COMMUNICATIONS 



623 



obscured the sunlight from Maine to 

 Philadelphia. 



During my stay in Philadelphia, my 

 native place, I found the enclosed com- 

 position, written by a young nephew. 

 I am sending it for you to read, because 

 it seemed to me to contain quite a good 

 synopsis of the reasons why our school- 

 children should be persuaded to become 

 friends of the forests. 



Caroline D. G. Granger. 



New York City. ♦ 



OUR FORESTS — A NATIONAL NECESSITY 



In America, as in other countries before it, 

 the first settlers found it necessary to hew 

 down certain portions of the forest in order 

 to make clearings in which to build their 

 houses and plant their corn. Moreover it 

 was necessary to push farther from their 

 dwellings such forests as sheltered wild 

 beasts and savages. Subsequently, as the 

 population grew, the trees were cut down for 

 purely commercial purposes, namely, for the 

 selling of wood for building lumber, pulp, 

 turpentine, and other uses. The continuance 

 of this unrestricted cutting down of trees for 

 centuries without any replanting of young 

 trees, has resulted throughout the larger part 

 of the eastern United States in the partial 

 destruction of the forests, while in some 

 places they have been completely destroyed. 



Some states, notably New York, saw the 

 peril of this practice in time and guarded 

 against it by careful restrictions and by the 

 state buying up tracts of forest in which the 

 streams took their rise. Other countries 

 learned the lesson too late. France has had 

 to spend forty millions of dollars in endeav- 

 oring to restore lost soil and forest to her 

 mountains after a long course of destruction, 

 such as is now going on in America. The 

 countries which have taken steps to preserve 

 their wood supply, are found to be those 

 which at the present day are most prosperous, 

 and have the best prospects for the future. 



The need of wood for some purposes has 

 been lessoned; coal, for instance, has been 

 largely substituted for wood as fuel, and 

 many other manufactured things have taken 

 its place for building purposes; but in spite 

 of this, there is more wood used to-day than 

 ever before. 



Forest land acts as a vast reservoir, for 

 the earth is naturally soft and easily absorbs 

 the rain, which, on account of the cover of 

 dead leaves and the shade afforded by the 

 trees, is not_ evaporated by the sun, but is 

 stored up in innumerable springs and in many 

 small lakes or ponds. 



From many such reservoirs, large and small, 

 are fed the streams which flow down to the 

 lower lying farm lands and make our larger 

 rivers _ navigable. By this natural method 

 there is a constant supply of water through- 



out the year; whereas when the land is de- 

 nuded of forests the rainfall and melting snow 

 flow at once into the streams, transforming 

 them into raging torrents, although during 

 the larger part of the year the stream may 

 not contain water enough to make the land 

 fertile. Thus it happens that where there 

 are no natural reservoirs of water in the for- 

 ests, artificial reservoirs have to be built, and 

 an expensive system of irrigation carried 

 out. Moreover, both the natural and the 

 artificial reservoirs guard against floods, 

 which wash off the loose earth from the 

 mountainsides and carry it to the mouths 

 of rivers, where it is deposited, and from 

 which it must be dug at an outlay of an enor- 

 mous amount of money. 



When the forests fail, the rivers will dry 

 up, for without them there will be nothing 

 to keep the water from running right off. 

 In some rivers already the water for most 

 of the time is not deep enough, but in the 

 spring the streams overflow their banks and 

 cause terrible damage. The floods on our 

 own Mississippi show us what the ruthless 

 destruction of our timber about its head- 

 waters is accomplishing. 



When the forests are gone the country be- 

 comes uninhabitable. For this reason Tyre and 

 Sidon, Babylon and Antioch came to ruin. 

 One third of China has become unfit for 

 habitation through destruction of the forests, 

 for when they are destroyed the soil soon be- 

 comes so poor that it will not support a 

 large population. The countrv is astounded 

 at a great disaster like that at San Fran- 

 cesco. The people respond willingly, and 

 millions of dollars are immediately given 

 for its aid. Yet we are told that a city like 

 San Francisco might be destroyed every 

 three or four months without causing greater 

 loss of national wealth than is now going 

 on all the time. 



The pinch is being felt already, for with 

 the decrease in the supply of hardwood, in- 

 dustries, such as carriage building and furni- 

 ture making, will be wiped out. The decline 

 in the wood-working industries of Ohio be- 

 tween 1900 and 1905 was more than fifty- 

 seven per cent. In Indiana the timber-using 

 industry fell from the third to the eighth 

 place. In 1905 the furniture establishments 

 in the United States reported the annual use 

 of 580,000,000 feet of lumber, and without 

 hardwood lumber they are helpless. Yet the 

 present supply, which is for the most part in 

 the highlands of the East, will be exhausted 

 in fifteen years. Building materials also 

 have become more expensive, and hence the 

 rents go higher. 



Farming also suffers. Thousands of acres 

 once cleared land have been abandoned, and 

 in the South the farms are moving farther 

 and farther up the mountainsides, with only 

 a brief space between the beginning and 

 the end of their usefulness. 



Commercially, as a public asset, from the 

 tourists' viewpoint alone, the White Moun- 



