134 



OUR FORESTS 



Erosion at Sayre, Penn., by the Chemung River. 

 Photograph by W. C. Barbour. 



largely by the Adirondack and Catskill forests. Should these 

 forests be destroyed, it is not impossible that the frequent freshets 

 which would follow would so fill the Hudson River with silt and 



. . debris that the ship 



channels in the bay, 

 already costing the 

 government millions of 

 dollars a year to keep 

 dredged, would become 

 too shallow for ships. 

 If this should occur, 

 the greatest city in this 

 country would soon lose 

 its place and become of 

 second-rate importance. 

 The story of how this 

 very thing happened to 

 the old Greek city of Poseidonia is graphically told in the following 

 lines : 



" It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Posei- 

 donia, later the Roman Psestum. Long ago those adventuring mariners 

 from Greece had seized the fertile plain which at that time was covered 

 with forests of great oak and watered by two clear and shining rivers. 

 They drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white 

 man's burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things 

 that were being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over 

 colonists whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no 

 doubt, in the same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists 

 cut down the oaks, and plowed the land, and built cities, and made harbors, 

 and finally dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labor 

 and wrought splendid temples in honor of the benign gods who had given 

 them the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fat- 

 ness. 



" Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the 

 hills upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with 

 bloody contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And 

 more and more the oaks were cut down mark that ! for the stories of 

 nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees until all 

 the plain was cleared and tilled ; and then the foothills were denuded, and 

 the wave of destruction crept up the mountain sides, and they, too, were 

 left naked to the sun and the rains. 



