so 



collateral advantage, of the preservation of these forests would be far 

 greater. Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with leafy woods,, 

 tint tlii-v mi^lit serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand 

 rivers and rills that an- fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a 

 screen for the fertile plains of the central counties against the chilling blasts 

 of the nrtli wind which meet with no other barrier in their sweep from the 

 north pole. The elimato of northein New York even now presents greater 

 extremes of temperature than that of southern France. The long-continued 

 cold of winter is more intense, the short heats of summer even fiercer than 

 in Provence, and hence the preservation of every influence that tends to main- 

 tain an equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The 

 felling of the Adirondacks woods would ultimately involve, for northern and 

 central Xew York, consequences similar to those which have resulted from 

 the laving bare of the southern and western declivities of the French Alps, and 

 the spurs, ridges and detached peaks in front of them. 



It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing of the moun- 

 tains of New York may be less in degree than those which a similar cause has 

 produced in southern France, where the intensity of its action has been increased 

 by the inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar geological 

 constitution of the earth. The degradation of the soil is perhaps not equally 

 promoted by a combination of the same circumstances in any of the Atlantic 

 States, but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils enough to- 

 render widespread desolation certain if the further destruction of the woods is 

 not soon arrested. The effects of clearing are already perceptible in the compara- 

 tively unviolated region of which I am speaking. The rivers which rise in it 

 flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with augmented volumes of 

 water after heavy rains. They bring clown larger quantities of sediment, and the 

 increasing obstructions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are extending 

 themselves down the channel in proportion as the fields are encroaching upon the 

 forest, give good grounds for the fear of irreparable injury to the commerce of 

 the important towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures are 

 taken to prevent the expansion of "improvements" which have already been ! 

 carried beyond the demands of a wise economy. 



In the Eastern United States, wherever a rapid mountain slope has been 

 stripped of wood, incipient ravines already plough the surface, and collect the 

 precipitation in channels which threaten serious mischief in the future. 



There is a peculiar action of this sort on the sandy surface of pine forest, 

 and in other soils that unite readily with water, which has excited the attention 

 of geographers and geologists. Soils ot the first kind are found in all the Eastern 

 States ; those of the second are more frequent in the exhausted counties of Mary- 

 land, where tobacco is cultivated, and in the more southern territories of Georgia 

 and Alabama. In these localities the ravines which appear after the cutting of j 

 the forest, through some accidental disturbance of the surface, or, in some forma- 

 tions through the cracking of the soil in consequence of great drought or heat, 

 enlarge and extend themselves with fearful rapidity. 



In Georgia and in Alabama, Lyell saw " the beginning of the formation of 

 hundreds of valleys in places where the primitive forest had been recently cut 

 down." One of these, in Georgia, a soil composed of clay and sand produced 

 by the decomposition in situ of hornblendic gneiss with layers and veins of 

 quartz, " and which did not exist before the felling of the forest twenty years 

 previous," he describes as more than fifty-five feet in depth, three hundred yards 

 in length, and from twenty to one hundred and eighty feet in breadth. He refers 



