INFLUENCE OF FORESTS ON CLIMATE. 79 



crop planted.' Sandusk}^, Sept. 30, 'Never before in the memory 

 of the living, has northern Ohio suffered from such a terrible 

 drouth as is now prevailing. For nearly three months, hardly 

 anything to be called a shower has fallen. Cisterns long since 

 went dry, and now nine-tenths of the wells are nearly exhausted. 

 For nineteen miles back from the shore people depend upon the 

 lake for water. The great drouth reaches from Rochester, New 

 York, in a belt 200 miles in width, to central Iowa. At present 

 there is no prospect of relief,' Elmira, N. Y., ' Pastures are an utter 

 failure, and cows are rapidly drjang up on hay, which is fed out to 

 them as though it were mid-winter. Wells are dry, and the beds 

 of streams, instead of flowing water, show yellow belts of burning 

 sand.' Pass on east of the Hudson, where the drouth was 

 ' master of the situation' last year, and now the country is wasted 

 and destroyed by exti-aordinary floods — the Connecticut river 

 rising ten feet in one day. ' What shall we conclude in regard to 

 such fluctuations and irregularities in the distribution of the rainfall ? 

 No reasonable person will deny that for all these changed mani- 

 festations of natural effects, there has been a corresponding change 

 of natural causes ; and it becomes us to inquire whether this 

 derangement has arisen from circumstances within the control of 

 man, and hence capable of a remedy, or whether they arise from 

 causes beyond his control, and to whose effects he must submit 

 with patient endurance, because they are remediless.'" "The 

 rainfall of any region is influenced by a variety of causes ; the 

 nature and direction of its prevailing winds, the influence of 

 mountain ranges, &c. ; but a cause which is very marked in its 

 influence and which is also within the control of man, is forest 

 growth. When we see how rapidly these forests have disappeared 

 under the hand of the woodman, and how steadily the climate of 

 the United States has changed with the disappearance of the 

 forest, have we not good reason to suspect that man's own hand 

 has drawn down these evils upon himself? 



If by this thoughtless destruction of this barrier against the 

 fickleness of the weather, we have laid ourselves open to the 

 operation of causes whose disastrous effects we are only beginning 

 to experience, is it not time to pause and consider whether we 

 have not gone as far in this destructive process as is safe, and 

 whether a wise prudence in regard to the future does not warn us 

 to stay our hand ?" 



