10 METKOPOLITAX PARKS. [Jan. 



winds of March have dried the surface of the ground, these 

 sticks and fallen trees, overlying each other in the best pos- 

 sible manner to cause quick-spreading fires, have done and will 

 continue to do, unless immediately checked by proper precau- 

 tions, irreparable damage to the woods. 



Illustrating this point, I would respectfully call attention to 

 the tremendous damage done by the forest fire in the Blue 

 Hills Reservation so short a time ao-o as the sprinof of 1893. 

 Hundreds of acres of valuable and beautiful woodlands were 

 utterly ruined, necessitatino^ their beins: cut to the ground, 

 leaving scarcely a single tree where one short year ago existed 

 a beautiful forest. 



Even more dangerous than the state of affairs which I have 

 just outlined as causing destructive fires in most of these 

 woods, is the condition brought about by these same forest 

 fires. The death of the trees by the forest fire may not be 

 immediate. A year or perhaps two years may ensue before 

 the trees finally give up the unequal struggle and die. They 

 remain standing, their limbs largely intact, presenting every 

 opportunity for another and still more disastrous fire. It is 

 absolutely indispensable that these areas of dead trees should 

 be removed at as early a date as is possible, and that also the 

 ground under the woods now living, as yet unvisited in recent 

 years by severe forest fires, should be put in such a condition as 

 to reduce to the minimum the dans^er of future conflao:rations. 



I would respectfully suggest that your honorable Board au- 

 thorize the expenditure of an amount necessary to remove from 

 the reservations this imminent danger of fire. The employment 

 of men now idle would at this time be opportune and the means 

 of preventing the destruction of property to an amount many 

 times the sum required to accomplish it. This would be work 

 not made for the occasion, but necessary, and in its doing not 

 only would the public receive the full equivalent of the money 

 spent, but, as I have before stated, it would be the means of 

 preventing serious losses in the future. 



With the cleaning of the woods and the providing of proper 

 means of ingress and egress, the opening of the disused wood 

 roads, rendering them availal)le to pedestrians and equestrians, 

 the occasional repairing of existing boundary fences, and the 

 erection of new fences upon the boundaries of the reservations 



