APPALACHIAN NATIONAL PARK 33 
this the canny mountaineer will do as soon as he 
recovers from his ancient fear of the forest and 
learns the new value of the tree. Among the most 
ardent workers for the passing of the Weeks Bill and 
for the Appalachian Park appropriation have been 
natives of these mountains, men of intellect and cul- 
ture who have thrown all their strength into the 
contest, and who are still working for the good of 
the forests. 
The primeval forests must go. The older trees con- 
tinually go anyway, for, excepting those marvels of 
our Far West, the trees grow old, die, and fall. But 
they need not go all at once, and under intelligent 
care new forests may take the place of the old so 
continually and so skillfully that we need not be 
conscious of the passing of the ancient groves. 
Every one owning land in these mountains should 
remember that it is also the sacred and inalienable 
right of the tree to bestow beauty on the landscape, 
and that the law reads: "Blessed is he who saves a 
noble tree or preserves a grove on the mountain-top." 
The lumberman, upon coming to a monarch of 
the forest so placed that it could survive the removal 
of the trees about it, should look at it with the eye of 
prophecy and pass by, leaving it to delight those who 
are on their way to the mountains, that vast army of 
pleasure-seekers whose coming will open up every 
beauty spot in the wilderness and also bring to the 
inhabitants of these noble heights a material wealth 
vying with that in the forests themselves. In these 
days of fast-moving events every feller of trees in the 
