58 TREE PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



and resident settlers say, "It does not pay to try to suppress the fire- 

 scourge." Were the fire uncontrollable, like a cyclone, there might be 

 some sense in refusing to meddle with it. 



Most of the forest fires are the result of sheer carelessness. Campers do 

 not vigilantly guard against the escape of the cooking flames; poachers let 

 them run; men throw burning cigar-stubs into the dry tinder, and in an 

 instant the woods are on fire; men set fire to their "felled piece," or a dry 

 grass meadow, that their stock may feed on the subsequent .green herbage, 

 and away the angry fiend leaps and rushes, till millions of property values 

 are ruined in an hour; sparks from the railroad engine ignite the combusti- 

 ble stuff along the thoroughfare, and the engineer drives on ahead and lets 

 the ruin go on. As if it would not pay to do something by way of 

 prevention! 



"Do you imagine," says John Birkinbine, president of the Pennsylvania 

 Forestry Association, "that the farmers of any section of the state would 

 fail to hunt out and punish the vandals who would destroy wantonly 

 either a field of wheat or a stack of grain or hay, that represented the 

 growth of but part of a year over a few acres, or that they would hasten to 

 aid in putting out the fire? Yet this same community has undoubtedly 

 seen forest fires follow one another until but few wooded areas have 

 escaped. Its residents can recall numerous instances where many miles 

 of timber were ravaged, the fire continuing for days, with no public protest 

 save against the inconvenience of a smoke-laden atmosphere, and no 

 concerted action towards checking the flames until fences, barns and 

 homes of individuals are threatened." 



Calamities of this kind are never single in effects. Then why is nothing 

 done to pevent such destruction? Men don't seem to think about what 

 ought and can be done. They are evidently dead-locked by the fire-king 

 held as in a dread negation. "The best we can do," say the lumbermen, 

 "is to cut every pine as we go that is over eight inches in diameter, and 

 make the most of the situation." 



SERIOUS INJURY TO THE SOIL. 



H. B. Ayers, who is familiar with the condition of all our wood-lands and 

 well posted, estimates "that two tons of dry vegetable growth per acre is 

 the least through which fire will follow. In the forest, I think as much as 

 100 tons per acre are frequently burned; while the average prairie fires is a 

 consumption of four tons per acre, and of forest fires, ten tons per acre. 

 On this basis over 100,000,000 tons of dry vegetable material is consumed 

 each year in the forest. The effect of repeated burnings is both logically 

 and practically to reduce a fertile soil to a desert. By combustion, part 

 of the vegetable matter which, decaying, would become a store of vegetable 

 food, is passed as gases into the atmosphere, and blows to other regions. 

 The ashes, a small proportion of the whole, lie on the surface to be leached, 

 mostly into the streams; or, if the soil be open, to a depth from which the 

 tardy new growth cannot recover it. What plant food remains on the 

 surface commonly centers into a growth of weeds and brakes which again 



