a retrograde or a genius, whichever we may choose to consider
him, and could live well enough upon ground ants. But as to his nest--he
would have to sharpen his wits still more to solve successfully the
question of the woodpecker motto, "What is home without a hollow tree?"

Great gaps would be made in the ranks of the furry creatures--the mammals.
Opossums and raccoons would find themselves in an embarrassing position,
and as for the sloths, which never descend to earth, depending for
protection on their resemblance to leaves and mossy bark, they would be
wiped out with one fell swoop. The arboreal squirrels might learn to
burrow, as so many of their near relations have done, but their muscles
would become cramped from inactivity and their eyes would often strain
upward for a glimpse of the beloved branches. The bats might take to caves
and the vampires to outhouses and dark crevices in the rocks, but most of
the monkeys and apes would soon become extinct, while a chimpanzee or
orang-utan would become a cripple, swinging ever painfully along between
the knuckles of crutch-like forearms, searching, searching forever for the
trees which gave him his form and structure, and without which his life
and that of his race must abruptly end.

Leaving the relations which trees hold to the animals about them and the
part which they have played in the evolution of life on the earth in past
epochs, let us consider some of the more humble trees about us. Not,
however, from the standpoint of the technical botanist or the scientific
forester, but from the sympathetic point of view of a living fellow form,
sharing the same planet, both owing their lives to the same great source
of all light and heat, and subject to the same extremes of heat and cold,
storm and drought. How wonderful, when we come to think of it, is a tree,
to be able to withstand its enemies, elemental and animate, year after
year, decade after decade, although fast-rooted to one patch of earth. An
animal flees to shelter at the approach of gale or cyclone, or travels far
in search of abundant food. Like the giant algae, ever waving upward from
the bed of the sea, which depend on the nourishment of the surrounding
waters, so the tree blindly trusts to Nature to minister to its needs,
filling its leaves with the light-given greenness, and feeling for
nutritious salts with the sensitive tips of its innumerable rootlets.

Darwin has taught us, and truly, that a relentles