552 



CONSERVATION 



pointed conservation committees. In a 

 private way, fifty of the organizations 

 representing the great industries of the 

 country have also appointed their own 

 committees to foster scientific work in 

 the way of investigation and applica- 

 tion of improved economic principles to 

 tkeir interests, and these movements, 

 which have been crystallized within ten 

 months, are only an indication of an 

 enormous popular educational and prop- 

 agandist movement which is being car- 

 ried on throughout the entire country. 



THE SCOPE 



The American hemisphere covers an 

 area of about 14,950,000 square miles, 

 of which about 8,000,000 square miles 

 belong to North America. That Eurasia 

 was probably never known to the ab- 

 origines of North America, in any real 

 sense, does not seem so strange as that 

 civilizations could have arisen and flour- 

 ished and fallen and decayed before the 

 discovery by the European races of 

 this fecund hemisphere, capable of such 

 vast economic power and utility. 



A glance at the world map will show 

 the larger portion of this hemisphere in 

 its equatorial and sub-tropical regions 

 encroached on by the sea, and the 

 greater portion of its areas not only 

 lying in the temperate zone, but mostly 

 free from such vast deserts as in Asia 

 and Africa destroy economic utility and 

 furnish insuperable obstacles to com- 

 munication. Again, both the northern 

 and southern continents have been fur- 

 nished means of sea communication in 

 its rivers, incomparably superior to 

 those of either Europe, Asia, or Africa. 

 The Mississippi-Missouri River, for ex- 

 ample, furnishes one continuous navi- 

 gable waterway for forty-three hun- 

 dred miles, with a system of navigable 

 waterways of about 16,000 miles, ca- 

 pable, under proper treatment, of car- 

 rying ocean-going steamships. 



The St. Lawrence River and the 

 Great Lakes oflFer a continuous water- 

 way, with short canals, of twenty-two 

 hundred miles, and has a drainage basin 

 of 600,000 square miles. One can float 

 in a canoe without meeting a rapid or 



cataract on the Amazon, 2,000 miles 

 from the foot of the Andes to the At- 

 lantic Ocean^ and then hoist the sail and 

 sail back again, for practically all the 

 winds blow up-stream. 



The Mississippi has more navigable 

 water than all the streams which drain 

 Europe, and the Amazon discharges 

 more water than the eight rivers of Asia 

 — the Yenesi, Indus, Ganges, Ob, Lena, 

 Hwangho, and the Yang-tse of China. 



Productive power depends upon heat 

 and moisture, and these are present, 

 roughly speaking, in the whole West- 

 ern Hemisphere, except in a narrow 

 margin of British North America of 

 arid or mountainous waste and frozen 

 land. 



The Mississippi basin, of 1,280,000 

 square miles, may be made the site of 

 a material civilization so rich as the 

 world has never dreamed of before— a 

 basin economically the most important 

 in the world, and capable easily of sup- 

 porting one-half the present population 

 of the globe. For the Mississippi basin 

 is economically probably twice or three 

 times as productive (if not more than 

 that) as all the rest of the United States. 

 An interesting sidelight on this subject 

 might be found in referring to the first 

 volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica 

 of the edition of 1875. It states that 

 while the American world is half the 

 size of the old, it contains equally as 

 much useful soil, and more productive 

 power than Europe, Asia, and Africa 

 combined, and is capable of sustaining 

 a population of 600,000,000 — more than 

 twice the present population of the 

 globe. This was written, however, be- 

 fore the resources of west and northwest 

 Canada, and certain parts of Africa, 

 were ever even considered. 



There are about 3,000,000 square 

 miles of land surface in the United 

 States proper, a little over one-fifth of 

 which is under cultivation, about a 

 quarter being covered with forests or 

 stumps, and some smaller proportion 

 covered with woods, undergrowth, and 

 other bushland. With the exception of 

 a small amount of mineral lands and, 

 of course, waste lands, the rest is graz- 

 ing land. While there are sections. 



