86 TREE PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



Nothing awakens such a dissatisfaction of the country as these merciless 

 winds simoons in summer, blizzards in winter. The only alternative is, by 

 the aid of irrigation, to reforest the plains by dense wind-breaks; actual 

 forests on a scale of vastness. But it never will be done until the national 

 government takes the responsibility. By irrigated forestry on the Great 

 Plains, protecting and enriching the farms there, bringing like blessings to 

 Minnesota, the intense burn and reactionary chill will be broken up, 

 causing climatic variability and more certainty of precipitation with assur- 

 ances of successful crops. Adverting to these meteorological changes, 

 consequent upon diversified environment, Prof. F. B. Hough, in his 

 "Elements of Forestry," p. 16, says: 



"The air in contact with these heated portions expands, and becoming 

 lighter, rises on the air from the surrounding spaces coming in to supply 

 its place. An upward current is thus formed, and the air rising and 

 cooling comes to the dew point, and the moisture becomes visible as cloud. 

 A column of smoke from a burning clearing, will sometimes thus form a 

 cloud, and may cause rain. (In such a case may not the rain be largely 

 resultant of the burning of oxygen and hydrogen, dropping in water?) A 

 country interspersed with groves of trees presents contrasts in heating 

 tendencies fas'orable to these upward currents of air." 



OUR DUTY. 



Our duty is plain, that we must augment the diversity of our environ- 

 ment by tree and soil culture; that we must haste to retain our water 

 systems by the agency of native forestry, and forestry by the agency of 

 our water systems; that we must reforest our highlands, which are unfit 

 for agriculture, where axes and fires have made havoc, else follow the 

 sequences of neglect the detritus of those highlands, damaging floods 

 reacting into more damaging drouths, and thence desert conditions to the 

 ruin of all that makes a state. 



SANITARY. 



VOICE OP THE TREE. 



Voicing the tree as if it were an intelligent being, Elizur Wright says: 

 "Let me just whisper in your ear, my kind friend, that what is our food 

 is your poison. Don't take that on my authority. Go to your chemist, ask 

 him what would be the effect of clapping a bell-glass over Boston. He will 

 probably tell you that trees would do something toward keeping the human 

 inhabitants from smothering in the poisonous gas of their own breath; but 

 they, not being able to consume their favorite food as fast as produced by 

 250,000 people (not to speak of hosses and furnaces), the people and their 



