94 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



And that is why, my friends, this transfer to a different 

 department is a matter now of necessity when this vast 

 domain of sixty-two or sixty-three million acres shall 

 have been selected for the purpose- 

 There is another reason for the transfer. I referred a 

 moment ago to my young friend, Mr. Pinchot, who is the 

 chief forester of the Department of Agriculture. It has 

 been an anomaly in our legislation that the department of 

 the government having charge of the forests had none of 

 the skilled foresters of the United States in its employ, 

 and that the department that did not own a tree anywhere 

 was surrounded by the best corps of foresters in the 

 world. The mountain could not come to Mahomet, and so 

 Mahomet is going to the mountain. The department is to 

 be transferred — the service transferred — to that de- 

 partment that is so notably fitted and so organized as to 

 take the permanent care of this magnificent, this wonder- 

 ful domain. I was born in the woods of Virginia. I 

 moved (thank God) to the prairies, and one of the most 

 unpleasant things of my subsequent life was to return to 

 the woods of Virginia, now West Virginia, to find that the 

 old streams — "the old swimmin' holes" — as Whitcomb 

 Riley calls them, the holes we used to swim in and where 

 we caught so many fish, are now simply gravelly roads. 

 They are highways as dry, as arid, as one of the deserts 

 of Arizona or New Mexico — nothing but beds of gravel. 

 And why is it? Because the trees have been cut down 

 and the springs that were the children of the forest, have 

 dried up, and instead of a slow running brook digging out 

 holes here and there, clear as crystal and full of water, we 

 have simply an increased torrent after each storm, carry- 

 ing the pebbles and sand from the hills, washing them 

 down and destroying the old brooks. 



Now this is one of the unpleasant features of the de- 

 nuded timber lands of the eastern states. I see here be- 



