12 FOREST LANDS FOB THE PROTECTION OF WATERSHEDS. 



Department and to the Land Office, and asked them to send us the 

 particulars about the purchase, more than one hundred years ago, 

 by the Navy Department, of lands at the South, because they had 

 live oak upon them/from which the department wanted to build our 

 frigates and vessels. The Land Office and "the Navy Department 

 together were kind enough to furnish those documents, and they are 

 the evidence that more than one hundred years ago the nation was 

 in the habit of buying land, owning land in fee simple, from different 

 States and from different individuals all through the South be- 

 cause it had live oak upon it, and that covers completely every state- 

 ment which gentlemen have wished to make here with regard to that. 

 Those papers can be obtained by the chairman and by yourselves. 



Speaking about denudation, I do not think there is any lesson that 

 the committee can learn outside of the hills of New Hampshire them- 

 selves as to what we mean by denudation. In the old days, of which 

 the governor has spoken just now, these pine trees were employed 

 in the American Navy. Mr. Chairman, in the great battles of 1780 

 and 1781, when the British navy was engaged, when the American 

 Navy was engaged, when the French navy was engaged, when the 

 Spanish navy was engaged, every spar used by every frigate, prob- 

 ably, and every man-of-war was from the New Hampshire and Maine 

 forests. Up until 1775 the export of these spars had been necessary, 

 and every navy-yard in western Europe and every fleet in all the 

 great naval encounters flew their flags from flagstaffs supplied from 

 the New Hampshire forests. In the last ten years, I was going to 

 say, there has not been a spar as big as that cane sold from a New 

 England forest, and why is it? It is because in the present business 

 of lumbering the very paper you are writing upon is made from 

 spruce timber cut down up there. A lumber baron will send his 

 men in, and he says, " Oh, do not pick out the good trees ; cut down 

 everything." It is so much easier to clear the whole thing, make a 

 clean sweep of it, that the denudation goes forward as it did not go 

 forward in the days when I was a surveyor there. In those days the 

 man who sold lumber sold timber which was of use to cut up. Now, if 

 he can sell a stick as big as my arm he can make as good paper out 

 of that stick as he can make out of a big log, and therefore the in- 

 structions to the workmen are to cut down everything and to leave 

 nothing. 



* Then comes a God-appointed shower, and the shower washes off 

 everything, because you have nothing to hold back the water. It 

 washes off everything. It washes off all the soil, everything that will 

 go. It washes off everything but large stones. So, when Governor 

 Guild and I go up there with our nice pine seed and plant them 

 there they will not grow. You have swept away the soil, and you 

 have nothing left but gravel and rock. 



The plea, therefore, for the preservation of the forests, that has 

 now become a national plea, is a plea made necessary on account 

 of the uses made of the timber when it has been cut down, and I beg 

 that you put in as a part of the statement we make that the cutting 

 down of the forests now leaves the thing as bare as that table, you 

 might almost say, and it sweeps down the soil, and the governor has 

 told you what becomes of it. It lies on the shores of the rivers and 

 creates malaria and all those evils. 



