DISCURSIVE. 105 



ROTATION OF TREE CROPS. 



The principle of rotation of crops, as recognized for ordinary grains and 

 roots, should be made to include the forests, and it should be a recognized 

 principle that after fifty or one hundred years of agriculture there should 

 come the same interval of forest culture. Every acre that is cut over 

 simply for lumber or other purely forest crops, should be immediately re- 

 planted to at least the same extent as that to which it has been deforested. 

 State foresters should be commissioned to enforce rational laws as to 

 cutting and clearing. 



COMMUNAL INTEREST. 



These restrictions on personal freedom are based on the principle that 

 the whole community is interested in the preservation of its forests; they 

 affect the water supply, the water power, the birds and animals, the purity 

 and even the temperature of the air we breathe. A lumber state has the 

 same right to protect its forest that a commercial community has to pro- 

 tect its harbor and channel, or a mining community to demand the ventila- 

 tion of its mines, or an agricultural community to protect its system of 

 irrigation ditches and reservoirs. To cut the wrong trees, leaving half of 

 them rotting on the ground; to destroy a forest without at once starting 

 young trees to replace it; to leave exposed hillsides that will send destruct- 

 ive floods into the valleys below; to dry up the ponds, lakes and springs, 

 all this is a loss to the community and an improvident waste, as serious as 

 the careiess burning of the forests. The general good of the common- 

 wealth demands conservative forestry, and it is the duty of the people to 

 enact and support laws for such self-defense. Prof. Cleveland Abbe, 

 Weather Bureau, Washington, D. C. 



SUCCE5SI0N OF F0RE5T GROWTH. 



Lumbermen say:. "When the pines are gone, they are gone forever." But 

 what are the facts? From time immemorial such trees have grown in 

 various parts of the old and new world in the same places where nature has 

 been allowed to have her own way. The pines of Maine have been cut 

 over and over again on the same wild grounds. The ancient oaks of Britain 

 have replanted themselves times without number on the very spots where 

 the Druids worshiped. The redwoods of California and elsewhere yet live 

 among their giant ancestors that date back even before the beginning of 

 the Christian era Despite human rapacity, the great cedars of Lebanon, 

 whose sires were cut by King Solomon for his temple, have repeated them- 

 selves on those shaggy heights a few yet lingering under religious pro- 

 tection. The olive trees of Palestine, and the fig trees, and the willows on 

 the lower banks of the Jordan, under whose shade the nomadic Israelites 

 pitched their tents, have again and again during all the centuries since. 



