Bridgeton pioneer. (Bridgeton, N.J.) 1884-1919, 1886-04-29
NO. 1888
TO OBSERVE ARBOR DAY.


State Superintendent Chapman has
issued the following circular to County
and City School Superintendents:
''The Governor of this State having
appointed Friday, April Both, as Arbor
Day, desire to call your attention to
the Importance of its observance in
such a manner as will be pleasing to
the children of the schools under your
care; will impress upon their minds the
truths that may be taught concerning
the planting and the preservation of
trees, and will also secure Immediate,
practical results in the actual planting
OF trees. The day, so far as any regu-
lar school work is concerned, should
be made a holiday, to be remembered
with pleasure through the coming
year. The morning may be spent in
the school room. with songs, recita-
tions, readings or lectures, but the
afternoon should be devoted to the
planting of trees or shrubs, with such
exercises as may seem best appropriate
and most likely to encourage a lover
of nature.
The law makes it the duty ofthe sew
eral County and City Superintendents
to prepare Il programme of the eXer-
cjses used on such day in all the schools
The programme need not be elaborate,
but should be pleasing and sufficiently
elastic to be adapted to the various
local conditions. In the lectures and
talks, the children may be impressed
with the great truth that trees per-
form an important part in the economy
of nature, and to wantonly destroy
them is often to invite disaster and
ruin. 1t may be shown how the forests
catch the rainfall and store it in the
earth to keep the springs bubbling and
the streams running during the long,
dry days of Summer, and how, when
the forests are cut away, the rain as
it falls, instead of sinking into the
ground, rushes over its surface to the
nearest stream which it swells to a
food, sometimes washing away whole
farms with their houses and cattle, and
destroying many lives; how in the
Summer, when there is but little rain
the same river which overfiowed its
banks during the food, having no
gentle, overfiowing streams from the
forests to feed it, shrinks away, and
the farmers crops suffer from drought
1t is because the foolish people of
China cut off all their forests that they
are obliged to dig canals all over their
great country to get water for their
rice fields; and when the floods come
down from the hills and mountains,
the canals overflow and people are
drowned Within two years, a great
flood there destroyed the lives of ten
thousand persons, and spoiled the rice
fields, so that many thousands more
starved to death. Famines are fire.
quent there. and are always due to
floods and droughts.
On the French side of the Alps there
were, not many years ago, pretty
mountain sides and fertile valleys; but
they cut off all the trees, and now the
country is a wilderness, where not
even a bird or rabbit can live. The
floods have washed the fields and
shrubs all away, and nothing remains
but bare rocks and parched gorges.
We have the same results in our coun-
try Wherever the forests have been
destroyed, we haves sdrought in Sum
mer and devastating floods in the
Spring. A recent flood in Ohio de-
stroyed 500, ,000,0 900 worth of property
and many lives. The Summer flow of
the Schuylkill has diminished one
half since its volume was first meas
ured. Our own pretty Delaware over
flows its banks in Winter and Spring
and dries up to little more than a mere
brook in the Summer. All of our lit
tie streams grow smaller year by year,
and will not turn the mill wheel in the
months during which, in former years,
there was a failing supply of
water.
These and other similar facts may
be dwelt upon at length with great ad-
vantage There are also other series
of facts which illustrate the relation
of trees to mans health and comfort
and pleasure, and safety from danger
by cyclones and gales, all of which
may be made interesting and instruc-
tive. Our literature is so full of praises
of the trees, that a volume of gems
might easily be culled, and I recon-
mend that pupils commit to memory
and recite short selections of this
character from our poets and prose
writer's. Let the Arbor Day of 1886
be memorable one.