ms, air, and thunderstorms, to imprison in the annual
increment of solid wood. There is no light coming from your wood,
corncob, or coal fire which some vegetable Prometheus did not, in its
days of growth, steal from the sun and secrete in the mysteries of a
vegetable organism.

Combustion lets loose the captive rays and beams which growing plants
imprisoned years, centuries, even eons ago, long before human life
began its earthly career. The interdependence of animal and tree life
is perennial. The intermission of a single season of a vegetable life
and growth on the earth would exterminate our own and all the animal
races. The trees, the forests are essential to man's health and life.
When the last tree shall have been destroyed there will be no man left
to mourn the improvidence and thoughtlessness of the forest-destroying
race to which he belonged.

In all civilizations man has cut down and consumed, but seldom
restored or replanted, the forests. In biblical times Palestine was
lovely in the foliage of the palm, and the purpling grapes hung upon
her hillsides and gleamed in her fertile valleys like gems in the
diadems of her princes. But man, thoughtless of the future, careless
of posterity, destroyed and replaced not; so, where the olive and the
pomegranate and the vine once held up their luscious fruit for the sun
to kiss, all is now infertility, desolation, desert, and solitude. The
orient is dead to civilization, dead to commerce, dead to intellectual
development. The orient died of treelessness.

From the grave of the eastern nations comes the tree monition to the
western. The occident like the orient would expire with the
destruction of all its forests and woodlands.

Twenty-five thousand acres of woodland are consumed by the railroads,
the manufactories, and the homes of the United States every
twenty-four hours. How many are planted? To avert treelessness, to
improve the climatic conditions, for the sanitation and embellishment
of home environments, for the love of the beautiful and useful
combined in the music and majesty of a tree, as fancy and truth unite
in an epic poem, Arbor Day was created. It has grown with the vigor
and beneficence of a grand truth or a great tree. It faces the future.
It is the only anniversary in which humanity looks futureward instead
of pastward, in which there is a consensus of thought for those who
are to come after us, instead of reflections concerning those who have
gon