Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/708

690 that would convert the necessary labor, to a large extent, into pleasure—at least take from it the character and irksomeness of a drudgery. The plan was, to fix upon a particular day, at the season of the year when the trees are starting into fresh life, and to invite those in the same general region to engage together on that day in the work of tree-planting. The designation of a particular day had the effect to prevent the propitious season of planting from slipping by unobserved, while it had also the advantage and stimulative effect attendant upon co-operative endeavor. The thought of tree-planting was thus at a certain time made as it were to pervade the atmosphere, or rather, perhaps, to become an atmosphere.

Thus Arbor-day, or Tree-planting-day, originated, and the person who put the question, not long since, in the columns of one of our newspapers, "Who invented Arbor-day?" used the right word. We commonly apply the term invention to some machine or mechanical contrivance. But there is no reason for thus restricting its meaning. Arbor-day is as truly an invention as the cotton-gin or the steam engine, and, like those notable inventions, its importance and beneficial results will be recognized in increasing measure with the lapse of years. Governor Morton builded better than he knew when he gave origin to this day. He was thinking chiefly of his own State, Nebraska, of beautiful name, but swept by the fierce blizzards of the Northwest and the hardly less harmful sirocco-blasts from the torrid South. He was contriving a plan to raise up against these harmful agencies the effective barrier of the leafy trees. His plan commended itself at once to his fellow-citizens, and in the first year of its adoption more than ten million trees were planted. Nor was the happy invention limited in its application by the boundaries of a single State. The people of neighboring States and Territories, with similar needs, one after another, adopted it, until it may be said to have become a fixed institution throughout the prairie region of the country.

But Arbor-day is not for the treeless regions of the West alone. The principle of associated and simultaneous action which it embodies commends it for adoption almost everywhere. States where once the trees were so abundant as to be in the way of agricultural improvement, and to call for the axe and the fire to remove them as speedily as possible, or where their value for lumber had occasioned their rapid and general displacement, are now welcoming Arbor-day to assist them in regaining the condition which they lost by the inconsiderate destruction of their best friends. Thus Michigan, lately a wilderness of forest, and even yet sending to market annually more lumber than any other State, but becoming sensible of the need of trees for other use than to be converted into lumber, has made experiment of Arbor-day, and in his designation of the 11th of April last, by public proclamation, Governor Alger earnestly recommended that on that day "we plant trees by the road-side, by our farm-houses, in our fields, parks.