34 KEPOKT OP THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 



United States, I venture to call tlie attention of the department to the matter as being 

 one of the most important that can claim attention. The fact stares us in the face 

 that the American supply of hark is becoming rapidly exhausted. Whole districts 

 are devastated every year, hundreds of thousands of trees being destroyed, root and 

 branch, while scarcely any effort is made to replace them. Inferior and even false 

 barks that vrere formerly entirely overloolied, now form the exclusive production of 

 some districts, while few places in these countries now remain unvisited. The natural 

 supply will soon be exhausted, and the East Indian plantations will then be the only 

 source of supply for the commerce of the av orld. When that time comes, and it will 

 come sooner than our people expect it, a general European or Asiatic war, or even a 

 war of the United States with any foreign power, might completely cut off the supply 

 of this drug, which is a real necessity in many jiarts of the country. Even such an 

 appalling disaster as the destruction of the Indian plantations by the ravages of war 

 is not without the range of possibility. 



Not only that ; even while the supply lasts it can never be too great. The bless- 

 ings of this beneficent remedy should be placed and kept within the reach of the 

 poorest in the land, and the government fulfills its highest mission when it provides 

 by a wise foresight the means of holding in check the merciless destroyer that has 

 driven a hundred armies from the field and fills witll terror some of the fairest por- 

 tions of the globe. 



WILLIS WEAVER. 



Bogota, Octoler 18; 1879. 



