396 ANNUAL REPORT 



POINTS TO PONDER. 



Not only do forests trap the snows and rains, holding back the 

 spring floods, but, by their shading leaves and limbs, they check 

 excessive evaporation, thus husbanding moisture for more equable and 

 economical distribution and increasing the precipitation, which in 

 Minnesota is but twenty-eight inches. Not only do they serve as 

 media that connect the minerals of the soil with the gases of the 

 atmosphere to fit them for appropriation by the higher organisms, 

 largely neutralize the breeding and ravages of germ diseases, protect 

 our rivers and lakes from drying up, break the force of destructive 

 winds and shelter our State and homes, but they invite hither the 

 furry animals to people again the woody retreats, and insect-devour- 

 ing birds that save our crops to a large extent from the depredations 

 of parasites on all our plants in field and garden; they conduct 

 electricity between tbe air and ground, and quicken all living things 

 into new vigor; they furnish healthful acids and fragrances for man 

 and beast; they spread their humid mantles over us, warming the 

 landscape in winter, cooling it in summer; they check the escape- 

 ment of heat at night and send it back to the plants safe from killing 

 frost; they beautify all the country, evoke poetic and artistic thought, 

 inspire lofty endeavor and nobility of character. 



Summing up all these benefits, which are but a moiety of the great 

 whole, can we in justice to ourselves and future generations postpone 

 the matter of forestry ? It is possible and practical for us to bridge 

 over the continental wind-trough of which we spoke, with a hu- 

 midity that will transform it into an Eden. As it is now, the rain- 

 sheets from the Alleghanies and other mountained regions of the east^ 

 expend their force ere they reach us; and the rain sheets from the 

 Pacific, winged eastward, surge against the western slopes of the 

 Rockies, cutting off supply from that direction. Thus the richest 

 part of North America becomes almost neutral ground, less subject 

 to precipitation than more remote localities that have soils far inferior. 

 Being mostly treeless prairie, the north and south winds, deflecting 

 southerns nearly in the same direction, driving hot or cold daggers 

 into everything, produce an excessively dry atmosphere which would 

 speedily change our adopted country into another Sahara, were it not 

 for porosity of soil and understrata of clay that reserve what water 

 filtrates through to feed the roots in seasons of drouth. Under all 

 these local disadvantages, the great enterprise of conquering a climate 

 suggests itself. If all the provinces and states in the Red river and 



