is a return to creed and season, to a state of mind 
without the idols of fear and calamity and failure. 
The feet press earth with a kindly caress. The 
soul nears the magic and the inscrutable mystery 
of the trees, while the heart flutters close to that 
depth of life which earth and sky mean. The 
senses are speculative, interpretive, intuitive. In 
the forest, with all communication severed with 
the road leading townward, I am the man primally, 
then the nature lover, then the naturalist. 
Every vista down the tree-flanked lengths is full 
of meaning and rich in instruction, not only in 
what it represents but in the impression it arouses. 
Simplicity broods from the soft yielding carpet of 
needles to the sway of restless rafters—a simplic- 
ity plus a luxury of nature’s bric-a-brac. These 
touch the artistic instead of the utilitarian for 
their message of beauty is more appealing than a 
bare list of uses. Every scene is descriptive with 
a language of beauty which no man knows en- 
tirely. More than a patch of earth made beautiful 
with untamed growths and peopled with wild 
things, more than a word and a study and a 
science, the forest is a brotherhood. 
hn 
PRESIDENT RESERVES ISLANDS FOR 
NEW WILD-LIFE REFUGE 
RESIDENT COOLIDGE, by a recent Execu- 
tive Order, has withdrawn from settlement, 
location, sale, or entry, all islands owned by 
the United States in the Mississippi River between 
Rock Island, IJl., and Wabasha, Minn., and has re- 
served them for the use of the Department of 
Agriculture in connection with the establishment 
of the Upper Mississippi River Wild-Life and Fish 
Refuge. The islands are withdrawn in order that 
the Department of Agriculture may hold them as 
parts of the wild-life refuge from the start instead 
of having to buy them later from private owners. 
These islands, with other islands in the river north 
of Cairo, Ill., were first withdrawn from public 
entry in 1891 for the use of the War Department 
in connection with possible improvements of navi- 
gation on the Upper Mississippi, but were restored 
to entry and disposal by the Secretary of the In- 
terior, on April 25, 1925. The order of President 
Coolidge again retains under Government owner- 
ship all islands within the limits of the new wild- 
life refuge. 
ad © 
CAN ANYTHING OUTLAST WOOD? 
OTHING in the world of living things has 
N greater endurance than wood under certain 
favorable conditions. Even in the field of 
inorganic things it is probable than man can man- 
ufacture nothing that will last longer than wood, 
says the New York State College of Forestry, 
Syracuse University. 
We have wooden buildings in the United States 
that date from the beginning of our Colonial his- 
tory, but we must go to older countries to find 
the best examples of the long life of wood struc- 
tures. There are sacred temples in Japan built 
of wood 1,300 years ago. The timbers in West- 
minster Hall, London, have endured for 1,000 
years. The well-preserved wooden articles found 
in King Tut’s tomb date back at least 3,500 years. 
An excavation recently made in Washington, D. C., 
disclosed cypress stumps not less than 20,000 years 
old and may have an age of 200,000 years. 
C. L. Hill of the district office of Products in 
California, connected with the U. 8. Department 
of Agriculture, sent a sample of wood to the 
Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wiscon- 
sin, where it was identified as belonging to the 
famous Sequoia tree family, the giant trees of 
California, a species of tree that at one time grew 
in the forests of America from coast to coast. 
This piece of wood was discovered 500 feet under- 
ground during the digging of a tunnel in 1920. 
The log was buried in gravels of a Tertiary 
stream bed about 12 feet under the lava cap of the 
great flow which terminated the Tertiary period. 
The wood, therefore, is at least one million years 
old and was remarkable for its state of preserva- 
tion; except for the lighter springwood or sapwood 
on the outside of the log it had not materially de- 
teriorated. 
w w w 
G. A. LAWYER RESIGNS AS CHIEF 
U. S. GAME WARDEN 
EORGE A. LAWYER, who for nearly ten 
GC; years has been chief United States game 
warden in the adminstration of Federal laws 
protecting migratory birds, has tendered his resig- 
nation, effective September 15, 1925, and it has 
been accepted by the Secretary of Agriculture. 
Mr. Lawyer gave as his reasons for the action that 
he wished to gratify a long-expressed desire to 
leave the Government service in order to look after 
private business affairs. Mr. Lawyer before his 
connection with the Department of Agriculture 
had been for several years president of the New 
York State Fish, Game, and Forest League. 
wv ew 
CONFLICT 
AR from the world! So seems the woods to 
man. It is an old expression, old with men— 
a survival of the ancient longing for the mon- 
astery. I use it to express a freedom from the 
thrall of cities and the puny frets of men, and at 
the same time I am allured and yet a little ap- 
palled by the revelation of one of natures’ mys- 
teries. The discovery begins with the conflict be- 
tween the trees of the forest, and a deep probing 
into this affair finds that life among the trees com- 
pares with and parallels the lives of men. 
There is the intense struggle for survival, all 
the heights and depths of emotion. Life is a 
vicious lease for some, a beautiful: dream for 
others, a smooth current of happiness for a minor- 
ity. Here are ills and injuries of every descrip- 
tion, freaks that lampoon the grotesque and bi- 
zarre, trials that are courage incarnated, misfor- 
tunes that border the sympathetic and merciful, 
ambitions without pity and love, a domineering by 
a few strong growths over the weak, all the gamut 
of life. 
If man thinks he has a monopoly of troubles, 
let him go out into the open spaces, let him read, 
study, ponder. Unending this social war is, and 
disturbed with lives bad, good, indifferent. The 
aristocrats and masses, the parasites and sinners, 
the saints and degenerates—a motely crew are 
these; yet they make up this primitive domain as 
assorted men make up the mortal world. 
663 
