330 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



population for that of nature. By tools and sprays he drives back the 

 larger and more minute representatives of the former population until 

 finally they are to be found only in such places as man may not yet wish 

 to use for the other purposes. In Muir's " Mountains of California," 

 in the chapter entitled The Bee-Pastures, he describes what used to be. 

 "The Great Central Plain of California during the months of March, 

 April and May, was one smooth continuous bed of honey-bloom, so mar- 

 vellously rich that in walking from one end of it to the other, a dis- 

 tance of 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at 

 every step. The radiant honey-filled corollas, touching and over lapping, 

 and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset 

 sky — one sheet of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring 

 through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin from the south, 

 and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the 

 mountains, dividing the plain into sections fringed with trees." Now 

 that plain is a checkerboard of grain and alfalfa fields bounded by irri- 

 gation ditches. And the lesser valleys, parallel with this great central 

 plain, bounded by mountains still more or less timbered, are consecrated 

 to the culture — of prunes. Undisturbed nature is still accessible, nearer 

 at hand in that golden west than in the green middle west or on the 

 Atlantic slope. Even the tourist can reach it if he will ; not in Yosemite 

 with its hotel, camps, and mule-polluted trails ; but beyond, at the top of 

 the world, in the higher places of the Sierra. 



Civilization in the form of agriculture plays sad havoc with natural 

 native vegetation, destroying, driving back, exterminating most, domes- 

 ticating and assimilating few, plants. 



Where agriculture has not yet reached, the lumberman hews down 

 that man may elsewhere build up. There is, so far as I know, only one 

 of our forests which, given a fair chance, will quickly reproduce itself. 

 The redwood forest which used to stretch for hundreds of miles 

 unbroken over the eastward as well as the westward slopes of the 

 mountains closely paralleling the coast line of California, can reproduce 

 itself and does wherever the lumberman fails to clear by the cheap and 

 costly means of fire. The redwood suckers like a lilac, a rare quality in 

 conifers. If the underground parts of a felled tree are left alive, 

 suckers will spring up, and by their astonishingly rapid growth, almost 

 throughout the twelve month, drenched in life-giving fogs in the rainless 

 summer and checked only by the coldest weather of the mild and rainy 

 winter, they will yield a stand which in thirty years will be merchantable 

 timber. Meantime the soil is held in place, the wash is slow and com- 

 paratively harmless, the streams are clear, and those turbid destructive 

 floods so common elsewhere, are almost unknown. 



The vast areas which the nation has saved from the lumberman to 

 furnish timber for our children and their children, to cover the water- 



