The relations between trees and the fertility of the country around them is a matter of deep interest to man. Portions of France have been productive and afterwards barren because of the abundance of the trees at first and their having afterwards been cut down to supply the wants of man, who desired their material and the ground on which they stood. The rivers of Michigan are not navigable now in some instances where once they were deep with water. The destruction of the forests to supply the lumber and furniture markets of the world has caused less rain to fall, and the snows of winter which formerly lay late in spring beneath the forests now melt at the return of the sun in the early months and are swept with the rush of high water away to the great lakes. Many of the barren wastes in Palestine and other countries, which in olden times blossomed as the rose, have lost their glory with the destruction of their trees.

Men have learned something of the value of the trees to a fertile country and the science of forestry has arisen, not only to determine the means of growing beautiful and useful trees, but also to court the winds of heaven to drop their fatness upon the soil. In the state of Nebraska 800,000,000 planted trees invite the rain and the state is blessed by the response.

Man used to worship the forest. The stillness and the solemn sounds of the deep woods are uplifting to the soul and healing to the mind. The great gray trunks bearing heavenward their wealth of foliage, the swaying of branches in the breeze, the golden shafts of sunlight that shoot down through the noonday twilight, all tend to rest the mind from the things of human life and lift the thoughts to things divine.

The highest form of architecture practiced on earth is the Gothic, which holy men devised from contemplation of the lofty archings of trees and perpetuated in the stone buildings erected to God in western Europe through the centuries clustering around the thirteenth.

Trees afford hiding and nesting places for many birds and animals. Their cooling shelter comforts the cattle; they furnish coursing-places among their branches for the sportive climbing-animals, and their tender twigs give restful delight to the little birds far out of reach of any foe.

Man has always used the trees for house building; his warmth is largely supplied from fires of wood and leaves; from the days when Adam and Eve did their first tailoring with fig leaves, the trees have been levied upon for articles of clothing till now the world is supplied with hats of wood, millions of buttons of the same material are worn, and the wooden shoes of the peasantry of Europe clump gratefully over the ground in acknowledgment of the debt of mankind to the woods.

Weapons of all sorts, in all ages, have been largely of wood. Houses, furniture, troughs, spoons, bowls, plows, and all sorts of implements for making a living have been fashioned by man from timber. Every sort of carriage man ever devised, whether for land or water travel, depended in its origin upon the willing material the trees have offered. Although we now have learned to plow the seas with prow of steel and ride the horseless carriage that has little or no wood about it, yet the very perfection of these has arisen from the employment of wood in countless experiments before the metal thing was invented.

Our daily paper is printed from the successors of Gutenberg's wooden type, upon what seems to be paper, but is in reality the ground-up and whitened pulp of our forest trees. Our food is largely of nuts and fruits presented us by the trees of all climes, which are yet brought to our doors in many instances by wooden sailing vessels, whose sails are spread on spars from our northern forests.

The baskets of the white man and the red Indian are made from the materials of the forest. Ash strips are pounded skillfully and readily separate themselves in flat strips suitable for weaving into receptacles for carrying the berries of the forest shades or the products of the soil, whose richness came by reason of the long-standing forests which stood above it and fell into it for centuries.

Whoever has tried to stopper a bottle when no cork was at hand knows something of the value of one sort of trees. He who has lain upon a bed of fever without access to quinine knows more of the debt we owe the generous forests that invite us with their cooling branches and their carpeted, mossy floors. The uses of rubber to city people are almost enough to induce one to remove his hat in reverence to the rubber tree; the esteem we have for the products of the sugar maple and the various products of the pine in their common forms of tar, pitch, and turpentine, as well as in their subtler forms, which are so essential to the arts and sciences, contributing to our ease, comfort, and elegance, should cause us to cherish the lofty pine and the giant maple with warmest gratitude.