OF THE TRADEWATER REGION. 15 
serious. Granted that in the course of years other forests 
will spring up in such districts, I have elsewhere shown that 
these new forests will be comparatively valueless, so far as the 
timbers are concerned. Of course, their presence would pre- 
vent the further washing of the soil and change of climate 
produced by barrenness, but nothing more. In fact, however, 
I see little hope of a worn-out soil thus exposed ever re- 
clothing itself with timbers of any kind. Timber growth upon 
such exhausted soils is so slow that its battle with washing 
rains would be doubtful, even with the best protection that 
could be given it; but when to the washing of rains is also 
added the ravages and trampling of cattle, and other such 
things incident to a totally exposed piece of once cultivated 
soil, I believe that the chances of a new forest growth are 
exceedingly poor. I have myself seen a piece of exhausted 
land that had stood thus, as I was informed, for twenty years. 
In it I measured washes fourteen feet deep and twelve feet 
wide, while almost every square yard was crossed by a “rut”’ 
or “gully” of greater or less size. A few scraggy persimmon 
bushes occupied the still unwashed spots; but it seemed to 
me inevitable that the entire two hundred acres of once fertile 
ground would soon have its surface soil completely washed 
away. If the farming lands of Kentucky were level prairie 
lands, the facts here spoken of would not be so serious; but, 
on the contrary, the ground is hilly or rolling, and the effects 
of reckless destruction of forests on such lands are always 
fatal. JI have not seen these effects better stated than in the 
JLondon Spectator of June 16, 1877, which says: 
“The evidence that the great floods which have from time 
to time, during the last half century, been so destructive in 
Switzerland, and in many districts of France and Italy, have 
been mainly caused by the felling of the forests on the high 
grounds, appears to be overwhelming. In the department 
of the Loire especially, it was universally remarked, that the 
wooded grounds suffered no change, while in the denuded 
districts, the whole soil of cleared and cultivated fields was 
‘swept away, and the rocks laid bare. ‘The same was seen in 
7 
