THE ROMANCE OF OUR TREES 



the tree's future needs. No chemical factory in the 

 world built by man and fitted with all the wonderful 

 appliances of modern science is half so marvellous as 

 the leaf of any one kind of tree; no system of collec- 

 tion and transportation devised by human ingenuity 

 and skill so perfect as that which serves each and 

 every tree. 



All who keep gold fish in a bowl or in an aquarium 

 know that green weeds of some sort must be kept in 

 the water or the fish will die. Why? Because the 

 fish inhale all the free oxygen in the water and poison 

 themselves with carbon dioxide, which they exhale 

 unless plants are present to take up this gas and in 

 exchange give back free oxygen and thus maintain 

 the balance in nature. So on the grander scale. 

 But for the presence of vegetation this earth would be 

 unhabitable for the animal kingdom in all its forms, 

 man included. 



The two kingdoms— vegetable and animal — are 

 interdependent, but the vegetable kingdom is the 

 more ancient of the two. Men of great minds, both 

 of the past and of the present, who have studied 

 deeply the problems concerning the origin of the 

 world of life are of the opinion that the present 

 state of development of the animal kingdom — the 

 living types of to-day including man the complex — 

 has been made possible by the steady change in the 



8 



