Since the observance of the day has been modified, as it was on its introduction into Ohio, it has spread rapidly through the country and at present forty-four states and territories celebrate Arbor Day.  Its every way healthful and desirable features have so generally commended it also that it has gained a foothold abroad and has begun to be observed in England, Scotland, France, and even in far-off South Africa.  It has become preeminently a school day and a school festival.  In many cases school teachers and superintendents have introduced its observance.  But it has soon so commended itself to all that, in most cases, it has been established by law and made a legal holiday.

Readings for Arbor Day.

About trees.

From the originator of Arbor Day.

A tree is the perfection in strength, beauty, and usefulness of vegetable life.  It stands majestic through the sun and storm of centuries.  Resting in summer beneath its cooling shade, or sheltering besides its massive trunk from the chilling blast of winter, we are prone to forget the little seed whence it came.  Trees are no respecters of persons.  They grow as luxuriantly beside the cabin of the pioneer as against the palace of the millionaire.  Trees are not proud.  What is this tree?  This great trunk, these stalwart limbs, these beautiful branches, these gracefully bending boughs, these gorgeous flowers, this flashing foliage and ripening fruit, purpling in the autumnal haze are only living materials organized in the laboratory of Nature’s mysteries out of rain, sunlight, dews, and earth.  On this spot, in this tree, a metamorphosis has so deftly taken place that it has failed to excite even the wonder of the majority of men.

[Illustration]

Here, sixty years ago, a school boy planted an acorn.  Spring came, then the germ of this oak began to attract the moisture of the soil.  The shell of the acorn was then broken open by the internal growth of the embryo oak.  It sent downward a rootlet to get soil and water, and upward it shot a stem to which the first pair of leaves was attached.  These leaves are thick and fleshy.  They constitute the greater bulk of the acorn.  They are the first care-takers of the young oak.  Once out of the earth and in the sunlight they expand, assume a finer texture, and begin their usefulness as nursing leaves, “folia nutrientia.”  They contain a store of starch elaborated in the parent oak which bore the acorn.

In tree infancy the nursing leaves take oxygen from the air, and through its influence the starch in the nursing leaves is transmuted into a tree baby-food, called dextrine, which is conveyed by the water absorbed during germination to the young rootlet and to the gemmule and also to the first aerial leaf.  So fed, this leaf expands, and remains on the stem all summer.  The nursing leaves die when the aerial leaves have taken their food away, and then the first stage of oak hood has begun.  It has subterranean