310 THE LOG OF THE SUN 



apes would soon become extinct, while a chim- 

 panzee or orang-utan would become a cripple, 

 swinging ever painfully 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 consider some of the more humble 

 trees about us. Not, however, from the standpoint 

 of the technical botanist or the scientific forester, 

 but from the sympathetic point of view of a liv- 

 ing 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 year, decade after decade, 

 although fast-rooted to one patch of earth. An 

 animal flees to shelter at the approach of gale or 

 cyclone, or travels far in search of abundant food. 

 Like the giant algae, ever waving upward from the 

 bed of the sea, which depend on the nourishment 

 of the surrounding waters, so the tree blindly 

 trusts to Nature to minister to its needs, filling its 

 leaves with the light-given greenness, and feeling 



