INJURY TO THE FOREST BY INSECTS. LS 
of the destruction or serious injury of American forests by in- 
sects, before or even soon after the period of colonization; but 
since the white man has laid bare a vast proportion of the 
earth’s surface, and thereby produced changes favorable, per- 
haps, to the multiplication of these pests, they have greatly 
increased in numbers, and, apparently, in voracity also. Not 
many years ago, the pines on thousands of acres of land in 
North Carolina were destroyed by insects not known to have 
ever done serious injury to that tree before. In such cases as 
this and others of the like sort, there is good reason to believe 
that man is the indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so 
heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever the birds which 
feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction 
of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipes implumis, 
the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal 
orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowsy beetle’s 
evening drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their 
fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his 
natural allies.* 
trees in sound health, and they assail those only whose normal conditions and 
functions have been by some cause impaired.” 
See, more fully, Samanos, Traité dela Culture du Pin Maritime, Paris, 1864, 
pp. 140-145, and Sremont, Manuale dell’ Arte Forestale, 2d edition. Florence, 
1872. 
* In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more numerous and de- 
structive to trees than in the primitive forests of America, and the same re- 
mark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as moles, mice, and squirrels. 
In the dense native wood, the ground and the air are too humid, the depth of 
shade too great, for many tribes of these creatures, while near the natural 
meadows and other open grounds, where circumstances are otherwise more 
favorable for their existence and multiplication, their numbers are kept down 
by birds, serpents, foxes, and smaller predacious quadrupeds. In civilized 
countries these natural enemies of the worm, the beetle, and the mole, are 
persecuted, sometimes almost exterminated, by man, who also removes from 
his plantations the decayed or wind-fallen trees, the shrubs and underwood, 
which, in a state of nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the 
rodent, and often also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the in- 
sect and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of 
the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, 
