H2 "Mature Studies in Berkshire. 



retiring sources of our actual life. A man is fed and 

 sustained by a thousand helpers of which he never 

 stops to think, that get none of his thanks. The 

 great streams which float our commerce and turn our 

 mill-wheels and irrigate our lands have their source 

 and supply high up in the still mountain forests, 

 where there is no hint of traffic or industry or grow- 

 ing crops. The stream of dollars which runs south- 

 ward through all the industries which line the 

 Mohawk and the Hudson, has its rise in the Adi- 

 rondack forests, and the green woods of the Catskills ; 

 and when the tellers of the New York banks catch it 

 in the reservoirs of their bank-vaults, they are really 

 storing up the product of the trees of the New York 

 forests. Yet how little the merchant and the banker, 

 and even the manufacturer in Little Falls and the farmer 

 in Dutchess County, think of their dependence on the 

 mountain woodlands, or how hard it would go with 

 them if these were swept away by fires or by the axe. 

 Precisely so we ignore the real sources of our 

 riches, our prosperity, our safety, our faith. Every 

 farmer must have his almanac ; but when he goes to 

 the legislature how hard it is to get an appropriation 

 from him for the astronomer and his observatory 

 where almanacs are made. Untold fortunes have been 

 coined out of the telephone and the electric light ; 

 but how much of that wealth has ever gone back to 

 the schools and the laboratories and the college class- 

 rooms where, by slow and patient study and experi- 

 ment, the mysterious fluid was broken to harness 



