62 



NA TURE 



[May 21, 1891 



and Minnesota. The timber operations in the white 

 pine forests have only one object, which is to bring as 

 much timber as possible out of the forest in the shortest 

 possible time, and to make money. Only the best trees 

 are felled, and the rest burned. K forest after a timber 

 gang has left it presents a remarkable appearance : 

 between the standing blackened and partially charred 

 stems of the broad-leaved and other trees which have not 

 been felled are the stumps of the felled pines, whilst the 

 ground is covered with wood, which would not have paid 

 for its removal, and rots, or is burned by the annual fires. 



In 1880, there were in the three lake districts 7000 

 million cubic feet of standing white pine timber, whilst in 

 the last ten years 6205 millions of cubic feet have been 

 felled and exported, 750 millions in 1889 alone. There 

 is, therefore, little more left than can be exported in a 

 single year. Many of the large saw-mills have already 

 been obliged to stop work, or get timber from Canada. 

 Chicago, which owes its rapid rise to the timber trade, 

 imports yearly 166,000,000 cubic feet of white pine timber. 

 This is about three-fourths of the whole forest yield of 

 Prussia,theproduceof6,75o,oooacresor 10,547 square miles 

 of forest. Besides the Weymouth pine, Pinus Banksiana, 

 the grey pine, and Pinus resinosa, and various broad- 

 leaved trees are found. The sub-Arctic region of Alaska 

 and British North America is poor in species ; Picea alba 

 and nigra, the white and black spruce, being characteristic 

 trees. 



Merely glancing at the North Mexican forest region, 

 with forests of Prosopis juliflora, and grassy tracts con- 

 taining gigantic cacti, and Yucca baccata, a palm lily, 

 attaining 40 feet in height, we come to the Pacific forest 

 region, where the Douglas fir, Pseudotsuga Douglasii, is 

 the most important tree, and yields, in suitable localities, 

 perhaps the greatest quantity of timber per acre of any 

 known species. 



We finally come to the red wood forests of the Pacific 

 coast, where Sequoia sempervireiis prevails, its congener 

 Sequoia gigantea only occurring over a limited area. 

 Unregulated fellings also prevail in the Douglas and red 

 wood forests, and their supply cannot last much longer. 



Besides the wholesale destruction of forests which goes 

 on in America, and has already driven the United States to 

 remove all duty from Canadian wood, the most appalling 

 destruction is now being annually caused by the floods 

 which pour down the slopes of the mountains, bringing 

 down boulders, stones, and gravel on the cultivated lands 

 below. Mayr has seen standing trees covered with mud 

 up to a height of 15 feet in some of the Southern and 

 Central States, whilst hundreds of magnificent trees lay 

 uprooted in the full vigour of their growth. This can 

 clearly be traced to the destruction of the hill forests. 



How long will rulers of the United States shut their 

 eyes to the appalling waste of the resources of their 

 country which is still rampant ! Brandis hopes that 

 private capitalists may invest their money in forests, 

 tempted by the rapid rise in the price of wood, and may 

 manage them properly ; but all European experience 

 points to the necessity of State forests, and a trained 

 State Forest Service to manage them, as the only effi- 

 cacious remedy against the impoverishment of the soil and 

 natural resources of America. W. R. FiSHER. 



BAIL Y INTERNA TIONAL WE A THER CHAR TS. 

 AT the meeting of the Meteorological Congress at 

 ^^^- Vienna in September 1873, General Myer, the 

 Chief Signal Officer of the United States Army, sub- 

 mitted the following proposal : — 



" That it is desirable that, with a view to their ex- 

 change, at least one uniform observation of such a 

 character as to be suitable for the preparation of synoptic 

 charts be taken and recorded daily and simultaneously at 

 as many stations as practicable throughout the world." 

 NO. I 125, VOL. 44] 



Although various suggestions had been made before, 

 and synoptic charts had been previously constructed 

 for large areas, this proposal was a bold step in advance, 

 as the charts hitherto published— those of the English 

 Meteorological Office excepted — were mostly synoptic 

 only, but not strictly synchronous, whereas the plan now 

 proposed was to treat the whole observational area of the 

 globe as a unit, and to represent the actual conditions 

 existing at the same instant of physical time. 



The proposal was well received, and on January i, 1875, 

 General Myer was able to publish his daily International 

 Bulletin, and tcnsupplement this, on July i, 1878, by the 

 daily International Weather Map. These publications 

 were continued until the end of March 1884, after which 

 time the daily Bulletin was discontinued, but the chart 

 was issued on an enlarged scale, containing data referring 

 to pressure and wind direction and force at all reporting 

 stations in the northern hemisphere and over the northern 

 portions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and this has 

 been published up to the end of December 1887. We 

 have before referred to the abihty with which this great 

 undertaking has been carried out by the Signal Service. 

 The necessity of obtaining strictly simultaneous observa- 

 tions was generally acknowledged after the discovery of 

 Buys Ballot's law of the relation between wind force and 

 barometric pressure, about the year 1857, and it is almost 

 entirely due to the construction of synoptic charts over 

 large areas that so much progress has been made in 

 weather prediction in the last quarter of a century. This 

 progress would hardly have been possible while each 

 country dealt exclusively with its own area, notwithstand- 

 ing the great advance made over the old system of 

 dealing with means of observations by the publication 

 of telegraphic weather reports and weather charts. But 

 notwithstanding the progress already made, we are still 

 unable to foresee what may occur for more than a day or 

 so in advance. Much more research is required, and the 

 thousands of observations now taken on land and sea 

 over the globe should be plotted at least once a day. We 

 should therefore much regret the discontinuance of such 

 work as that now before us, which deals with nearly half 

 the globe. 



To take one or two of the facts shown by the 

 charts themselves : the very severe gale which visited 

 these islands on December 8 and 9, 1886, in which about 

 the lowest barometer reading on record was observed, will 

 be remembered in connection with the capsizing of the 

 Southport and St. Anne's lifeboats near Formby, result- 

 ing in the loss of twenty-seven lives out of twenty-nine 

 which constituted the two crews. In a paper upon this 

 storm, read before the Royal Meteorological Society on 

 April 20, 1887, by Mr. C. Harding, it is stated, after a 

 careful examination of the materials then available, that 

 " the Atlantic was in such a disturbed condition at this 

 time that it is not possible to track the passage of the 

 storm across the Atlantic with any certainty." The daily 

 International Charts, however, show the position of the 

 storm day by day, and also that it did actually cross the 

 Atlantic from shore to shore, and was central over the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence on December 3. 



Another instance of remarkable weather, it will be 

 remembered, o'ccurred in June 1887 — the Jubilee year ; 

 the weather was remarkably dry and fine in this country, 

 there being an extraordinary drought of about thirty days. 

 The charts for that period show that similar anticyclonic 

 conditions also embraced a very large part of the eastern 

 portion of the Atlantic, and extended abnormally over a 

 portion of Europe ; while the travelling disturbances are 

 plainly shown to be confined to the American side of the 

 ocean. 



It is only Government organizations that can undertake 

 the laborious work of producing such charts ; but when 

 they are published, the matter should not be left there : 

 the meteorologist should make use of the materials pro- 



