88 3Iississippi Valley Horticultural Society. 



of the timber, and leaves the young growth to be consumed by the fires 

 which his refuse makes possible and resistless. A generation since who 

 could have predicted the present scarcity of white pine in some of the best 

 timber districts? The white pine belt of this country is already nearly ex- 

 hausted; and, vast as are the forests of yellow pine in the South, another 

 score of years of such destruction as we have witnessed will see little left of 

 all this seemingly boundless wealth of timber. You know what changes of 

 climate this entails. You know that it brings long periods of drought fol- 

 lowing devastating floods. The numberless mill streams -sources of me- 

 chanical power and a diversified industry in all the older States; and the 

 thousands of babbling brooks which ran all summer in woodland and pas- 

 ture in the days of our boyhood, are now as dry and lonely in the midsum- 

 mer season as the parched canyons of desolate Arabia. We are but repeating 

 the history of other lands. There are whole provinces and kingdoms in the 

 Eastern world which God made fertile, and which man has made a desert by 

 doing just the things which the American people are doing to-day. 



The past year has given, both in our countrj' and in Europe, the most 

 forcible illustrations of the results of too great a destruction of forests. The 

 unprecedented floods which have poured down our valleys, interrupting the 

 commerce and threatening the existence of many cities and towns, tells the 

 story of how little protection we have left us in these natural conservators of 

 the rain — the beautiful forest garments of the hills. In Northern lUily, 

 where the southern slopes of the Alps have been stripped of their protecting 

 forests, the plains are yearly devastated by the floods. Every mountain 

 brook is alternately a dry channel and a torrent. The hill sides are gullied 

 and ruined for culture. The waste of the hills fills up the beds of the rivers, 

 and a deposit of stones and mud and gravel is made over miles of gardens 

 and farms. Every succeeding freshet washes the soil of the hills thinner; 

 and relegates a certain jjortion to permanent sterility; as no agriculture can 

 re-establish itself upon the naked rocks. How long this process of degrada- 

 tion will go on, or whether it is now beyond the possibility of arrest by 

 human energy and skill, I can not say. But it will take generations of'effort 

 to reclothe the AIjds witli such jirotection as the primeval woods gave them, 

 and which on all mountain sides should be permanently maintained. 



With this impressive lesson of a wasting country in Italy before us, with 

 the knowledge of the impoverishment of many other portions of Europe ;. 

 with " the white bones of the hills of Palestine now glittering in the hot sun 

 whore the slojies were once clothed with olive groves and vineyards," it 

 would seem that wo might take measures in time to save the Adirondacks^ 

 the Alleghanies, the Rocky mountains and our numberless and nameless 

 mountiiins and hills from that certain and destructive waste which will fol- 

 low the general removal of their forests. There is no question that all of the 

 jiublic domain now covered with trees shcnild bo inaintainod in permanent 

 forest. Congress should take immediate mcHsures to this end, and the pro- 

 tection laws be rigidly enforced. And much as may be done and can be 



