108 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



that press ceaselessly over the Great Divide. It would 

 seem quite evident that the Great Designer of this inter- 

 esting orb never intended that any single generation 

 should take a mowing-machine to the natural resources 

 of any region on the face of the earth. 



This has been done in some lands with some of their 

 natural resources. China today is reaping a harvest of 

 penury and famine and flood through the indiscriminate 

 exploitation of her forests for many generations. The 

 inspiration of her sages and religion makers has not been 

 wise in this matter ; their deity failed to reveal this vital 

 failure to them. Their people perish, often a million a 

 year, from floods that need not occur. One would expect 

 this in a country where the people do not read or write, 

 and where national life has not been developed in any 

 real sense whatever. They are like the over enthusiastic 

 youth at the circus who spends all his loose change for 

 red-lemonade and peanuts and finds himself without car- 

 fare at midnight, twenty miles from home. Before it is 

 too late for our own young nation it is the part of a 

 patriot to thrust the problem of conservation into the 

 daily thought of his countrymen. The extent toward 

 which forest depletion has been rapidly driving will make 

 the average citizen rub his eyes and stare in amazement. 

 As for our forest-resources, we are like a young man with 

 all his front teeth out at twenty-five. 



America once had inexhaustible forests over wide 

 reaches of her territory — easily inexhaustible with any 

 sort of early national inventory and planning. No sec- 

 tion of this country outside of the great treeless plains 

 needed ever to be a pauper begging for lumber. They 

 had enough and to spare. But pioneering was done at 

 fever-heat. Almost as by legerdemain the forests of 

 whole states were cut away to such a degree that people 

 can not today live upon millions of acres that once sup- 

 ported a thriving population. One can travel today in 

 eastern states, in some regions for miles, and see only an 

 occasional farm. The one time wealth-producing acres 

 have been abandoned; farms that once had enough tim- 

 ber upon them to support a good-sized family today have 

 onlv an occasional tree. In fact, all sections of the 



