"The location of Solaris as an experimental tree-planting farm, is particularly fortunate. It possesses a soil and climate which will promote the perfect growth of more than one hundred different varieties of trees. Among these, we find a majority of the valuable timber and nut-bearing trees of the world. Consequently, a very wide field of experimentation awaits our efforts. Let us improve our splendid opportunities so industriously, that a wide spread interest in forestry, may follow and become firmly established in the minds of the people of our Republic. "By way of an introduction to the general subject, of the importance of trees, as an adjunct to the progress, welfare and civilization of mankind. I wish to relate to you the story of my first great lesson in the seductive lore of forestry. "Near the beginning of the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, in the year of 1893, it was my good fortune to visit the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. I was then a lad of fifteen years, full of boyish enthusiasm, in the enjoyment of my first vacation from the preparatory school, where I was being fitted for my collegiate course. "I was born and reared on my father's farm, on the broad rolling prairies of Nebraska; up to that time I had never been far from home; as a consequence my knowledge of growing trees was limited to the following fast-growing varieties, which were planted and cultivated by prairie farmers for fuel, fencing and storm-protection. I will name these varieties in the order of their value for fuel and timber. White ash, soft maple, cottonwood and white willow. At a later period I learned that perhaps with the exception of white ash, the timber furnished by these trees, is considered valueless, in the markets of the world. "Under such circumstances you may imagine my astonishment when I first beheld that wonderfully unique, Forestry Building; with its bristling array of tree-trunk flag poles. Try first to picture in your mind's eye, a building in the form of a parallelogram, large enough to afford two acres of floor-space; with the first story surrounded on every side by a wide, open veranda: with a full length second story one hundred feet wide, rising gracefully from the central roof of the first; altogether, completing a design of exterior so boldly rustic in its general effect, as to suggest the idea of trees and forests at every point; then, you may get the delightfully novel effect, which the architect conveyed to my mind as I approached this curiously fascinating structure. A closer inspection increased the rustic effect of the general design. The main outside walls, were composed of thousands of wide, bark-coated slabs, cut from the choice typical trees of our American forests.