

 woods made their appearance, and formed forests sur- 

 passing anything known on earth today. There are 

 about five hundred kinds of trees in America north of 

 Mexico now. The number was double some millions of 

 years ago. The magnificent forests of that remote time 

 seem to have sprung into existence all at once. The 

 records in the form of leaf prints in the rocks show no 

 gradual and slow development; but the forest's full and 

 wonderful richness came suddenly. 



YELLOW POPLAR LEAVES OF VARIOUS GEOLOGICAL PERIODS 



1 Willow-leaf poplar five million years ago; 2 Fiddle-leaf poplar four million years ago; 3 Oak-leaf poplar three million years ago; 4 Giant-leaf poplar I 



million years ago; 5 Yellow poplar leaf of the present time. 



is considered and comparison is made with yellow poplar. 



There is ancestry back of this splendid tree. No royal 

 house among the kings of earth has anything to compare 

 with it, not even Menelik of Abyssinia who traces his 

 line back to Solomon. When the first white men settled 

 in the United States they made the acquaintance of 

 yellow poplar. They never heard of it before, because it 

 did not grow in Europe. The Virginia Indians called it 

 "vikiok" and made canoes of it. 



History goes no farther back than that in its account 

 of the yellow poplar; but that is really the last page of 

 this tree's voluminous and romantic history. Talk of 

 the survival of the fittest. Here is an example of it. 

 Geologists and palasobotanists (those who study fossil 

 botany) are the yellow poplar's biographers. They have 

 dug its life history out of rocks and clays where its leaves 

 and flowers have lain buried during thousands and mil- 

 lions of years. This tree was in America at a time so 

 remote that in comparison with it, the period covered by 

 human history is as a hand's span to the distance round 

 the world. 



The records of geology show that yellow poplar made 

 its appearance on earth during what is known as the 

 44 



Among the earliest of the hardwoods in those forests 

 was yellow poplar -not one solitary species as at present, 

 but sixteen of them, every species apparently being as 

 fine as ours of today, or finer. The climate was warm, 

 and trees which now grow no further north than the 

 United States, then nourished in Greenland. Yellow poplar 

 was in that remote northern land, and its companions were 

 sassafras, red gum, sycamore, bald cypress, and the "big 

 tree" now confined to California. At that remote time 

 yellow poplar grew in Europe where it no longer exists. 



The sixteen species which once flourished in America 

 have dwindled to one. Fifteen species perished in a 

 tremendous catastrophe which changed the face of much 

 of the northern hemisphere. It was a winter a million 

 years long, known as the Ice Age. The ice killed every 

 living plant in its path. It pushed from the north down 

 to middle United States, burying everything. A single 

 species of yellow poplar escaped, and that one is with us 

 yet. It was probably growing at that time south of the 

 region of extreme cold, and thus managed to survive, and 

 when the ice sheet finally melted away, the yellow poplar 

 worked its way north again, and reached the southern 

 provinces of Canada. Some of its former companions, 



