WINTER MEETING. 453 



HISTORICAL AND SUGGESTIVE FORESTRY NOTES. 



FROM E. W. BARBER, OF JACKSON. 



Jachson, Mich., Feb. 15, 1887, 



Hon. C. W. Gaefield, Secretary Michigan Horticultural Society : 



My Dear Sir: — No doubt you had in mind my enforced idleness when 

 you invited me to prepare an address on the forestry question, and deliver it 

 at the coming meeting of your society at Hillsdale. I informed you that I 

 am not in the missionary business, as I have learned that it is a tremendous 

 task to convert men and save them from themselves, but your request has 

 become a purpose on my part to write something of a general nature on the 

 subject, which you may use or not as you think best. 



It is not the expenditure of millions of dollars for coast defenses, ships of 

 war, torpedoes and cannon that this country needs for its welfare half so 

 much as it requires forest protection. The floods of the present month 

 emphasize this fact with destructive energy. 



Too long has man been the enemy of nature. For centuries it has heen 

 the fashion to place the world, the flesh and the devil in the same bad cate- 

 gory. Out of this grew the shameful practice of maltreating their bodies,, 

 hating the world in which we live, and turning both over to the devil. Nature - 

 hating became a part of religious teaching and duty. In many instances,, 

 where men have been the most religious, nature has been blighted and deso- 

 lated the most by them. Palestine, Persia, Asia Minor, portions of Spain 

 and Italy, Ceylon and Cyprus, the north of Africa — regions once celebrated 

 for agriculture, commerce and sylvan attractions — are now classed among the 

 most barren portions of the globe. 



The relation between the wooded areas of a country and its welfare are tod 

 close and important to be overlooked. To destroy the forests is to invite per- 

 manent disaster. In the interior of every continent at least one-third of the 

 area should be woodland. The mountains should never be denuded. Hum- 

 boldt, the great student and lover of nature, said : " In felling trees growing 

 on the sides and summits of mountains, men under all climes prepare for sub- 

 sequent generations two calamities at once — a lack of fuel and a lack of 

 water." He might have added that such action causes more destructive floods 

 in the fertile valleys during the seasons of melting snows and falling rains. 

 The water that falls on the barren mountain sides rushes rapidly down the 

 gullies into the rivers, causing fearful floods and great destruction of property. 

 If, on the other hand, the mountains were covered with forests, the falling- 

 rain and melting snow do not form such torrents, for much of the water is 

 caught and held by the mosses, the roots, the leaves, the fallen logs and brush, 

 and trickles away gradually to the valleys beneath, mitigating alike the sever- 

 ity of spring floods and of summer drouths. 



It is a pity, so far as the welfare of future millions is concerned, that an acre 

 of mountain land, from the Adirondacks on the north, to the piny woods of 

 Alabama on the south, has ever been sold to the forest-destroying speculator, 

 and that the whole area had not been long ago placed under charge of an intelli- 

 gent forestry department of the government, and the timber cut only to 

 save it and not to destroy it. By such means, and such only, could the val- 



