Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 5, May 1899 / Illustrated by Color Photography

by Various

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.

Perhaps the most refined of the pleasures of man is found in the playing of musical instruments. There is not one of the sweeter-toned of all the vast family of musical instruments that is not dependent on the sympathetic qualities of the various woods. The violin shows the soul of this material in its highest refinement. No other instrument has so effectually caught the tones of the glorious mountain and the peaceful valley as has the choicely selected and deftly fashioned shell of the fiddle. It awakens all the fancies of a lifetime in one short hour, it brings gladness to the heart and enlivens the whole frame, and when the master hand brings out from its delicate form the deeper secrets of its nature the violin brings tears to our eyes and inspires within us an earnestness of purpose which is a perpetual tribute of the soul of man to the heart of the forest.

I took a spring journey once from the heart of old Kentucky through some of the northern states around to the eastward to Virginia. The dogwood was in blossom south of the Ohio. The forests and hillsides were set forth here and there in bridal array by the glad whiteness of myriads of these delicate flowers. Through Ohio and Indiana the peach trees were putting forth their delicate pink blossoms that sought us out in the cars and delighted us with their rare fragrance. In Pennsylvania we passed out of the peach region, and I thought the mountains could not give flowers to match the loveliness experienced on the two preceding days, but when we were running adown the "blue Juniata river" there burst upon me the purple radiance of the ironwood that I had entirely forgotten as a flowering tree of beauty. Brighter than the peach and softer than the dogwood it stood out against the foliage of the stream and hillside. It followed the railway all down the Susquehanna across the line into Maryland, and gave me joy until it was lost again as the warmth of the southern sun poured itself again before my eyes upon the purity and simplicity of the snowy dogwood.