S6 Canadian Forestry Journal. 



has at all been attempted, and quite as much, if not more so, 

 than coimtries which are freely accorded an agricultural name. 

 Professor Johnston, F.R.S.E., who examined the Province care- 

 fully, reports that its soil is capable of producing food for five 

 or six millions of people ; capable of growing all the common crops 

 on which man and beast depend; and possessing a climate suitable 

 for the growing of crops in quantity and quality not inferior to the 

 average soil of England. It is, therefore, greatly to be desired 

 that, as agriculture must play a great part in the development 

 of this Province when the population of the country becomes 

 intensified, as we know it will in the not too distant future, 

 a sane system of forest preservation be early resorted to, so that 

 the fruitfulness of the future crop-producing areas may not be 

 radically impaired. 



The third and most generally fertile Province of Maritime 

 Canada, termed by its admirers "the Garden of the Gulf" and 

 "the Million-acre Farm," has already suffered, and is suffering 

 very considerably every year, from the deprivation of its forest. 

 The lands for the most part have passed from the Crown— only 

 about fourteen thousand out of the one million two hundred 

 and eighty thousand acres, are still in its possession, and these 

 lands have been stripped of everything worth taking away long 

 ago. The farmers themselves are, in the great majority of cases, 

 obliged to purchase coal for fuel from the mines of the neighbour- 

 ing Province of Nova Scotia, and building material from the 

 New Brunswick mills. The farms thus bared are not at all being 

 cultivated to their utmost extent; the Island is susceptible 

 of maintaining under right conditions a system of the most 

 intensive agriculture, and one which would sustain in comfort 

 a population five times greater than its present one. The portions 

 cultivated — and they are much greater than those of the other 

 Maritime Provinces, comparatively greater than any other 

 portion of Canada comparatively fruitful as they are, would be 

 doubly so if the requisite forest influences were in full play. 

 There are numerous places completely denuded which nature 

 only intended for tree production and the safe-guarding of the 

 splendid water sources with which the Province was originally 

 endowed. One thought given to the insular nature of the countr}% 

 its situation in the midst of a great wind-swept Gulf and its 

 smallness, will convince anyone that the losses incurred to its 

 husbandry, where unprotected from the blizzards of winter and 

 the drying-out winds of summer, as well as the erosion which 

 spring freshets and fall rains occasion, must be very serious 

 indeed. 



Little more than one hundred years have sufficed to trans- 

 form this Province from a complete forest to its present bare 

 and exposed condition. Then its flora was of the most engaging 



