STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 59 



water as a part of some organic solid. The water, which is given off in 

 the combustion of any organic substance, has once been made water 

 before, and such combustion may be regarded as the undoing of the work 

 which the vital force has done. Considering the part which the moisture 

 of the atmosphere must take in all forms of vegetation, how can we say 

 that the larger plants, such as trees, have " no appreciable meteorological 

 influence?" They must absorb, and they must excrete immense volumes 

 of water, else the economy of their circulation, upon which their life 

 depends, would be destroyed. They must use a great deal of water as an 

 ingredient of the substances which make up their mass ; and all this water 

 must come from the atmosphere. In the life story of a tree is found, then, 

 a better argument for the meteorological influence of forests than you can 

 find in your rain gauges. 



And now let us look at these observations, upon part of which Mr. 

 Meehan has predicated his attack upon the meteorological influence of 

 forests. At what points have they been taken ? Why, just where certain 

 peculiarities of the location would indicate that the rain-fall would 

 decrease, rather might increase as forest denudation proceeded in the 

 whole country. Two points are mentioned in the timbered trough of 

 the Mississippi river — Natchez, and St. Louis ; and Mr. Meehan's points 

 are clearly within the influence of the Atlantic ocean and its tributary 

 waters. The Smithsonian Institution also is located between the Potomac 

 and Delaware bay. It is generally held, and all observation proves it, 

 that bodies of water exert an attractive influence upon rain storms ; and 

 whether we think we know why they do so is not pertinent to our inquiry. 

 Again, ridges and ranges of high lands exert an attractive influence upon 

 certain kinds of storms. But who of our learned men has told us that 

 hollows, troughs, depressions of the general surface, attract storms ? And 

 yet, have you not seen the masses of cumulus clouds which go to make up 

 one of our summer thunder-storms, when advancing over the plains of 

 Eastern Iowa and approaching the trough of the Mississippi, gradually 

 increasing their down-pour, till when over that timbered trough the rain 

 was many times heavier than before, and the storm seemed to linger as if 

 loth to move on in its eastward course, and when it finally drifted away 

 from the Mississippi, over the high plains of Illinois, the rain became very 

 much lighter? The phenomenon may be seen every summer, by an ob- 

 server stationed at a proper point, and I have seen it often. Why the 

 increased rain in that valley? I believe it is due largely to the timber of 

 the valley acting with the water surface as attractors of the cloud masses. 

 But valleys not timbered, though they contain rivers and lay at right 



