1906.] FOREST SERVICE FOR FARMERS. 209 



every farming community of the Middle West, the benefit 

 of cheap hmiber from those forests has been felt. It has gone 

 to build farmers' houses and barns, it has gone to build fac- 

 tories and workingmen's homes. But in the future we shall 

 not have these forests as sources of timber supply, and we 

 shall all be the worse off on that account. If instead of 

 cutting those pine forests off, with tremendous waste in some 

 instances, they could have been cut under such conditions that 

 a new crop would have come up to take the place of the old, 

 what a benefit it would have been to the nation ! On land 

 which is now desolate and for the greater part worthless, we 

 should then have a supply coming on against the day of our 

 need which is certainly approaching. 



I wonder if you appreciate at all how much agriculture 

 as practiced at present owes to science, or to what an extent 

 the common, everyday practice of today is indebted to the 

 scientific researches of the past. I sometimes think that if we 

 could look back upon the practice of our ancestors when they 

 first came to this country, it would seem to us hardly less bar- 

 barous than the method of culture employed by the Indians 

 in raising their small crop of Indian corn. In England, at 

 the time when the colonists came to this country and practi- 

 cally through the eighteenth century, farming land was for 

 the most part held in common. This land was divided into 

 three classes. First was the meadow along the stream, or 

 grass land, in which each man had his portion assigned up to 

 the time when the grass was cut, after which it became com- 

 mon again for all the cattle to graze upon. Next above this 

 was the plow land, of which one-third was sown to wheat, one- 

 third to peas, barley, and a very limited range of other crops, 

 and the third was fallow. The third to be left fallow was 

 changed every year, so that any given piece of land was culti- 

 vated only two years out of three, and then allowed to rest 

 for a year in lieu of fertilizing. Individual allotments changed 

 every season. No man could improve his land under such 

 circumstances, because he did not hold it permanently, but 

 only in turn. All implements were home-made. The cattle 

 and sheep were pastured on the " waste," or higher land, which 

 was never tilled, and which furnished wood material as well 

 as pasture. Weeds were abundant, manuring unknown, im- 

 provements discouraged ; in every way the system of agricul- 

 Agr. — 14 



