1883.] MODIFYING EFFECTS OF FORESTS. Ill 



denuded of their virtues. Is it to be wondered at then that 

 they are well-to-do people, surpassing all their neighbors in 

 their calling, and that their name and their fame alike smack 

 of the Gold-en, shining metal ? 



But this is foreign to the purpose of our gathering, and I 

 must come to the matter more appropriately before us. 



OUR STORM SYSTEMS AND CLIMATIC CONDITIONS. 

 MODIFYING EFFECTS OF FORESTS. 



RESULTS OF THEIR DESTRUCTION UPON ANIMAL 

 AND VEGETABLE LIFE. 



BY E. D. GOODWIN, FALLS VILLAGE, CONN. 



Mr. Chairman — I suspect we are not here as mere novices, to 

 learn the first, the fundamental principles of Agriculture; we have 

 long since mastered its primary facts, and it is from our practical 

 experience in applying its principles to our calling, that we 

 are here to take counsel together — and learn the better ways of 

 others. 



You cannot expect to bring vegetable life up to its full capacity 

 of fruition without ample stores of appropriate food in your soil 

 to feed from, no more than the animal organism can realize its 

 full development without its full, liberal, appropriate diet. I sus- 

 pect the law of inheritance, of production, whether it be toward 

 an improvement or otherwise, is as applicable to the vegetable as 

 the animal creation, although in the latter it is more marked and 

 well defined, perhaps. We all prefer to draw our seed or our 

 stock for propagation from a succession of ancestors judiciously 

 selected and well fed. 



Now having your soil well stocked with all the essential elements 

 to its fertility, either from its natural, innate virtues, or from these 

 and others added to it by the art of man, and its surface well 

 covered with our selected superior vegetable and animal organisms 

 — what avails all this without the early and latter rains to bless 

 the plant and reward our culture ? 



As a farmer I have passed through fifty consecutive seasons of 

 varied experience as to sunshine and shower — of heat we are rare- 

 ly apprehensive of not having, sooner or later in our climate, an 

 ample supply, but with an occasional exception of seasons when 



