SECRETARY'S PORTFOLIO. 519 



CLIMATIC CONSIDERATIONS. 



" I had a dream which was not all a dream ! " 

 A great State was a desert, and the land 

 Lay hare and lifeless under sun and storm, 

 Treeless and shelterless. Spring came and went, 

 And came, but brought no joy ; but in its stead 

 The desolation of the ravine floods 

 That leaped like wolves or wildcats from the hills • 

 And spread destruction over fruitful farms, 

 Devouring as they went the works of man, 

 And sweeping southward Nature's kindly soil 

 To choke the watercourses, worse than waste. 



The forest trees that in the olden time— 

 The people's glory and the poet's pride- 

 Tempered the air and guarded well the earth, 

 And under spreading boughs for ages kept 

 Great reservoirs to hold the snow and rain, 

 From which the moisture through the teeming year 

 Flowed equably but freely— all were gone. 



Their priceless holes exchanged for petty cash. , 



The cash had melted, and had left no sign ; 

 The logger and the lumberman were dead ; 

 The ax had rusted out for lack of use ; 

 But all the endless evil they had done 

 Was manifested upon the desert waste. 



Dead springs no longer sparkled in the sun ; 

 Lost and forgotten brooks no longer laughed ; 

 Deserted mills mourned all their moveless wheels ; 

 The snow no longer covered as with wool 

 Mountain and plain, but buried starving flocks 

 In Arctic drifts ; in rivers and canals 

 The vessels rotted idly on the mud 

 Until the spring floods buried all their bones; 

 Great cities that had thriven wondrously, 

 Before the source of thrift was swept away, 

 Faded and perished, as a plant will die 

 With water banished from its roots and leaves ; 

 And men sat starving in the treeless waste, 

 Beside their fruitless farms and empty marts, 

 And wondered at the ways of Providence ! 



— N. T. Sun. 



Fokests and Eivbrs. — Francis Parkham says, in the Atlantic Monthly, that 

 there are reasons entirely independent of economic value which make the pres- 

 ervation of our forests a matter of prime importance, and would make their 

 ruin a national calamity. It is not that they have much influence on the rainfall. 

 Those who hold that they do so, mistake effect for cause. The rain produces 

 the forest, and not the forest the rain. A forest growth may not of necessity 

 follow an adequate supply of moisture, but the supply of moisture is an indis- 

 pensable condition of it. The utility of forests, aside from their marketable 

 value, lies in their power not to cause the rainfall, but to regulate its distribu- 

 tion. In this they are of incalculable benefit. When they cover the ground 



