TREES WOODLAKD FORESTS. 47 



twenty years ago, and protected from fire and devas- 

 tation till now, the value of those Plains for settle- 

 ment would have been nearly or quite doubled. 



A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by 

 some of the dairy farmers of our own State. One 

 who has a hundred acres of good soil, whereof twenty 

 or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely, cal- 

 culating that the additional grass that he may grow 

 in its stead will pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, 

 so that he will make a net gain of the time he has 

 hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling 

 wood. He does not consider how much his soil will 

 lose in Summer moisture, how his springs and run- 

 nels will be dried up, nor how the sweep of harsh 

 winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and 

 ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliber- 

 ate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield 

 more feed, with far greater uniformity of product from 

 year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine- 

 sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with tim- 

 ber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted 

 to grass. Hence, I insist that the farmer who sweeps 

 oft' his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, 

 hoping to increase permanently the product of his 

 dairy, makes a sad miscalculation. 



Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suf- 

 fering from the improvidence that devoured their for- 

 ests, leaving the future to take care of itself. I pre- 

 sume the great empires of antiquity suffered from the 

 same folly, though to a much greater extent. The 



