DESERTS DUE TO DEFORESTATION 



603 



This tradition was related to the writer many years 

 ago by Manuel Largo, the chief of the Kiowa tribe. It 

 is interesting in two ways. It seems to point to a success- 

 ful civilization under the rule of some fair-skinned stran- 

 ger — perhaps some shipwrecked blonde and bearded Phoe- 

 nician of remote antiquity, and it seems also to substantiate 

 the theory, here advanced, that originally there were no 

 deserts. All students of myths and folklore admit that 

 every deep-rooted racial legend has some origin, however 

 slight, in actual fact, and it may well be that this tradition 

 is a record, naturally intermixed with blunder, of a time 

 when bounteous Nature smiled on industrious man, and 



What is a tree and what is a leaf and what are their 

 functions? 



In reply, it may be said that a tree is a great botanical 

 structure intended as a conductor of moisture from earth 

 to air ; an attracter of moisture from air to earth ; a 

 moderator of heat in summer and of cold in winter; 

 and, by reason of its shade, its obstruction to winds, its 

 root system and its sap, an economizing storage and 

 conservator of the actual rainfall. 



The leaves are the lungs of the tree. In the economy 

 of arboreal nature they are the equalizers and moderators 

 of temperature and moisture. When the air is moist they 



DEFORESTATIOX— THEN DEVASTATION 



This view shows two hundred square miles of the once well-wooded mountains in the vicinity of Fou-ping. China. This district a century ago paid rich revenue 



from its forest products. Today it is practically a desert. 



when all the great Colorado desert actually afforded sup- 

 port to a soil-tilling population. In fact, a marvelously 

 productive section of country has been rescued from the 

 Colorado desert of recent years and now is known in the 

 Imperial Valley of Southern California. 



In the incalculable antiquity of man's pre-Adamite 

 occupancy of this planet, the comedy and traged\- of life 

 may have been played by teeming millions in arid -America 

 thousands of years before our half-naked ancestors hurled 

 their rude spears at Caesar's cohorts disembarking upon 

 the shores of England. The earth is the gra\e of the 

 past as well as the tomb of the future. 



Trees are inducers of rain, and, in a special degree 

 are conservators and gradual distributors of the moist- 

 ure that falls. As things to which we are most accus- 

 tomed are sometimes the least known to us in an 

 accurate way, it may not be amiss to propound and 

 answer an apparently simple question : 



absorb the dampness and thriftily store it away in capa- 

 cious reservoirs of millions of tubes in the trunks and limbs 

 of the trees ; and, when parched Nature looks upward and 

 prays for water, like Dives did to Abraham and Lazarus, 

 these same little " miracles of design " draw on the supply 

 of water in the tree that they have stored away and that 

 the rootlets have absorbed from the earth and send the 

 precious liquid forth into the air, an unseen exhalation to 

 be condensed by the atmosphere and to fall in benedictory 

 showers or refreshing dew. 



This same water, but for the tree and its foliage, 

 would be carried away by vagrant winds, or, if it fell, 

 would fall in sudden gusty showers and be lost to use. 



It is known to botanists that each square inch of leaf- 

 structure lifts and throws out into the air in dry weather 

 6 1000 of an ounce of water every twenty-four hours. 

 A large forest tree has foliage equal to above 5 acres 

 of superficial area, or 6,272,600 square inches. This 



