12 ACQUIRING LAND FOR PROTECTION OF WATERSHEDS, ETC. 



even greater flood height in the sixteenth century than any that oc- 

 curred in the nineteenth. As deforestation in the watersheds in both 

 the Danube and the Seine is vastly greater now than it was eight cen- 

 turies or three centuries ago, the testimony of the actual records pre- 

 sented by M. Lauda can not be lightly set aside. Nor can it be said 

 that M. Lauda stands alone in his opinion, for at the Tenth Interna- 

 tional Congress of Navigation, held at Milan in 1905, papers upon this 

 subject were presented by representatives from France, German}', 

 Italy, Austria, and Russia, and while all the writers favored forest 

 culture the opinion was practically unanimous that forests exert no 

 appreciable influence upon the stream flow of rivers. 



Indeed, Colonel Chittenden, who has perhaps studied foreign reports 

 upon this subject more carefully than any other American, declares 

 that he is unable to find among the river engineers of Europe tiny that 

 advocate forests as a corrective for the extremes of flow in our rivers. 

 He cites an exceedingly elaborate investigation instituted by Napoleon 

 III, as a result of which the French engineers, after an exhaustive 

 study of the subject, united in the opinion that whatever value forests 

 might have locally in preventing the erosion of steep slopes they could 

 not be relied upon in any degree to diminish the great floods from 

 which France had been suffering, and that any measures which might 

 be taken in the line of reforestation would have no appreciable effect. 

 The report of these engineers quoted a very elaborate and exhaustive 

 work upon the floods of French rivers, going back over six hundred 

 years, in which it was conclusively shown that former floods were 

 larger than those of the present time. As a result of this report it is 

 declared that no French project of river improvement, either for flood 

 prevention or as an insurance against low water in navigable rivers, 

 has embraced reforestation as an essential part or even any part at all. 



In our own country, where river records have been kept but a com- 

 paratively short time, the data are of course insufficient to warrant 

 any very sweeping generalizations. We believe it is admitted, how- 

 ever, that the records of the Ohio River, which extend over a period 

 of forty } T ears, show greater extremes of both high water and low 

 water during the first twenty years of that period than during the last 

 twenty years, thus bearing out in a degree at least the conclusions 

 reached through a study of the extended periods of observation of 

 European rivers. While it can not be regarded, therefore, as fully 

 established, we submit that the weight of expert testimon}^ and the 

 preponderance of evidence as deduced from actual observation is very 

 largely in favor of the proposition that forests do not exercise an" 

 appreciable influence upon the navigability of navigable rivers. 



But the argument against the proposition in the bill under consid- 

 eration b} T no means rests alone upon the contention that there is no 

 vital connection between the forests and the maintenance of naviga- 

 bility in navigable streams. It is a conceded fact that at the present 

 time, in the southern Appalachians at least, the menace to the streams 

 comes from the operations of the farmer and not from those of the 

 lumberman. It is the tracts on the lower slopes of the mountains 

 which have been cleared for farming from which the silt is washed 

 into the streams and not from the upper slopes, which are covered 

 with trees. Now, it is not denied that if these lower slopes are prop- 

 erly farmed the soil will not wash appreciably, and the streams there- 

 fore will receive no damage. It is not denied either that if the steeper 



