THIRD WEEK] December 325 



Great gaps would be made in the ranks of the furry 

 creatures the mammals. Opossums and raccoons would 

 find themselves in an embarrassing position, and as for 

 the sloths, which never descend to earth, depending for 

 protection on their resemblance to leaves and mossy bark, 

 they would be wiped out with one fell swoop. The arboreal 

 squirrels might learn to burrow, as so many of their near 

 relations have done, but their muscles would become 

 cramped from inactivity and their eyes would often strain 

 upward for a glimpse of the beloved branches. The bats 

 might take to caves and the vampires to outhouses and 

 dark crevices in the rocks, but most of the monkeys and 

 apes would soon become extinct, while a chimpanzee or 

 orang-utan would become a cripple, swinging ever pain- 

 fully along between the knuckles of crutch-like forearms, 

 searching, searching forever for the trees which gave him 

 his form and structure, and without which his life and 

 that of his race must abruptly end. 



Leaving the relations which trees hold to the animals 

 about them and the part which they have played in the 

 evolution of life on the earth in past epochs, let us con- 

 sider some of the more humble trees about us. Not, how- 

 ever, from the standpoint of the technical botanist or the 

 scientific forester, but from the sympathetic point of view 

 of a living fellow form, sharing the same planet, both 

 owing their lives to the same great source of all light and 

 heat, and subject to the same extremes of heat and cold, 

 storm and drought. How wonderful, when we come to 

 think of it, is a tree, to be able to withstand its enemies, 

 elemental and animate, year after vear, decade after 



