96 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1895. 



woodland disappear in this country every year, and that at the present 

 rate of consumption our marketable lumber supply will be exhausted 

 in fifty years. 



It is not likely that the American people will allow their lumber sup- 

 ply to be entirely exhausted before they take some measures to cheek 

 the wasteful destruction of their timber land ; and then, too, the de- 

 mand will grow less in the advancing years, as stone, brick, iron, and 

 steel will undoubtedly take the place of wood to a large extent in the 

 construction of buildings. 



Nevertheless, for many years to come, the demand for lumber in 

 this prosperous and growing country will be great ; and unless some- 

 thing is done to preserve our forests, they will be cut off too rapidly 

 for the best interests of the country. Already our rivers and creeks 

 are dwindling in size, our summers are becoming drier, and our water 

 supplies more difficult to obtain, and our manufacturing industries are 

 compelled to resort more and more to steam and reservoirs for power 

 to turn the wheels of their machinery. 



These things are directing our attention to a more careful consider- 

 ation of the uses and advantages of forests. Their existence and de- 

 velopment are now recognized as important in the matcu'ial world as 

 money in the economic world. Their influence upon the climate and 

 atmosphere is immense, though of such a quiet nature that it generally 

 escapes our observation. They are reservoirs of water from which the 

 atmosphere above and the ground below are constantly drawing mois- 

 ture, and thereby the climate is made more equable and humid. They 

 serve the double purpose, — of windmills to pump the water in the soil 

 up into the atmosphere, when it is dispersed ; and to retain it in the soil 

 by their roots and their leafy moulds, where it is allowed to pass off 

 gradually into the springs and brooks. It is one of the wonderful 

 provisions of nature that every growing tree helps to purify the air we 

 breathe. Vegetation lives and thrives on the carbonic acid and other 

 ingredients in the atmosphere which are poisonous and injurious to 

 animal life, and it has the happy faculty of working over these poisons 

 and issuing in the place thereof pure oxygen, which is the most life- 

 giving food for man and beast. When impure air passes through a 

 forest, it comes out purer, if not wholly purified. In Italy and other 

 places, towns wliich formerly were so unhealthy that nobody could 

 safely live in them during certain seasons of the year, have become 

 wholesome and pleasant places to live in owing to the planting of for- 

 ests near them. And no doubt tlie destruction of forests has caused 

 many places to become uninhabitable which in ancient times wore the 

 healthy and happy abodes of human beings. 



