180 FOREST OUTINGS 



a blanket, and a pitcher of water. Slanting the board, he poured water upon 

 it, and immediately upon the floor below he had a flood. Then he covered 

 the board with the blanket and again poured water, and this time the water 

 soaked in and seeped down slowly. 



The new-born Forest Service, dating from 1905, set out to make the 

 American public erosion conscious at the time when most soil scientists, even 

 in the Department of Agriculture, refused to believe in the menace or give 

 credence to the warnings. Hugh Bennett in the Bureau of Soils at the time 

 (he is Chief of the Soil Conservation Service now) already had raised his 

 voice, crying warning especially against sheet erosion on farm land. But few 

 believed him. The loss continued. Sheet erosion strips off tilled topsoil evenly, 

 grain by grain, layer by layer, stealthily. It may leave no gullies, but it makes 

 the soil thinner, poorer, all the time. Foresters did not know much about 

 sheet erosion. It is rare in forests, but plain evidence was available even then 

 that veritable avalanches of soil-wash and rock-wash from denuded high 

 plains and mountains were bringing unutterable havoc upon the country 

 below. So the foresters cried havoc; and with all the force of his vibrant 

 voice and character, their great friend in the White House, Theodore 

 Roosevelt, echoed the cry. 



"To skin and exhaust the land," he proclaimed in 1907, "will result in 

 undermining the days of our children, the very prosperity which we ought 

 by right to hand down to them amplified and developed." 



In 1908 President Roosevelt called a conference of Governors at the 

 White House, to forward conservation. Dr. Thomas C. Chamberlin, a 

 geologist at the University of Chicago, was there to talk to the governors 

 and, through the press, to all the people. 



"Soil production," he told them, "is very slow. I should be unwilling to 

 name a mean rate of soil formation greater than 1 foot in 10,000 years. In 

 the Orient there are large tracts almost absolutely bare of soil, on which 

 stand ruins implying former flourishing populations. Other long-tilled lands 

 bear similar testimony. It must be noted that more than loss of fertility is 

 here menaced. It is the loss of the soil body itself, a loss almost beyond repair. 

 When our soils are gone, we, too, must go unless we shall find some way to 

 feed on raw rock, or its equivalent. . . . 



