148 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1892. 



is an evil for which we or our children must sometime suffer. 

 There are now among us wise ones who see in this the reason 

 for short and irregular water-supply and the slow but snre 

 change of climate which renders precarious the cultivation of the 

 peach and the apricot, the arbor vitse and the balsam-fir. What 

 can a republican government do to regulate such matters? 



As to the relation of railroads to forest-renewal, this I believe 

 is true, that on each side of the Boston & Albany railroad (and 

 it is like the others) there are long reaches where for miles 

 every inch of ground has been repeatedly burned over, as the 

 charred and fallen young chestnuts and oaks will now testify. 

 By such a means, not only is the young growth killed or stunted 

 at once, but in a short time the land becomes entirely unproduc- 

 tive, and unsuited to the sustaining of plant life. 



Yet to a person unused to such a sight, a view from a lofty 

 hilltop out over the country, is most surprising. Those of us 

 who have been educated by the map and the commercial gazette, 

 have come to think of the county as covered with villages, farm- 

 houses and clearings, and that the woods have for the most part 

 vanished. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No mat- 

 ter what else has happened, the white pine and the chestnut 

 are on hand, ready to take possession ; and in the winter espe- 

 cially, when the ground is white with snow, it is easy to see that 

 we still have much young forest ; and the very self-evidence of 

 this truth, it is, which makes our people so careless of the future. 

 The earth cannot be continually robbed with impunity. In olden 

 times, every estate had its wood-lot, where in winter was cut the 

 year's supply of wood ; to-day, many of the poorer farmers de- 

 pend wholly upon the alder swamp, or the gray-birch barren. 



When, on every hand nature so plainly teaches the lesson, it is 

 strange that our country people have not gained the wisdom to 

 make plantations of trees on their waste lands, especially since 

 much of the necessary work could well be done at times when 

 they have little else to do. I suspect, however, that to most of 

 us, a penny to-day is better than a dollar Tiext century ; and that 

 short-term endowment orders are more to the popular taste than 

 tree-planting. This also is true. In many of our rural commu- 

 nities, there are numbers of men watching the opportunity to 



