152 ERYTHEA. 



Bulletin, are not dated, nor is there any indication of their origin. 

 Ordinarily the name of a journal and the title of an article alter- 

 nate regularly in the running head, but in recent issues of the 

 Bulletin the title of the article appears at the top of both odd and 

 even numbered pages and the name of the Bulletin does not appear 

 at all. In consequence the origin of such a reprint as that before 

 us is quite untraceable. 



The season of 1897-98 was, in California, one of such scanty 

 riiinfall during the winter season that the period was one of grave 

 anxiety. The fear that the season of 1898-99 was to be a complete 

 repetition of the year before was in the end happily dissipated, but 

 in each of these years the long rainless (or summer) season witnessed 

 widespread and disastrous fires in the forests and mountainous 

 country, accompanied by the exhaustion of flowing springs and wells, 

 and the drying up of hitherto perennial streams. On account of 

 the drought and lack of range-feed in certain drier portions of the 

 state, cattle died upon a thousand hills, or, in the case of other 

 herds, their owners secured their transportation by rail to the humid 

 north Coast Ranges. As a result, such matters as the larger prob- 

 lems of irrigation, the storage of flood- waters, and, as a necessary 

 consequence, forest protection and reforestation of denuded areas^ 

 has been brought very near home to many classes of people. 



The friends of the forests were not, at such a juncture, slow to 

 take advantage of the situation ; they have sounded right vigorous 

 alarms in many quarters; literature has been distributed; resolu- 

 tions have been drafted ; state water and forest societies have been 

 formed ; and in the editorial columns of some of the large daily 

 journals of San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in the lesser 

 newspapers of the interior, the subject of forests and forest con- 

 servation has been granted an extraordinary amount of space, and 

 has been handled (for daily journalism) with a great deal of knowl- 

 edge and considerable skill. In the case of one man, they appealed 

 to his material interests ; for another they interpreted the seven 

 lean ears and the seven lean kine (of the dream of Pharaoh) as the 

 want and necessity that fell upon the land when the water failed. 



