Go and sit down in our mixed beech, maple, birch, and oak woods and witness the varying fortunes of the trees. How many of them have had misfortunes of one kind or another! How few, if any, have reached their ideal! How many are diseased or dying at the top or decaying at the root! Some have been mutilated by the fall of other trees. Youth and age meet and mingle. Some trees in their teens, as it were, are very thrifty; others are old and decrepit. In fact, the fortunes of the individual trees are much like those of men and women in a human community--struggle, competition, defeat, decay, and death on all sides. All, or nearly all, the evils that afflict men have their counterpart in the evils that afflict the trees of the forest. When some species of forest worm threatens the destruction of our beech or maple forests some other form of insect-life steps in and puts an end to their increase, and the plague vanishes. The gypsy and the brown-tailed moths which have so ravished the groves and forests of the Eastern States will doubtless in time be held in check by their natural enemies. The plague of tent caterpillars that got such headway in New York State that it threatened to become a public calamity was effectually checked by the cold and rain of the May of 1917. Not one tent caterpillar have I seen during the past three years. The plague of currant-worms was checked in the same way. Sooner or later any excess is sure to be corrected. But so far as we can see, such things as the chestnut blight and hickory blight must rage like a fire till they have spent themselves and there are no more chestnut- or hickory-trees to be destroyed. Throughout the course of the biological history of the globe, both plants and animals have dropped out in some such way, and new forms come in--come in through the slow action of the evolutionary impulse. The Providence I see at work in the case of the trees does not differ at all from the Providence I see at work in the case of men. It is one and the same, and that one is as I have so often said, wholesale, indiscriminating, regardless of individuals, regardless of waste, delays, pain, suffering, failure, yet insuring success on a universal scale, the scale of centuries and geologic periods. Our standards of time compared with Nature’s standards are like our interplanetary spaces compared with the inconceivable abysses of the sidereal heavens--minutes compared to centuries. Our little family of planets moves round the fireside of our little sun--a small chimney-corner in the vast out-of-doors of astronomic space, where suns and systems and whole universes of worlds drift like bubbles on the sea. Give Nature time enough, and the world of to-day, or of any day, becomes an entire stranger to you. Orion will no longer stalk across the winter skies, the pole-star will no longer guide your ships, if, indeed, there remains any ocean for your ships to sail upon.