18 REPORT ON THE TIMBERS OF THE 
young trees is due to the fact that settlements pushed south- 
ward in this part of Kentucky, and that the limit of the burnt: 
area was pushed a little further south each year for some 
years before the burning ceased altogether. 
Luckily for the prairie lands of the United States, they are 
nearly all level, or the loss of their timbers would have led to: 
so great a destruction of the lands themselves, by torrents, 
that no amount of human labor and ingenuity could ever have 
retrieved them. If the same process of forest destruction 
goes on in the mountainous regions of the North Cumber- 
land, until the timbers there are entirely destroyed, nothing 
can avert from that country the calamity which reckless de- 
struction of forests is now producing in the mountain regions — 
of some parts of Europe. (See Tradewater Timbers, vol. V, 
this series.) 
One of the most important results to be reached from a 
study of this once burnt district of the Purchase is, however, 
that my former conclusions in regard to the disappearance of 
the white oak are correct. Here is a strip of country, sur- 
rounded on all sides by vast forests of white oak, such as. 
once evidently occupied this district itself, which is suddenly 
entirely stripped of its forest growth, except that immediately 
along its streams. In the new forest which succeeds this. 
destruction scarcely a single white oak is to be found. This, 
taken in connection with previous observations which showed: 
that the white oak is wanting in the young forest growth in 
all parts of Kentucky, whatever the character of the old 
growth, seems to prove conclusively that the white oak can- 
not hold its own in competition with black oak, red oak, and 
such timbers. 
TIMBER IN DETAIL. 
Starting out from Paducah southward along Clark river, for 
some miles there is found a flat table land with grayish soils, the 
curious alternation of whose timbers I have previously noticed. 
Upon this very little undergrowth is found, and what little 
there is consists almost wholly of black oak and Spanish oak. 
154 
