27 
(et) 
FORESTS OF UNITED STATES. 
viduals. Property of this kind is subject to plunder, as well as 
to frequent damage by fire. The destruction from these causes 
would, indeed, considerably lessen, but would by no means 
wholly annihilate the climatic and geographical influences of 
the forest, or ruinously diminish its value as a regular source of 
supply of fuel and timber. 
It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the 
public, and especially land-owners, be roused to a sense of the 
dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may 
expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. 
Some of the American States, as well as the Governments of 
many European colonies, still retain the ownership of great 
tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York, for ex- 
ample, has, in its north-eastern counties, a vast extent of terri- 
tory in which the lumberman has only here and there estab- 
lished his camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with 
permanent settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, 
and often ravaged by devastating fires, still covers far the lar- 
gest proportion of the surface. Through this territory the soil 
is generally poor, and even the new clearings have little of the 
luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes them elsewhere. 
The value of the land for agricultural uses is therefore very 
small, and few purchases are made for any other purpose than 
to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed that 
the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable 
property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the 
suggestion has originated rather in poetical than in economical 
views of the subject. Both these classes of considerations have 
a real worth. It is desirable that some large and easily access- 
ible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, 
in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction 
of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of na- 
ture, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant 
that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, 
may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such 
imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint 
