CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 847 
Western States, the swine subsist more or less on acorns, nuts, 
and other products of the woods, and the prairies, or natural 
meadows of the Mississippi valley, yield a large amount of food 
for beast, as well as for man. With these exceptions, all this 
vast army of quadrupeds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse, 
and roots grown on soil reclaimed from the forest by European 
settlers. It is true that the flesh of domestic quadrupeds en- 
ters very largely into the aliment of the American people, and 
greatly reduces the quantity of vegetable nutriment which they 
would otherwise consume, so that a smaller amount of agricul- 
tural product is required for immediate human food, and, of 
course, a smaller extent of cleared land is needed for the growth 
of that product, than if no domestic animals existed. But the 
flesh of the horse, the ass, and the mule is not consumed by 
man, and the sheep is reared rather for its fleece than for food. 
Besides this, the ground required to produce the grass and 
grain consumed in rearing and fattening a grazing quadruped, 
would yield a far larger amount of nutriment, if devoted to 
the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished by his flesh; and, 
upon the whole, whatever advantages may be reaped from the 
breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that the cleared land de- 
voted to their sustenance in the originally wooded part of the 
United States, after deducting a quantity sufficient to produce 
an amount of aliment equal to their flesh, still greatly exceeds 
that cultivated for vegetables, directly consumed by the people 
of the same regions; or, to express a nearly equivalent idea in 
other words, the meadow and the pasture, taken together, much 
exceed the ploughland.* 
* The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, because, 
though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of vege- 
table aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume 
a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and cultivated 
as regularly and as laboriously as any other. 
The 280,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1870, and fed 
to the 7,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize employed in 
fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered the same year, oc- 
cupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand-labor and with Chinese 
