labor of constructing a majestic oak. Phosphates and all the
delicacies of plant-food are brought in from the secret stores of the
earth by the former, while foliage and twig and trunk are busy in
catching sunbeams, air, and thunderstorms, to imprison in the annual
increment of solid wood. There is no light coming from your wood,
corncob, or coal fire which some vegetable Prometheus did not, in its
days of growth, steal from the sun and secrete in the mysteries of a
vegetable organism.

Combustion lets loose the captive rays and beams which growing plants
imprisoned years, centuries, even eons ago, long before human life
began its earthly career. The interdependence of animal and tree life
is perennial. The intermission of a single season of a vegetable life
and growth on the earth would exterminate our own and all the animal
races. The trees, the forests are essential to man's health and life.
When the last tree shall have been destroyed there will be no man left
to mourn the improvidence and thoughtlessness of the forest-destroying
race to which he belonged.

In all civilizations man has cut down and consumed, but seldom
restored or replanted, the forests. In biblical times Palestine was
lovely in the foliage of the palm, and the purpling grapes hung upon
her hillsides and gleamed in her fertile valleys like gems in the
diadems of her princes. But man, thoughtless of the future, careless
of posterity, destroyed and replaced not; so, where the olive and the
pomegranate and the vine once held up their luscious fruit for the sun
to kiss, all is now infertility, desolation, desert, and solitude. The
orient is dead to civilization, dead to commerce, dead to intellectual
development. The orient died of treelessness.