FOOTPRINTS IN THE FOREST, 409 
timber and for fuel than it is to plant cereals and other crops for 
their food values, must be left for each individual to decide for 
himself. 
A good writer in the Gardener’s Monthly,says: ‘“Itisa great gain 
to forestry to note that the weak arguments for forestry, which 
bring the whole subject into disrepute with persons of ordinary un- 
derstanding and leave the topic to be handled by visionaries, are 
being gradually laid aside. There are innumerable solid reasons 
why old forests should be judicially cared for and new ones planted 
without resorting to bugaboos to frighten people into what cool 
reason cannot sustain.” 
When we travel over our praires and see so many farms stark and 
treeless, often with a lonesome house and, perhaps, a barn also, with- 
outa single tree or shrub, for either ornament or shelter, it seems 
to me that it must be a self evident fact that it will be easy to con- 
vince such people that they may find actual profit as well as pleas- 
ure and comfort to themselves, their families and their domestic 
snimals, by sheltering their crops, their gardens and orchards, and 
their buildings as well, from the excessive force of the winds. 
The man who has the good sense and judgment to plant out a 
forest plantation and carefully attend to the wants of the growing 
trees, will as soon as he commences the thinning process take care 
that all dead brush is removed where it can be safely burnt, never 
allowing it to accumulate on the ground among the standing tim- 
ber, as it would be a continuous source of danger from fire. 
I would recommend the use of a sharp grub hoe in removing 
nurse trees, instead of the axe, thus leaving no stumps. 
In closing this paper, I wish to repeat the words used by Prof. J. 
L. Budd, in a late issue of the Des Moines Register, in regard to the 
death of Judge Whiting: “The Iowa press has quite generally noted 
the recent death of Judge C. E. Whiting, at an advanced age, at his 
grand home in Monona county. 
“Unitedly these notices speak of him as an able pioneer of the 
Hawkeye state, and that he was the democratic nominee for gover- 
nor in 1885. His remarkable career asa tree planter in the way of 
shelter belts on the wind-swept Missouri bottom, and his success 
as a pioneer fruit grower in the days when people said fruits could 
not be grown on the prairies, have not been even referred to. 
“When his brief political history is forgotten, the one thousand 
eight hundred acres of wind-swept prairie which he transferred by 
shelter belts of black walnut, around every eighty or one hundred 
and sixty acre tract, will live as an object lesson, 
“He was the only man in the west who demonstrated on a large 
scale the fact that with two-fifths of the land surrounded by shelter 
belts, far larger aggregate crops can be grown on the remainder 
than on the whole when swept by the winds. 
“During the last twenty years of his life he called attention to the 
great fact that shelter belts lessened evaporation and permitted the 
growing of grops that failed in open exposure. He also called at- 
tention to the fact that when the corn in western Iowa was fired his 
great fields escaped. When the grasshoppers came they passed 
