110 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



monarchs upon which Nature had spent two or three hun- 

 dred years of architectural efforts. 



Even where some of the timber was left standing, often 

 when taking out the salable timber, the wood-cutters were 

 entirely careless of the trees about them, and many 

 younger trees were and are still being destroyed when the 

 giant falling ruins a score of others about him. Unsci- 

 entific and ruinous pasturing has trampled down the soft 

 forest-earth until it is hard and often baked, very in- 

 hospitable to struggling seedlings that do their best tc 

 preserve the species. Forest fires too have been very de- 

 structive, and even today the forests actually burned 

 would equal a strip ten miles wide from New York City 

 to Denver, annually consigned to destruction. Careless 

 campers, hunters and automobilists are responsible for 

 the largest percentage of losses from this cause. The U. 

 S. Forestry Department expects to accomplish a very 

 large annual saving, 1,000,000,000 cubic feet, and $17,- 

 000,000 worth, by effectively curbing this loss. In our 

 own state of Illinois more than half the fire-loss is due 

 to the railroads, wood-cutters and careless campers. It 

 is not unusual to see the tell-tale scars left by a dozen 

 successive campers who built their camp-fires among the 

 roots of some lordly roadside elm that had gladdened the 

 eye of a generation of admirers of beauty. 



What is the result among us in the Central West? 

 90 per cent of the original forest is gone, and at very 

 heavy cost for transportation, you and I and our needy 

 neighbors are importing 47 per cent of our lumber from 

 distant regions, some of it from the South, herself al- 

 ready in straits for some species, but mostly from the 

 remote Northwest Pacific States. From kings to paupers ! 

 There is more reality in the term than is pleasant to re- 

 call. Members here who are familiar with the housing 

 conditions in our great cities and their suburbs are well 

 aware that thousands of our citizens are living in dwell- 

 ings of about the size and quality of store-boxes, unsani- 

 tary, unfit for habitation, such as no farmer would think 

 of housing his animals in, for he would be sure that pneu- 

 monia would destroy them. This is a national wrong. 

 Good patriotism. can not rest without bringing about a 



