for moisture and sustenance from the soil, and for
a place in the sun, as men do in the community, and
the most lucky, or the most fit, survive. Nature
plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect
man, but both tree and man have to take their
chances with hostile forces and conditions amid
which their lot falls, so that an absolutely perfect
oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man.
Of course Nature has endowed man with mental
and spiritual powers which she has not bestowed
upon trees. These powers give man an advantage
over trees, but not the same advantage over men--
his own kind of tree--because his fellows are simi-
larly endowed. His struggle with his own kind is as
inevitable as the struggle of trees with their kind,
with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is al-
ways a peaceful competition, it never takes the form
of destructive wars. Trees of opposite kinds will
draw away from one another; a pine will draw away
from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of
any natural antagonism, but because it is less mo-
bile and its tender but more rigid branches cannot
stand the buffetings of the more mobile and flexible
deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine,
and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere
of a pine or a hemlock forest, how different from
that of a beech or a maple! Most trees tend to asso-
ciate themselves together in large bodies, as did
primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that mat-

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