tecture. Wood facilitates his endeavors to instruct himself in
art, by its adaptedness to a greater variety of purposes than any
other substance. It is, therefore, one of the principal instruments of
civilization which man has derived from the material world. Though the
most remarkable works of the architect are constructed of stone, it
was wood that afforded man that early practice and experience which
initiated him into the laws of mechanics and the principles of art, and
carried him along gradually to perfection.

But as man is nomadic before he is agricultural, and a maker of tents
and wigwams before he builds houses and temples,--in like manner he is
an architect and an idolater before he becomes a student of wisdom; he
is a sacrificer in temples and a priest at their altars, before he is a
teacher of philosophy or an interpreter of Nature. After the attainment
of science, a higher state of mental culture succeeds, causing the mind
to see all Nature invested with beauty and fraught with imaginative
charms, which add new wonders to our views of creation and new dignity
to life. Man now learns to regard trees in other relations beside their
capacity to supply his physical and mechanical wants. He looks upon them
as the principal ornaments of the face of creation, and as forming the
conservatories of Nature, in which she rears those minute wonders of
her skill, the flowers and smaller plants that will flourish only under
their protection, and those insect hosts that charm the student with
their beauty and excite his wonder by their mysterious instincts.
Science, too, has built an altar under the trees, and delivers thence
new oracles of wisdom, teaching man how they are mysteriously wedded
to the clouds, and are thus made the blessed instruments of their
beneficence to the earth.

Not without reason did the ancients place the Naiad and her fountain in
the shady arbor of trees, whose foliage gathers the waters of heaven
into her fount and preserves them from dissipation. From their dripping
shades she distributes the waters, which she has garnered from the
skies, over the plain and the valley: and the husbandman, before he has
learned the marvels of science, worships the beneficent Naiad, who draws
the waters of her fountain from heaven, and from her sanctuary in the
groves showers them upon the arid glebe and adds new verdure to the
plain. After science has explained to us the law by which these supplies
of moisture