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Show 459 more than lights and flowers on mountains, or on the trees themselves. A man's contribution to forestry could be measured by how much he loved the trees; Muir's highest praise for Sargent's volumes was that they breathed the peace of the wilderness, that they made the reader long for the presence of the forests themselves. Next to this, the technical and scientific questions of botanical names, or distinctions between species, paled to nothing. What mattered was that Sargent had gone out into the woods to see all these trees in their living relations. What had qualified Sargent to be Chairman of the Forestry Commission was his devotion to the trees themselves, as indicated by the twelve years he spent preparing the fourteen volumes of the Silva. How different was Pinchot's attitude toward Sargent, as we shall see. When Muir stood up at the annual meeting of the Sierra Club in November, 1895, he half humorously suggested that he was not really qualified to carry on the work of protecting the Yosemite National Park, that it should be left to lawyers and younger men like William E . Colby. But there was also some seriousness in that. He knew that the problem for the future would be ongoing: The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. The problem that he focused on was that of administration and |