and superterranean organs, the former finding plant-food in the earth, and the latter gathering it in the air, the sunlight, and the storm.  The rootlets in the dark depths of soil, the foliage in the sunlit air, begin now their common joint labor of constructing a majestic oak.  Phosphates and all the delicacies of plant-food are brought in from the secret stores of the earth by the former, while foliage and twig and trunk are busy in catching sunbeams, 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 gone before us.  It is a practical anniversary.  It is