ECONOMIC. 57 



RECKLESS WASTES. 



Take the country over, it is safe to say that ten per cent of our soil runs 

 off into the streams and rivers, utterly lost to us. We are thus losing the 

 best part of our farms. Silly men, what have we been doing to impoverish 

 our lands and pockets? Why, we have planted to the water's edge; plowed 

 the slopes and inclined plains, without making any provision whatever to 

 prevent waste of soil, till, in some places, it becomes sterile as that of 

 Sahara. Not infrequently we have thus bared it to the under-stratum of 

 gravel and clay. Heavy showers and hot suns have hardened what is left, 

 preventing the water from soaking down for subterranean drainage, and 

 away goes the soil and debris down the slope, reducing the value of the 

 farm, piling it into the rivers, making harbor improvements more expensive; 

 and then men wonder why they have poor crops. 



NEXT THE FLOOD. 



Small causes combined produce great results. " The numerous tiny 

 rills and runs, scarcely noticed by the farmer, center their quota in the 

 river, multiplying at every advance, and then the flood, carrying off our 

 soil, drowning cities and villages, destroying immeasurable property and 

 many lives." People look on dazed and call it "the anger of God;" and it 

 is His anger in the sense of reaping what we have sown the penalty of , 

 neglect and misuse. Only a forest economically managed can prevent thece 

 wastes and ruins. "The forest cover with its interposing foliage and 

 undergrowth, its protecting floor of fallen leaves and twigs, its intricate 

 root system and its fallen trunks and branches, first retard the rain on its 

 way to the ground, thus breaking its force, and then retard the surface 

 drainage and prevent the rush of water which takes place over naked soil." 



FOREST FIRES. 



Travel on what line we may, we are confronted with burnt districts. 

 All along for miles upon miles it is one continuous blackness of despair. 

 The tamaracks in the swamps are swept down as by a cyclone. Here and 

 there stands a dead pine amid the dread solitude. Among the black stumps 

 some forlorn poplars are trying to get a foothold a sad retrogression of 

 our timber lands. Farther back from the railroad here and there are 

 clumps of living trees, but without exception in every place where the 

 pines have been recently cut and huge piles of refuse left, the ruinous 

 effects of fire are seen in all their terrors. In other localities, where limbs 

 and leaves have accumulated for years, the fires have also swept and killed 

 all the young growth, and more or less injured the large trees. See how 

 their angry tongues have lapped to death the yellow and white birches, 

 even eating far down into their roots! These and valuable pines and oaks 

 are a prey for worms. 



Millions of dollars worth of property, consisting of timber, camps, 

 implements and hay-stacks are destroyed every year. Remote homes 

 are burned up, and sometimes whole villages, and hundreds of lives lost, 

 and yet absolutely nothing is done to avert such calamities. Lumbermen 



