rangers! _In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than
Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force
was organized._

Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together,
who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass
herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the
animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become--what?--is
it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs
and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The
flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may
perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species
that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the
law of its own being--fixity--by sending its seeds sailing, whirling,
aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.

You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the
National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't
you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the
centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate
almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with
the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle
up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing
life and strength straight from the sun.

The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you
suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to
you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead
branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal
rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our
weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be
fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy
anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the
useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that
can't stand fast against the shocks of life!

You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause
made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of
life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who
divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet,
not the philosopher, who divides the life of man i