392 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



regions, and at once institute measures to indoctrinate with the lessons of the 

 past the inhabitants of our more recently settled regions. 



"Whatever may be the views of people of other localities, in Michigan we can 

 have no occasion for uncertainty as to the benefits of 



TIMBER PEOTECTION", 



whether to the farmer or to the fruit-grower. Thirty years ago when the mer- 

 ciless ax of the pioneer had as yet but commenced its inroads upon the forest 

 mantle of our beautiful peninsula, the wheat fields that nestled here and there 

 among our primeval forests produced crops that rendered Michigan the banner 

 wheat-growing State of the West so far as quality was concerned, famishing, 

 as it came to do, much of the material for the then famous "Genesee Flour," 

 undergoing for that purpose its transmutation in the mills of Western New 

 York — a material which is now, from necessity, drawn mainly from the more 

 remote West. 



In those days too, the planters of the young, healthy and vigorous apple 

 orchards, introduced from New York and New England, and which luxuriated 

 under the lee of these same forests, were oblivious of the unexperienced perils 

 of winter-killing and blight that has since overtaken them, while specimens of 

 their fruit, when returned to the localities in which the varieties originated, 

 were denonnced as spurious, so wonderfully had their improvement transcended 

 what were believed to be the possibilities of the case. 



Then, too, that now almost tabooed fruit, the peach, was grown everywhere 

 with almost, if not quite, as much certainty as the Black Cap, or even the cur- 

 rant, and with no fear of the winter-killing of either tree or fruit. Those 

 halcyon days, alas, are gone! never, we fear, to return ; and we have naught 

 that we can do but to lament the sad ruin so stealthily wrought by the means 

 of that little instrument, the ax, which in the grasp of our sturdy pioneers 

 seems as little amenable to reason as were said to be the bayonets of the elder 

 Napoleon. 



Gladly would we find occasion to charge the calamity upon a sudden freak 

 of the frost-king, or be able to take refuge behind some theory of cycles of cli- 

 matic variations. But no! — neither history nor precedent seems to warrant 

 such assumption, unless we refer it to that grand and yet uncompleted cycle, 

 the curves of whose temperatures tend ever downward, and in the course of 

 which our fruit bearing trees have come to succeed the Sigillarias and Calam- 

 ites, the Lepidodendra and Conifers of eras redolent of clouds and tepid mois- 

 ture ; and in their turn may possibly, in the remote periods of a geology yet 

 to be, become embalmed in the rocks of a then bygone era. and come to excite 

 the wonder of some succeeding race, to which we may doubtless be as to us are 

 now the Saurians and Pachydermata of the remote past. But such cycles are 

 of a character too remotefor our present consideration, while science, with unerr- 

 ing finger, is pointing to our treeless plains, swept by parching blast in summer 

 and arctic gales in winter, as the true and present cause of the dire calamity. 



The acceptance of this conclusion carries with it the further conclusion that 

 the work of destruction is yet far from complete, but is rather proceeding at 

 an accelerated rate, and that if allowed to progress unchecked it is difficult to 

 imagine when and at how calamitous a point the evil will culminate. We are 

 already compelled, in some portions of the State, to abandon many of what 

 we had learned to consider as our best or most desirable varieties of fruit, and 

 to substitute for them those that have come to be designated as " Iron clads," 



