ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 
301 
harvest long in maturing. The tree-planter can appreciate the apothegm, 
“To patiently work and wait, year after year, for the attainment of some far- 
off end, shows a touch of the sublime, and implies moral no less than mental 
heroism.” 
Clinton, Conn. 
B. G. Northrop. 
ARBOR DAY. 
O UR modern institution — Arbor Day — is a public acknowledgment of our 
dependence upon the soil of the earth for our daily, our annual, bread. 
In recognition of the same fact the Emperor of China annually plows a furrow 
with his own hand, and in the same significance are the provisions in the 
ancient law of Moses, to give the land its seven-year Sabbath, as well as to 
man his seventh day for rest and recreation. Our observance is a better one, 
because it calls on all, and especially on the impressible learners in the schools 
to join in the duty which we owe to the earth and to all mankind, of doing 
what each of us can to preserve the soil’s fertility, and to prevent, as long as 
possible, the earth, from which we have our being, from becoming worn out 
and wholly bald and bare. And we do this by planting of any sort, if only by 
making two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, and by learning 
to preserve vegetation. We give solemnity to this observance by joining in it 
on an appointed day, high and low, old and young, together. 
Vick's Magazine. 
DESTRUCTION OF THE FORESTS. 
‘OME of the figures presented to the Forestry Congress, recently held at 
O Philadelphia, are, to say the least, impressive. From them it appears that the 
woodland of the United States now covers 450,000,000 acres, or about twenty- 
six per cent of the area. Of this not less than 25,000,000 acres are cut over 
annually, a rate of destruction that will bring our forests to an end in eighteen 
years, if there is no replanting. It was also stated that while the wood grow¬ 
ing annually in the forests of the United States amounts to 12,000,000,000 cubic 
feet, the amount cut annually is 24,000,000,000 cubic feet, and this does not 
include a vast amount destroyed by fire. The country’s supply of timber, 
therefore, is being depleted at least twice as fast as it is being reproduced, and 
this is another way of showing that a timber famine is approaching rapidly. It 
will be very serious when it comes, and it will not be relieved very easily or 
very soon. 
Newspaper Extract, Nov., 1889. 
Mouldering and moss grown through the lapse of years in motionless beauty 
stands the giant oak — while those that saw its green and flourishing youth are 
gone and forgotton. 
Longfellow. 
