CAUSES OF THE DESTEUOTION OF THE FOKEST. 337 



husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of 

 his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to 

 a fresher soil. The extent of cleared ground required for agri- 

 cultural use depends very much on the number and kinds of the 

 cattle bred. We have seen, in a former chapter, that, in the 

 United States, in 1870, the domestic quadrupeds amounted to more 

 than a hundred millions, or neai'ly three times the number of the 

 human population of the Union at that time, and that the number 

 greatly increased during the following ten years. In many of the 

 "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 quadru- 

 peds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse and roots grown on soil re- 

 claimed from the forest by European settlers. It is true that the 

 flesh of domestic quadrupeds enters 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 agricultural 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 groimd 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 devoted 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, dii'ectly 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 vegetable 

 aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume a great 

 15 



