PAPERS ON BIOLOGY AND AGRICULTURE 107 



FOREST PRESERVATION— THE PATRIOT'S 



DUTY 



E. M. North, DesPlaixes 



America is yet young. It is the springtime of her 

 youth in spite of her spectacular development and 

 the great inroads she has made upon her natural re- 

 sources. AVe have made progress that easily outdoes 

 any other nation in history, pioneering as we have 

 done into new lands. We are still far enough this side 

 of actual dejDletion of most of our natural resources to 

 be able to arrest the usual course of waste to which every 

 nation has fallen a prey. The United States is about to 

 reap another great advantage from her educated citizen- 

 ship in the promising conservation programs that are 

 meeting with popular approval. 



It is true that some of our natural resources are gone 

 forever. In the absence of any conservation plan, the 

 wild-pigeon is gone; the beaver is nearly extinct; the 

 buffalo is maintained with difficulty in a few herds; 

 natural gas, apparently inexhaustible at one time, is now 

 but a memory in some sections of the country. Men here 

 remember the six-or-eight-inch gas-wells in Indiana that 

 were lighted for show day and night, sending a column 

 of roaring flame a hundred feet high and turning dark- 

 ness to daylight to the astonishment of beholders. They 

 may also remember sitting in an Indianapolis hotel on a 

 cold winter day with a gas-stove giving out a flame the 

 size of a candle 's. It is possible then to be recklessly and 

 heedlessly destructive of wealth that belongs as much to 

 the citizens of 2250 as of 1850. 



For, after all, to whom does the land of a nation be- 

 long? The owners of a farm in one generation camp on 

 it for a few brief years, take leave of life, and involuntar- 

 ily surrender ownership to the succeeding generation. 

 No man owns his piece of land, no matter how solemnly 

 the Recorder of Deeds may officially declare it. It is to 

 be the possession and the home of uncounted generations 

 after him, who will come like himself, to camp on the 

 spot, draw their sustenance from it for a few fretful 

 years, and then move on in the great caravan of humana 



