SANITARY. 87 



horses, cats and dogs would soon choke and die. Without the bell-glass 

 the winds waft away the poisonous gas which feeds the forests. Where 

 does it go to? Why does it not come back again to plague you? What 

 becomes of it? Ask your botanists, your chemists, all the people who have 

 been studying the nature of things since Joseph Priestly discovered what air 

 is made of more than one hundred years ago. See if they will not tell you 

 that animals could never have lived and cannot live long on this earth 

 without forests to purify the air. You may ask the historians, too, if great 

 nations have not decayed and become puny and degraded because they 

 made broad and fertile valleys bare of forests." 



WATER CONTAHINATION. 



The picture of the real is not overdrawn when it is said that the ruin of 

 our forests breeds the pestilence that ruins the city. W r here the water 

 flow of our rivers is kept up and only large, dense forests will do this 

 they wash away the filth of the towns through which they flow, and every 

 new swift current brings them the very elixir of life. Destroy the forests 

 that head the rivers, and they sink lower and lower, and in the hot, dry 

 season they sluggishly float down to us an immeasurable amount of unsan- 

 itary dregs, and the people suffer and die. Such river water is liable to 

 contaminate that of our wells, and what an offensive stench arises from it! 

 It is then full of wigglers, microbes, and poisons innumerable. What is 

 the primal cause of these miseries? Simply we have unbalanced nature 

 by imprudently, avariciously, unpardonably slaying the forests where the 

 pure springs would otherwise flow to us with healing in every wave. 



Prof. J. T. Rothrock, the official head of the forestry movement in Penn- 

 sylvania, says: "Fresh-flowing water which maintains a constant level is 

 in a condition of the least danger to the health of a community. Frequent 

 stages of high water, followed by as frequent periods of low water are a 

 constant danger. It is under such conditions that malarial complications 

 are most frequent. It is clear that we have reached a period when intelli- 

 gent legislation will be required to avert threatened evils." 



CEMETERIES OF NATIONS. 



"Whence the cholera and other plagues? When it is said ''from oriental 

 population," it is not half answered. That population has destroyed its 

 forests, and the very hells of filthiness and plague follow, spreading to the 

 western world. Villages surrounded by forests in India, "are never 

 visited by cholera, and troops are being withdrawn into forest stations in 

 order to arrest the disease which it has been found is invited by removal 

 of the forests." Ebermayer's observations are, that "so far no pathogenic 

 microbes have ever been fouqd in forest soil, hence this soil may be called 

 hygienically pure." 



