i84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all our crops of grain and large fruits is destroyed by violent windSy 

 which such a system of protection, or its equivalent in groves, would 

 so far check as to prevent the destruction." Another, whose words are 

 quoted in the " Iowa Horticultural Report " for 1875, speaking of the 

 wintry storms of the Northwest, sometimes known as " blizzards," says, 

 " More people have been frozen within the last year in north^vestlowa 

 and west Minnesota than were ever murdered by the Indians in those 

 counties since their settlement." And he says, in regard to a remedy : 

 '* I see none that would do but timber-planting. It alone would stop 

 these terrible winds, modify the climate, and furnish landmarks for 

 the traveler." So Professor Lacy, of the State University, in an ad- 

 dress to the Minnesota State Forestry Association, says : " The Minne- 

 sota State Forestry Association was organized to meet and deal with 

 the stern realities of facts. It was organized to meet the fact that over 

 more than one third of the great State of Minnesota the winds rush with 

 a howling fury and with a bitter cold that neither beast nor fruit-tree 

 can resist or withstand, and for miles not a single forest-tree rears its 

 head in protest. It was organized to meet the fact that, in a climate 

 which affords six months of winter, much of it fearfully severe, there 

 are thousands of farms on which there does not grow one particle of 

 fuel, and on which it can not be obtained without the expenditure of 

 both money and labor by a people often destitute of means. It was 

 organized to meet the fact that for miles and miles there is not a sin- 

 gle landmark to guide the benumbed and benighted traveler. It was 

 organized to meet the fact that to induce human beings to make their 

 houses on such farms is downright inhumanity. . . . The force of the 

 winds on our Western prairies can not be conceived of by you who have 

 always lived within the area of forests. They are simply terrible to 

 endure and appalling to contemplate. They carry death alike to the 

 unprotected beast and the more tender forms of arboreal life." 



It is not surprising that people living amid such exposures of life 

 and property, and seeing so manifestly as they do that these are 

 attributable to the absence of trees, should bestir themselves in seek- 

 ing the appropriate remedy, that they should organize, as they have 

 done, forestry associations, appoint arbor-days, and engage the aid of 

 the State itself in offering bounties for tree-planting, and in exempt- 

 ing forest plantations for a time from taxation. The latter has been 

 done in several of the Western States, and already the work of tree- 

 planting has wrought a perceptible change on many a farm, as to 

 appearance, comfort of living, and productiveness. But the work 

 that is needed is a great one, a work not to be accomplished by plant- 

 ing in a few States or portions of States lines of quick-growing, soft- 

 wooded trees, which may make tolerable wind-breaks in five or six 

 years. This is hardly more than a makeshift at the best. The work 

 is broader and more comprehensive than that, and one which for its 

 due accomplishment needs an intelligent comprehension of the facts 



