Is not such instruction valuable by way of mental discipline, and most valuable in the acquired knowledge that enters into the every-day practical affairs of life? The spirit of inquiry and original investigation is readily communicated, and the mind stored with a fund of information that is ever useful in the various departments of active life, by applying the objective method to the study of trees.

Arbor Day. The celebration of Arbor Day, as instituted by Governor Morton, in Nebraska, is one of the most powerful means thus far employed in this country for educating the people in the important facts relating to trees and to forests. In the prairie States it has stimulated the planting of many thousand acres of forest trees for economic purposes, and it has given an impetus to practical forestry that is moving on in geometric ratio across the treeless plains toward the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, carrying innumerable blessings in its course. But the celebration of Arbor Day as instituted at Cincinnati in the spring of 1882, by the planting and dedicating of memorial trees, I would have observed by the public schools everywhere. No better method, and none half so attractive, has been discovered for arousing enthusiasm and imparting correct ideas to both young and old of the beauty and utility of trees and forests.

Says Doctor Peaslee, the distinguished superintendent of Cincinnati's public schools, in the introduction to his little pamphlet entitled "Trees and Tree Planting":

In every place where sufficient grounds can be obtained, either in public parks or elsewhere, we would have memorial groves planted, and the Arbor Day celebration take place in them. Let there be a “citizens' memorial grove," in which trees shall be planted from year to year by loving hands of the relatives and friends of those who have died; let there be a "pioneers' grove," in which all citizens, young and old, shall annually join in paying just tribute to the memory of those who endured the hardships and privations of a pioneer life. Let there be an "authors' grove," in which the school children shall honor by living monuments the great men and women in literature, so that while they learn to love and reverence trees, they will at the same time become interested in the lives and writings of distinguished and worthy authors. Let there be a "soldiers' grove," devoted to the memory of our patriotic dead.

And what interests cluster around the growth and development of trees thus dedicated! What lasting monuments they become! "Their grandeur will challenge the admiration of the beholder when the coeval marble monument at their base will lie in ruins, defaced by age and crumbling into dust."

Well may the historian Lossing ask:

What conqueror in any part of life's broad field of battle could desire a more beautiful, a more noble, a more patriotic monument than a tree, planted by pure and joyous children, as a memorial of his achievements? What earnest, honest worker with hand and brain for the benefit of his fellow-men could desire a more pleasing recognition of his usefulness than such a monument—a symbol of his or her productions—· ever growing, ever blooming, and ever bearing wholesome fruit?

The legislatures of eleven of our States have already provided Arbor Days, and we are encouraged to believe that the remaining States will soon imitate them. A prominent feature in these State recommendations is that the public schools shall take part in the celebration; and with the necessary encouragement of school authorities and the hearty co-operation of the teachers, this annual American festival will become a most powerful factor in inculcating and disseminating a lasting sentiment in favor of the preservation and conservation of our ornamental and forest trees. Surround the study of a science with the halo of sentiment and enthusiasm, and the dry bones of fact become at once clothed in full form of beauty and attractiveness, and this subject of forestry is eminently adapted to the most attractive methods of presentation.

I would have forestry taught in every agricultural college in the country, and a forestry experiment station connected with each, and I would have as thorough, systematic training given in this branch as its great value to agriculture requires. It would hardly be advisable as yet to have a separate and distinct department or chair of forestry established in our schools. We have not grown to a condition to warrant this. But in connection with agricultural studies, in teaching physical geog. raphy and the economical branches, forestry deserves a prominent place, and without this our American education will be wanting in one of its most important elements.

To avoid the mistakes of the past in the treatment of our forests the people must be educated concerning them. They must be awakened to a proper sense of their relations to the vital interests and prosperity of a nation.

Marsh, in his "Man and Nature," a book of the greatest value on this subject of forestry, says, in speaking of man's influence in warring ig norantly against nature's laws:

The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations, and she avenges herself upon the intruder by letting loose upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely dispersed and driven from the field of action. When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mold is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mold has been converted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its débris, and, except in countries favored with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a moderate and regular inclination of surface, the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy and malarious plains. There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call "the historic period," they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by 6742-No. 2- -5

man, nor can they become again fitted for human use except through great geological changes, or other mysterious influences or agencies of which we have no present knowledge, and over which we have no prospective control. The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, and of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. The Hon. H. G. Joly, ex-premier of Canada and first vice-president of the American Forestry Congress, in his report on the forests of Canada, says:

The rapidity with which this country is stripped of its forests must alarm every thinking man. It has been estimated by good authority that if we go on at the present rate the supply of timber in the United States will, in less than twenty years, fall considerably short of our home recessities.

It is the highest time that we should turn our earnest attention to this subject, which so seriously concerns our national prosperity.

Prof. C. S. Sargent, of the Bussey Institution, says:

As moderators of the extremes of heat and cold, the benefits derived from extensive forests are undoubted, and that our climate is gradually changing through their destruction is apparent to the most casual observer. Our springs are later, our summers are drier, and every year becoming more 30; our autumns are carried forward into winter, while our winter climate is subject to far greater changes of temperature than formerly.

The late Horace Greeley, in the course of an agricultural address delivered in Westchester County, New York, once said:

Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of our country bounteously wooded once more and kept so for a generation our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter and our gales less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight us with their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons and the remorseless devastations of our visible and insect enemies have all but annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it; and what is true of Westchester County is measurably true of every rural county in the Union.

It is estimated by the National Bureau of Forestry that the total area of forests in the United States, exclusive of Alaska, the Indian Territory, and the District of Columbia, is 489,080,000 acres, or 26.4 of the whole area, and that of this there is annually denuded for timber, fuel, railroad ties, fencing, and by forest fires and browsing cattle 27,278,653

acres.

The timber sawed by the mills of the United States for the year 1884 is given at 28,000,000,000 feet, board measure, and the number of acres required for this product, at 5,000 feet per acre, is 5,600,000 acres, an area as large as the State of Massachusetts. The estimated number of acres annually cleared for fuel alone is given at 9,500,000, and the area of forests destroyed by fires in the census year of 1880, as given by Professor Sargent, was 10,274,089 acres.

What more convincing evidence can we have that our forests are rapidly disappearing than these alarming figures give?

If this destruction goes on without check or repair for the next generation, the prediction of Bryant's Indian at the burial place of his fathers may be realized:

But I beheld a fearful sign,

To which the white man's eyes are blind.
Before these fields were shorn and tilled,
Full to the brim our rivers flowed,

The melody of waters filled

The fresh and boundless wood.

And torrents dashed and rivulets played,
And fountains sported in the shade.
These grateful sounds are heard no more,
The springs are silent in the sun,

The rivers by the blackened shore

With lessening currents run;

The realm our tribes are crushed to get
May be a barren desert yet.

We want instruction ín forestry to become an inseparable part of our universal American education, because we believe it most important that the people should know that our navigable streams can best be preserved for the future commerce of the nation by forest areas at their head-waters and around the numerous springs and streams that feed them; that water power for our numerous and varied manufactures can be rendered perpetual by forest protection to the streams that furnish them; that drought and flood will be lessened thereby; that the fertility of the soil and the agricultural interests of the country will be preserved and perpetuated by an adequate reservation of forest areas. wisely distributed; that the healthfuluess of the country can be subserved, and marshy, miasmatic, deadly areas cleansed of their baleful influences through the wonderful chemistry of tree-growth; that mountainous and hilly countries can be preserved from the direful effects of denudation by permitting nature's protection to do its perfect work; that barren lands can be reclaimed, and desert places made to "blossom like the rose," by planting, protecting, and nurturing trees; that the landscape is beautified, homes rendered attractive, cities and towns made beautiful, and the inhabitants protected from parching sun and cutting blast, by the artistic distribution of these crowning works of nature's vegetable creation; that our forest product is among the most indispensable and most important elements in our national economics; and that to secure these desired ends such laws should be enacted and such means employed as the various circumstances and needs may demand. Hon. J. W. Dickinson, of Massachusetts, read a paper on "The Province of the Public School," which was discussed by B. A. Hinsdale of Ohio, Colonel Parker of Illinois, and others.

Hon. N. C. Dougherty, superintendent of schools, Peoria, Ill., then read the following paper:

LANGUAGE WORK.

An apprentice may begin to learn his trade in either of two ways. He may study the purpose of each tool and practice himself in its use till he has attained considerable skill in handling it, till he can plane a board or set a horseshoe ordinarily as well as his master. Or he may study each tool in itself, examining its different parts, learning how to mend it when broken, discovering why iron is used here and wood there, why and how one style of make is better than another, etc.; he may further learn why the jack-plane is sometimes to be preferred to the smoother, the shoeing hammer to the sledge, why for some purposes oak timber is superior to ash, and why a horse that "interferes" in his gait requires a shoe peculiarly set.

The first of these methods is the one immediately productive of results, and indeed the more important one, so far as results are eoncerned. What sort of workman is he who cannot use his own tools?

But the second method must not be neglected. He would hardly be called a thorough workman who knew nothing of his tools but how to use them; who could neither keep them in good condition, repair them when broken, nor select good ones when he must buy more.

He cannot learn much of their use without studying their parts and structure more or less closely, nor use them independently without knowing the principles which guide in their use. And, on the other hand, no amount of study of the tools, no amount of pulling them apart and putting them together again, no mere theoretical knowledge of principles, can make him a skillful workman. He must use his tools

in order to become skilled in their use.

By much practice he may learn to do good work in ordinary cases; but he must know the underlying principles before he can do independ ent work. It requires science to shoe the racer.

Language is the instrument by which we express thought. As in the case of any other tool, it may be studied in two different ways. One may study it only as a means to the expression of thought; he may practice himself in its use till he has ready command of a large and good vocabulary and skill in the building of sentences; or he may study it as an end in itself, examining its structure and the function of the various parts. The former method gives him facility in expression; the latter gives him a knowledge of the instrument that he uses, so that he may use it understandingly, so that he may become acquainted with its structure and workings. Without the former, his knowledge of the structure of the language helps him but little in its use; the apprentice does not learn to shoe a horse by sorting over a keg of nails. Without the latter, one's facility in speech is a superficial thing, resting on mere imitation, unguided by reason, and lacking the