STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. l^Jl 



again : " The soil once carpeted with a beautiful verdure, and thickly 

 sprinkled with stately trees, is now bare, arid, and parched, and in main- 

 places white with the incrustations of salt, caused by the diminution of 

 rainfall, and the evaporation of the waters consequent upon the denuda- 

 tion of the country." 



Wm. C. Bryant, speaking of the effects of deforestation in Eastern 

 Ohio, says : 



"It is a common observation that our summers are become drier and 

 our streams smaller. Take the Cuyahoga as an illustration. Fifty years 

 ago large barges loaded with goods went up and down the rixer, and 

 one of the vessels engaged in the battle of Lake Erie was built at Old 

 Portage, six miles north of Albion, and floated down to the Lake; now 

 in an ordinary stage of water a canoe or skiti" can hardly pass down 

 the stream. Many boats of fifty tons burden were built on the Tus- 

 carawas, and loatled at New Portage, and sailed to New Orleans without 

 breaking bulk; now the river hardly furnishes a suppl\' of water at 

 New Portage for the canal. The same may be said of other streams; 

 they are drying up and from the same cause, the destruction of our 

 forests; our summers are becoming drier and our winters colder." 



The former rank and tall grasses on the primitixe prairies measurably 

 answered the purposes of forests. The summer rains certainly were 

 then more equable and abundant than now. Streams that forty or fifty 

 years ago furnislied milling jDower the whole year round are now dry, 

 except in time of freshets. The steady decrease of water in our \vestern 

 rivers, even in tliat of the great Mississippi, warns us of deleterious 

 influences at work and of impending danger. Our steamboatmen recol- 

 lect the time when steamboats that now can not, in low water, ascend 

 higher than Memphis, could, without difficult}-, at all seasons of the 

 year, ascend to St. Louis. Destruction of the forests at the sources of 

 the rivers tributary to the Mississippi, and the wasting the prairies along 

 the afiiuents of these rivers, are the causes of this deterioration. The 

 unshorn natural meadows, the prairies, are practically amongst the things 

 of the past. The I'ank, tall grasses, whose wavelike motion showed 

 every pulsation of the wind, are no more. Denuded by our flocks, and 

 the native grasses exterminated, there only remains the naked plain. 

 Now a naked, parched plain is a very difterent thing from one clothed 

 with the vesture of the primitive prairies. Its reaction upon the atmos- 

 phere, and consequently its meteorologic effects, are entirely different. 

 One favors the condensation of vapor and the precipitation of rain, the 

 other favors the dispersion of both. Hence we find xvith the disappear- 

 ance of the vesture of the primitive prairies, aridity of climate sets in 

 and the streams dry up. Tiie following fact illustrates this. Near 

 (^iiincy. 111., are several streams that forty and fifty years ago supplied 

 ample water for milling purposes. One of these still bears the name of 

 Mill Creek. Were it not for the old dams and dilapidated mills, the 

 tradition that they ai forded water power for mills might be regarded as 

 apocryphal; for now all the creeks afford but little running water at any 

 season, and during the whole summer and autumn they are perfectly dry. 



