Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 5, May 1899: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 5, May 1899: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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