a comparatively very well-stocked 15,000 acre lot in Pulaski County, Ky., and found them to number 3,500. At that rate the tanneries of Cincinnati and Louisville alone would every year use up the trees spontaneously growing on about 100,000 acres of land. The few years since the Cincinnati and Southern Railroad has been in operation a belt of fourteen miles on both sides of the road, and of about two hundred miles in length, has been almost totally depleted of that valuable variety of timber. The same gentleman ventures to predict that within twenty years from now the entire supply of chestnut-oak bark in the United States will be exhausted. The price now varies from $14 to $28 per cord, and is steadily increasing. From carefully prepared reports of the forestry departments of the several German States and of Austria, it appears that an acre of properly cultivated Hackwald of the age of twelve years will furnish from four to five cords of tan-bark, and about six thousand feet of timber (board measure) fit for posts and for wagon-makers' work. The revenue from the wood covers all the expenses of planting and managing, leaving a surplus. Under such circumstances, the foresting of inferior lands in Ohio, Kentucky, or West Virginia could not fail to lay the foundation of wealth for those who would now engage in it. Large tracts of such lands are now lying waste. The income derived therefrom is now generally not sufficient to pay the taxes and interest on the original purchase money. By the means of forest culture, they might be easily turned into well-paying estates, and while they are much more than a public nuisance, they may become an ornament of the State and a great benefit for the general public. EMIL ROTHE. VILLAGE IMPROVEMENT SOCIETIES. In order to assist in organizing Village Improvement Societies, the following Constitution is given here. It is modeled after the constitution of the Laurel Hill Association of Stockbridge, Conn., and of the Wyoming and College Hill (Hamilton County, O.,) Village Improvement Societies. ARTICLE I. THIS Society shall be called the ARTICLE II. Improvement Society. The object of this Society shall be to improve and ornament the streets and public grounds of the village by planting and cultivating trees, establishing and protecting grass-plats and borders in the avenues, and generally doing whatever may tend to the improvement of the village as a place of residence. ARTICLE III. The business of the Society shall be conducted by a board of nine directors-five gentlemen and four ladies, to be elected annually by the Society-who shall constitute the board. This board shall, from its own number, elect one President, two Vice-presidents, a Secretary, and Treasurer, and shall appoint such committees as they may deem advisable to further the ends of the Society. 44 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. ARTICLE IV. It shall be the duty of the President, and, in his absence, of the senior Vice-president, to preside at all meetings of the Society, and to carry out all orders of the Board of Directors. ARTICLE V. It shall be the duty of the Secretary to keep a correct and careful record of all proceedings of the Society and of the Board of Directors, in a book suitable for their preservation, and such other duties as ordinarily pertain to the office. ARTICLE VI. It shall be the duty of the Treasurer to keep the funds of the Society, and to make such disbursements as may be ordered by the Board of Directors. ARTICLE VII. No debt shall be contracted by the Board of Directors beyond the amount of available funds within their control to pay it, and no member of this Society shall be liable for any debt of the Society beyond the amount of his or her subscription. ARTICLE VIII. Any adult person may become a member of this Society by paying two dollars ($2.00) annually. Any person not of age who shall plant and protect a tree, under the direction of the Board of Directors, or shall pay the sum of $1.00 annually, may become a member of this Society until of age, after which time their annual dues shall be increased to two dollars ($2.00), the same as other adults. ARTICLE IX. The annual meeting of the Society shall be held during the first week of October, at such place as the Board of Directors may select, and a notice of such meeting shall be posted in prominent places through the village. Other meetings of the Society may be called by the Board of Directors when desirable. ARTICLE X. At the annual meeting, the Board of Directors shall report the amount of money received during the year, and the source from which it has been received; the amount of money expended during the year, and the objects for which it has been expended; the number of trees planted at the cost of the Society, and the number planted by individuals; and, generally, all acts of the Board that may be of interest to the Society. This report shall be entered on the record of the Society. ARTICLE XI. This Constitution may be amended with the approval of twothirds of the members present, at any annual meeting of the Society, or at any special meeting called for that purpose, a month's notice of the proposed amendment, with its object, having been given. PART SECOND. SELECTIONS ON TREES FOR ARBOR DAY CELEBRATIONS. “The Tree of the Hield iz Man's Life.”—BIBLE. Ir is gratifying to see Ohio take such deep interest in tree-planting, which is beginning so strongly to attract public attention. Setting apart one day for this purpose and making it a general holiday will add attractiveness to utility, and give it a deeper hold on the popular heart. But the happiest thought of all was to make it a holiday for the public schools, and have the children practically take part in it and set out groups of trees for their favorite authors. You thuş not only connect trees with the associations of childhood and their pleasantest holidays, but with authors from whom they receive their earliest and best impressions. We sometimes forget that the highest aim of education is to form right character-and that is accomplished more by impressions made. upon the heart than by knowledge imparted to the mind. The awakening of our best sympathies-the cultivation of our best and purest tastes-strengthening the desire to be useful and good, and directing youthful ambition to unselfish ends-such are the objects of true education. Surely nothing can be better calculated to procure these ends than the holiday set apart for the public schools. J. T. HEADLEY: Extract from Letter. WHEN We plant a tree, we are doing what we can to make our planet a more wholesome and happier dwelling-place for those who come after us if not for ourselves. As you drop the seed, as you plant the sapling, your left hand hardly knows what your right hand is doing. But Nature knows, and in due time the Power that sees and works in secret will reward you openly. You have been warned against hiding your talent in a napkin; but if your talent takes the form of a maple-key or an acorn, and your napkin is a shred of the apron that covers the lap of the earth," you may hide it there, unblamed; and when you render in your account you will find that your deposit has been drawing compound interest all the time. 66 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: Extract from Letter. 46 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. We wish to wake up the people of Ohio to the value of their forests, and to prevent the fulfillment of the prediction of Bryant's Indian at the burial-place of his fathers: But I behold a fearful sign, To which the white man's eyes are blind. The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless wood. The rivers, by the blackened shore, The realm our tribes are crushed to get THE trees may outlive the memory of more than one of those in whose honor they were planted. But if it is something to make two blades of grass grow where only one was growing, it is much more to have been the occasion of the planting of an oak which shall defy twenty scores of Winters, or of an elm which shall canopy with its green cloud of foliage half as many generations of mortal immortalities. I have written many verses, but the best poems I have produced are the trees I planted on the hill-side which overlooks the broad meadows, scalloped and rounded at their edges by loops of the sinuous Housatonic. Nature finds rhymes.for them in the recurring measures of the seasons. Winter strips them of their ornaments and gives them, as it were, in prose translation, and Summer reclothes them in all the splendid phrases of their leafy language. What are these maples and beeches and birches but odes and idyls and madrigals? What are these pines and firs and spruces but holy hymns, too solemn for the many-hued raiment of their gay deciduous neighbors ? OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: Extract from Letter. THE objects of the restoration of the forests are as multifarious as the motives which have led to their destruction, and as the evils which that destruction has occasioned. The planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and violence of river inundations, prevent the formation of torrents; mitigate the extremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation; restore dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation; shelter the fields from chilling and from parching winds; prevent the spread of miasmatic effluvia; and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply of material indispensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful exercise of every act of peace, every destructive energy of war. GEORGE P. MARSII, "Man and Nature." ARBOR DAY EXERCISES. THE WAYSIDE INN-AN APPLE-TREE. I HALTED at a pleasant inn, Mine host-it was an apple-tree- And spread his choicest, sweetest fruit, Full many a little feathered guest Came through his branches springing; Beneath his shade I laid me down, And when I rose, and would have paid He only shook his lofty head I blessed him, and departed. I LOVE thee in the Spring, FROM THE GERMAN Earth-crowning forest! when amid the shades. In the hot Summer time, With deep delight, the somber aisles I roam, But O, when Autumn's hand Hath marked thy beauteous foliage for the grave, WM. JEWETT PABODIE THE groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them,-ere he framed The lofty vault to gather and roll back The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 47 |