Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/711

Rh introduction into them of the natural sciences with all their healthful and helpful influences.

And just here, also, if we mistake not, is our best guarantee fur the promotion of forestry and for the solution of a great national problem. The children, who have been invited and assisted to plant shrub and tree on their school-house grounds, will soon be interested in the work of their elders, as they plant trees along the borders of the streets, and will ask to join in it. Next, they will be ready to assist in bringing trees, with which it may be sought perhaps to give the village cemetery a more pleasant look; or they will enter with sympathy into the work of converting some neglected spot of ground into a comely park, or clearing up a rough piece of woodland so as to make it a desirable place of resort and recreation. Thus, going on from year to year, a new generation will soon have come to manhood and womanhood, a generation full of the love of trees as such, and not estimating them merely for their value as lumber or cord-wood. They will even have a poetic sensibility in respect to the trees. Like the old Greeks, they will sometimes people the woods and groves with dryads, or, as our ancestors did, with gnomes and sprites. They will have learned, also, as their fathers have not, the important relations which the forests sustain to climate, to the precipitation and distribution of moisture from the sky and clouds, and its exhalation from the ground. They will be sensible of their influence upon the hot and cold currents of the air, and their value to agriculture by serving as effective barriers against them. They will have learned, as their fathers have not, how nicely adjusted to each other are the forces of the natural world, and how hazardous it is to disturb their equilibrium, yet how easily in our ignorance or recklessness we may do it. The fact will be familiar to them that the woodman, by an improvident use of his axe upon the hill-side, may let loose the torrent or the avalanche, which may hurl ruin upon the fertile valley below. Well knowing these and many other things respecting the trees, of which the present generation for the most part are ignorant, or which they are slow to learn, the new generation will recognize, as we do not, that the trees are essential to man's highest welfare, that they are his best friends, that they are the constituted partners of the world with him, that human life in fact would be impossible without them. Recognizing these facts, as the new generation come into society as its directors, we may expect that they will be conservative of the forests, and thus conservative also of the best interests of the country.