EDITORIAL 



391 



agriculture, navigation, and manufac- 

 ture. They show, on the other hand, 

 that the same rain falHng upon a slope 

 bared by ax and fire rushes madly to 

 the bottom, sweeping the slope bare of 

 soil, silt, and everything movable, fills 

 the channels of the streams with de- 

 bris, and produces disastrous floods, to 

 be followed by droughts hurtful to agri- 

 culture, navigation, manufacturing, and 

 all other interests dependent upon the 

 streams. 



J^ «r' !^ 



The Question of Snow 



THAT masses of snow on mountain 

 sides maintain stream flow, there 

 can be no doubt. The more of such 

 snow, within limits, the better. But why 

 argue that only the snow lying above 

 timber line is desirable? Why not snow 

 below timber line as well ? Because it 

 does not "drift?" Even so. is not the 

 water which results from the melting of 

 the snow in the forests absorbed up to 

 the point of saturation, by the forest 

 mulch, passed into the underground cir- 

 culation, and otherwise handled exact- 

 ly as rain deposited upon forested 

 slopes ? 



A great point is made of the asser- 

 tion that snow lying in the timber is 

 quickly melted by the warm air of sum- 

 mer. Granting, for argument's sake, 

 that this is true ; suppose this timber 

 were gone. Would the snow deposited 

 on the same area lie unmelted longer 

 than if the timber were there? Would 

 the spring air be less warm? Would 

 the snow water enter more readilv the 

 underground circulation after the slope 

 had been bared by fire to the original 

 rock bottom than it did when the 

 ground was covered by soil, dead leaves, 

 decaying branches, logs, and other for- 

 est litter? Instead, in the case of such 

 an area is not every advantage, as re- 

 gards slow melting and earth absorp- 

 tion, on the side of the forested and 

 against the deforested slope? 



Again, as to snow on forested as 

 against snow on deforested slopes. If 

 the unknown writer will turn to 

 Marsh's "The Earth as Modified by 

 Human Action" he will find that de- 

 foresting the slopes of the Alps aided 



in producing avalanches, first of snow 

 and then of earth. The author points 

 out that the forest aided in holding both 

 snow and soil in place. However, when 

 this conservative influence was re- 

 moved, great snow fields burst from 

 their moorings and rushed down the 

 niountain sides, leaving desolation and 

 havoc in their wake ; only to be fol- 

 lowed, in some cases, by huge fields of 

 earth, one such destroying an entire 

 village. 



^ 'M tii 



Where There Are No Snows 



AGAIN, the anonymous writer devotes 

 his whole attention to the question 

 of forests, streams, snow, and water as 

 connected with the high mountains of 

 the far West. What of the compara- 

 tively low mountains of the East and 

 South ? He says "If we had no barren 

 high-peaked mountains, we would have 

 no rivers and no timber to preserve." 

 "Timber has nothing to do with 

 stream-water supply." In the East and 

 South "barren high-peaked mountains," 

 such as he is describing, do not exist. 

 According to his theory, we should 

 have in New England and the South, to 

 say nothing of the Great Lake regions, 

 no rivers and no timber at all. How- 

 ever, we have had, in all those regions, 

 a magnificent forest growth and a se- 

 ries of great river systems. In the light 

 of these facts the fallacy of this position 

 becomes at once apparent. In the South- 

 ern Appalachians, notably, the snow- 

 fall is light, and there are not, as in 

 Wisconsin and New Hampshire, sys- 

 tems of lakes, regularly filled by snow- 

 waters, to feed, in a measure, the rivers 

 through the summer. The one agency 

 that exists here to conserve the streams 

 in summer, standing out sharply and 

 unconfused with any other, is the 

 mountain forest. Facts are stubborn 

 things : what will our writer do with 

 such a fact as this? According to his 

 view, there should not be a river in the 

 entire South. Let him look at the map. 

 With the writer's naieve acceptance of 

 "the dear old rainfall theory once held 

 in such esteem," as shown by his decla- 

 rations that trees in the plains country 

 are needed to "induce rainfall" and 



