LECTURE VI. 



LUMBERMAN AND FORESTER. 



All the great diversity of activities, of industries, of commodities, of 

 sources of wealth which characterize the modern civilization and give em- 

 ployment to the millions, have their origin more or less directly in that pri- 

 mary source of wealth and comfort, nay of life itself, the soil. 



And next to it stands water : Water is the best thing, sang Pindar o 

 the Greeks. 



But without soil to use it, it is of little avail. And yet again, soil with- 

 ' out water to support useful plant production would be an empty treasure, 

 for it is water that makes the soil available. So intimately are soil and 

 water connected that the one cannot be disassociated from the other. Just 

 as in a chemical compound, inert and separately useless or obnoxious ele- 

 ments, combine to form active, most valuable and beneficent bodies, so 

 does water and soil impart, each to the other, its value by their combin- 

 ation. 



Soil and water, then, are man's richest treasure, and if he be rational 

 he would guard them more than any other sources of material wealth and 

 use them with discretion ; yet in all countries and in all ages man has been 

 careless and wasteful of these most important bases of his well-being. He 

 has squandered them lavishly, has allowed them to dissipate and to slip 

 away or to be destroyed, seemingly in utter ignorance of their important 

 bearing; whole peoples have been impoverished, practically wiped out 

 through mere neglect or abuse of these primary sources of wealth and 

 through ignorance as to the conditions and relations influencing their pres- 

 ervation. 



"Man goes over the earth and leaves a desert behind him." "Precise- 

 ly that portion of the earth's surface which about the commencement of the 

 Christian era was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil and climate 

 is now completely exhausted," says Geo. P. Marsh, in his classic volume, 

 "The Earth as Modified by Man." "A territory which in bygone centuries 

 sustained a population scarcely inferior to that of the entire Christian 

 world at the present day has been brought into desolation almost as com- 

 plete as that of the moon." 



Nor is this destruction of naturally favorable conditions confined to 

 that portion of the earth and that era. We can trace it over the globe and 

 through all ages, progressing only less intensely and now arrested here and 

 there by intelligent man. 



