Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/709

Rh villages, and cities, around our school-houses, and in the cemeteries where sleep our beloved dead. . . . We may not live," he said, "to enjoy the full fruits of this work, but our children and our children's children will receive the benefit of our labor."

Pennsylvania, in keeping with that wise consideration of the value of trees which led William Penn to prescribe, among the early laws of his colony, "that, in clearing the ground, care be taken to leave one acre of trees for every five acres cleared," has followed Michigan in the recent adoption of Arbor-day.

The older Northern and Eastern States have not the same interest in forestry as the prairie States. They are comparatively well-wooded. Yet, even among them, such have been the encroachments upon the woodlands by the axe and by fire as seriously to affect the flow of streams, and the manufacturing and agricultural interests dependent upon them. In several of these States attention has been called to the subject, and its manifest importance has led to legislative action looking to the protection of what forests remain and to the planting of new ones. Most of the New England States are now engaged in the serious investigation of their forestral condition. The boards of agriculture have taken it into consideration, and some of them have urged the adoption of Arbor-day as an instrumentality of importance to the interests of the States.

Thus the Arbor-day idea is seen to have spread far beyond the place of its origin. It has been formally adopted already by seventeen of our States, and bids fair to be adopted soon by many others.

A noticeable and important development of the Arbor-day movement is its connection with the public schools. This may be said to date from the memorable tree-planting by the pupils of the public schools of Cincinnati, on the occasion of the meeting of the American Forestry Congress in that city in the spring of 1882. No one who was present will ever forget the scene, when, on a lovely May day, twenty thousand school-children, marshaled by their teachers, formed a part of the grand procession which, amid banners fluttering from every window, and with the accompaniment of military battalions and bands of music, went out to the beautiful and well-named Eden Park, and there, in Authors' Grove, planted trees in memory of the most eminent authors and statesmen of our own and other lands. It was a lesson in practical forestry and of practical education at the same time. It was a grand and impressive object-lesson of the best character, and one that reached far beyond the circle of those immediately engaged in it. If the children were taken out among the trees for a holiday, the trees were thenceforth and thereby brought into the schools of Cincinnati, and the sweet influences of Nature connected with the school-room and its studies as never before. That holiday was made a most impressive and valuable school-day. It was for the