NEED OP CARE OF FOREST GROWTH. gg 



Men need to be taught to plant trees, and their children taught to 

 plant trees and to love them. Owners of poor lands need advice 

 and direction in planting wood upon them, as a crop more hopeful 

 in riches to future heirs than usual expectations from wasted fields. 

 Owners of good lands in Maine, or elsewhere, will, in the future, 

 learn that their bleak fields, if judiciously planted with wood to 

 the extent of forty per cent, of area, will jDroduce on the remain- 

 ing sixty, more in all kinds of crops than the whole now does or 

 can be made to do under any other possible course of treatment. 

 Lands well sheltered, can and do produce winter wheat in Maine 

 as well as in England or on the new lands, at the West. An im- 

 mediate adoption of shelter to all lands, would result — as soon as 

 such shelter could be matured — in the independence of our State 

 from imported grain. We speak confidently, because advisedly 

 on this point. While the State has manifested a laudable ambition 

 in developing its resources, while it has wisely provided guardians 

 for the Fisheries, and a Commission on Water-power, it has not 

 yet recognized the more important public concern that underlies 

 both those, and all other interests. We believe this to be an im- 

 portant public matter that does not lie outside of legitimate 

 legislation. Shall the legislative voice continue silent on the 

 matter of forests, till the last tree shall be cut, thus ensuring dry 

 channels to the rivers and the consequent death of the Jishes? 



Must the man of Christendom be taught that Monarchies alone 

 are competent to guard and preserve physical nature so as to 

 yield its sustenance in a perpetual round ? Or shall a professed 

 Republic for once arise from an unaccountable lethargy, and assert 

 its force in its determination to perpetuate itself, and make its 

 declaration of intention to have a country in the distant future 

 worth possessing and worth preserving still ? 



We have extended this paper beyond the limits that we would 

 gladly have assigned to it; but there was a seeming necessity to 

 here show to the sons of Maine, that no part of our extended 

 domain was without the blighting effects of climatic influences. 

 That the means here at home are as available to the creation of 

 desirable homes for ourselves and our posterity as elsewhere. 

 Though man's past history is but a dark picture of physical mis- 

 fortunes and seeming failures, yet we are hopeful for the future. 

 We hope to see the energy, the wealth, the increased intelligence 

 of men more employed to overcome the physical evils that sur- 

 round them. After so much of the earth has been made fertile 



