600 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



mental and psychological dry-rot, superinduced by the 

 physical dessication of their lands. 



We of the United States are traveling the same road, 

 but traveling it with more rapidity. Our population 

 is increasing and our means of feeding it decreasing. 

 In two hundred years we have slain more trees than 

 Kurope slew in twenty centuries. The deadly work of 

 deforestation is manifested in dry creeks and diminished 

 rivers, where once those arteries of agricultural and 

 commercial life were running bank-full. 



When the rain comes now, it 

 comes in torrents which rush off 

 to the sea, laden with fertiliza- 

 tion washed from the surface of 

 the water-sheds. Such sudden 

 downpours frequently flood the 

 surrounding plains, with dis- 

 astrous results to property and 

 even to life. 



Germany and France, accord- 

 ing to a distinguished authority, 

 suffered more damage by 

 the floods of the single year 

 1883, than by all the expense and 

 losses caused by the Franco- 

 Prussian war. 



Fifty years ago, De Bonville, 

 Prefect of the Lower Alps, 

 addressed to the government a 

 report in which he describes the 

 appearance of the upper moun- 

 tain valleys after the loss of their 

 forests, from which report the 

 following excerpt is taken: 



" There is no doubt that the 

 vegetable mold of the Alps swept 

 off by the increase of that curse 

 of the mountains, the torrents, is 



good crops the exception and not the rule, and which is 

 the precursor of an ultimately desert condition. 



Even as the stripling, coming by inheritance into a 

 large estate, loses sight of the value of his possessions in 

 the ease of their acquisition, so we Americans have 

 prodigally wasted the superabundant advantages af- 

 forded by the resources of the new world. Every intelli- 

 gent man of mature years will recall instances, within 

 his own observation, of diminution of rain-fall going 

 hand in hand with diminution of tree growth in the 



DESOLATION IN ALGERIA 

 Representative of the Smithsonian (Washington. D. C), astronomical expedition of 1912 near Bassour, Algeria. 

 This station is on a rolling plateau region about fifty miles south of Algiers. Heavy snowfalls occur in winter and 

 occasional small rains in all months. Except for a few scrub oaks the region is now treeless and vegetation is com- 

 pletely dried up once this region was well wooded and prosperous. 



daily diminishing with frightful rapidity. All our Alps 

 are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wood. Their 

 soil, scorched by the sun of Providence, cut up by the 

 hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface 

 the grass they require for their sustenance, scratch the 

 ground in search of roots to satisfy their hunger, . . . 

 is periodically washed away and carried off by melting 

 snows and rain-storms." 



In our own country the overflows of the Mississippi 

 River alone have caused more loss of property than all 

 the wars in which our government Kas ever been engaged, 

 and these overflows directly result from ill-regulated 

 torrential rains arising from abnormal conditions caused 

 by deforestation of its enormous water-shed. 



Many portions of Europe, occupied by industrious 

 nations for more than a thousand years, are better sup- 

 plied with forest trees than some of our own states. 

 There are localities in North America which, a genera- 

 tion ago, were a part of the great American forest, yet 

 now. since becoming denuded of tree growth, have fallen 

 into that condition of chronic lack of rains which makes 



same locality a steady decrease in regularity and 

 amount of rain-fall being perceptible wherever the forests 

 have been devastated by man. 



Utah illustrates the same scientific truth, but con- 

 versely, for the Mormons, who found the country tree- 

 less, have nearly doubled their annual rainfall, and have 

 largely increased the size of their lakes and streams by 

 planting orchards and by reforestation. In much the 

 same way Nebraska has been made productive within 

 the last thirty years. 



Near the close of the last century the great lake in 

 the Valley of Aragua, in Venezuela, was found to be 

 rapidly lessening in area as the clearing increased, so 

 that it was about to become dry. A civil war breaking 

 out at that time, with the virulence for which South 

 America political affairs are noted, the forest was allowed 

 to spring up again through neglect of agriculture, and, 

 in a quarter of a century, the lake and its tributary streams 

 resumed their original dimensions. 



Dr. Rogers, of Mauritius, gives this testimony: " So 

 late as 1865 this island was resorted to by invalids from 



