i8 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



trees to suit their own use and liking. They 

 have brought into play what the men of science 

 call artificial selection. But is that which we 

 call natural selection any less artificial? Have 

 we any right to call only that which we do, 

 artifice ? Is there skill and purpose only in the 

 planting of larch-woods so that there shall be 

 the maximum of long, straight timber ; and no 

 skill and purpose in the evolution that has 

 produced trees so widely differing as the oak 

 and the larch? I, at least, am with Walt 

 Whitman, when he calls the science that scoffs 

 at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad but 

 half-way science, and declares such reminiscence 

 to be quite as true as any, and profounder than 

 most reminiscences we get. 



So when I am among the trees, and much 

 more when I work among them, it is always 

 with the thought that the power that works in 

 me works also in them ; and, according to its 

 own purpose, determines their likeness and their 

 difference. Matter and motion, as we conceive 

 them, could not produce a tree. The laws of 

 nature are but the ways in which is working, 

 in the lowest as well as in the highest forms 

 of life, a power which must be in every way 



