FOREST PLANTIb G. 



stranger within her gates, that Chicago should exhibit such an extent 

 of wooden tenements and plank sidewalks structures of the most 

 superficial character, which must soon give way to those more solid 

 and enduring. The products of the lake pineries are distributed 

 over half a continent. From them are built the farm houses of the 

 pioneers on the solitary prairies,* and the bridges which span the 

 waters of the Kansas and the Platte. 



"The destruction of hard wood timber is going on at a pace 

 equally as rapid. The railways require annually in construction and 

 maintenance at least 10,000,000 of ties. Nothing strikes the emi- 

 grant from the Atlantic slope, on returning after years of absence, so 

 forcibly as to see those hills which in his youth were forest crowned, 

 now bare and desolate, and the streams in which he was accustomed 

 to fish dwindled into mere trickling rills.f The Pacific railroads 

 which traverse for long distances the valleys of the Kaw and Platte, 

 have consumed in their construction nearly every stick of timber, and 

 in four years will have consumed all the firewood. The beautiful 

 black walnuts of the Kaw valley, fit for gunstocks and cabinet ware, 

 have been remorselessly sacrificed to these base purposes." 



I cannot better conclude the evidence on this branch 

 of the subject than by introducing the following report of 

 a committee on Forest Culture, which was read at the last 

 meeting of the National Agricultural Association in St. 

 Louis : 



At the recent meeting of the National Agricultural Association in 



*In journeying last summer on the plains between Lincoln, Neb., and Fort 

 Kearney, I asked a new settler at whose house I stopped to dine, where he got 

 the lumber for his house, not a tree being in sight. The answer was : " I ordered 

 it from Chicago to Lincoln by rail, and hauled it out from there (thirty miles) with 

 my team." H. W.S. C. 



tin confirmation of this statement I may mention that on a recent visit to a 

 town on the Nashua River in Massachusetts, I was recurring to the delight I used 

 to experience when a boy, more than forty years ago, in witnessing the wild scenes 

 of the annual freshets when the intervale land on each side of the river was 

 converted into aa angry flood, when I was astonished to learn that nothing of the 

 kind had been known for twenty or thirty years past doubtless the result of the 

 stripping off of the forests, to which Mr. Foster so feelingly alludes. 



