THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MAY, 1882. 



METHODS AND PEOFIT OF TREE-PLANTING. 



By N. H. EGLESTON. 



THE recent calamitous fire in Michigan calls attention afresh to the 

 rapid consumption of our forests, and occasions renewed inquiry 

 as to what may be done either to check that consumption or to make 

 good the loss thereby sustained. More than fifty townships of land, 

 covering an area of aboufr two thousand square miles, or a territory 

 nearly half as large as the State of Connecticut, were swept over by 

 the flames. " Scarcely a green sprig," says a reporter, " was left in 

 the track of the fire." This fire was, indeed, exceptional in extent, as 

 well as in the loss of life occasioned by it ; and yet it was only the em- 

 phasized form of a very common occurrence one so common that we 

 fail to notice it as we should, or become sensible of the aggregate losses 

 resulting therefrom. The destruction of the great pine-forests of the 

 Northwest, of Michigan and Wisconsin, rapidly as it is carried forward 

 by the lumberman's axe, is hastened by the fires lighted, in some cases, 

 by the lumberman's carelessness or that of others, and in other cases 

 as the speediest way of clearing the ground for agricultural use. There 

 is no part of our country exempt from the destructive effects of forest- 

 fires. The mountains and hill-sides of New England frequently show 

 blackened spaces on their verdant flanks. The same is true of the 

 great wooded regions of New York and Pennsylvania. The vast Adi- 

 rondack forests are visited by fires, the frequency and extent of which 

 are known to hardly any but the wandering trappers and hunters whose 

 camp-fire's, left unextinguished, may have lighted them. New Jersey 

 has suffered severely from the burning of her woods. Ten thousand 

 acres, covering a space seven miles in breadth, were swept over, at one 

 time, in 1866. In 1871 two fires in Ocean County consumed over 

 thirty thousand acres, and it is said that this whole county is overrun 



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