Destruction and Deterioration 91 



are in many parts of the Lake and Mississippi re- 

 gion tracts of greater extent which are likely to be 

 woodland for generations of men to come. These 

 are sandy, broken, or swampy districts. There 

 are in many even of the long-settled parts more or 

 less extensive islands of this kind, where agriculture 

 has made hardly any inroads on account of the 

 infertility of the land. The swampy districts are 

 perhaps the most hopeful of these tracts from an 

 agricultural point of view ; for they may be drained, 

 or where that is impracticable, gradually dry up in 

 the natural course of their development, and in 

 either case they are apt at last to form very fertile 

 meadows and fields. But there is no such prospect 

 for the sand barrens and the " broken," hilly dis- 

 tricts. The former are now, in the three great 

 lumber States of the Lake region, as well as in the 

 South, furnishing the greater part of the output of 

 pine lumber. When that is removed, little of it is 

 taken up by settlers, but most of the land is left to 

 the forces of nature to do with it what they will. 

 In nearly every case it still remains woodland, 

 though of a very different kind from the original 

 forest, and of little economic value. Large tracts 

 of such lands, deprived of their original growth of 

 merchantable timber by former lumbering opera- 

 tions, but still in an uncultivated state, can be seen 

 in nearly every part of the country within the limits 

 of the eastern forest zone. 



There is also a very considerable amount of land 

 being converted into forest which was formerly 



