Thus, then, in the forests, in this bright and beautiful world of vegetation, most of the pleasures which man can derive from external nature are garnered up, and most of the lessons he requires are written. All kinds of precious grace and teaching, says Mr. Ruskin,[145] are united in this link between the Earth and the Stars: wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and discipline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beautiful means of life. "First, a carpet to make it soft for him; then, a coloured fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage: easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for him, or instruments (lance-shaft, or plough handle, according to his temper); useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous; useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm--and all these presented in forms of endless change. Fragility and force, softness and strength, in all degrees of aspects; unerring uprightness, as of temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the storms of ages, or wavings to and fro with faintest pulse of summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or binding the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage for tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean--clothing with variegated, everlasting fibres, the peaks of the trackless mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest passion and simplest joy of humanity." Considered in their physiological aspect, it is evident that the forests have played, from the remotest ages of our planet, a pre-eminently useful part, by absorbing the carbonic acid with which the atmosphere was surcharged, fixing the carbon, and restoring to the air a quantity of oxygen sufficient for the support of animal life, impossible or rudimentary previous to their creation. And they still serve to maintain the chemical equilibrium of the atmosphere, by incessantly refeeding it with the oxygen which the respiration of animals and the phenomena of combustion have transformed into carbonic acid. * * * * *