DISCURSIVE. 107 



FACTS TO CONSIDER. 



LESSONS OF WARNING. 



Less than seventy years ago, Bucharia was "one delicious garden, on every 

 side, villages, rich cornfields, fruitful orchards; country houses, gardens, 

 meadows interspersed by rivulets, reservoirs, canals a lively picture of 

 industry and happiness." About forty years ago, a mania of clearing the 

 forests seized upon the inhabitants; they cut down the trees, and what was 

 left was ravaged by fire during a civil war. Result: the waters dried up, 

 the sands of the desert swept over that fair land, and next came desolation 

 and solitude. 



A like fatality arising from deforestation fell upon parts of India, Turkey, 

 Greece, Egypt, Italy, Spain, the once luxuriant valley of the Euphrates, 

 Palestine, and so all around the world where man has presumed to unbal- 

 ance the meteorological forces of nature. 



The present arid hills and worn-out fields in New England, in Pennsyl- 

 vania and other Middle States, and in the sunny South, report the same sad 

 story, that waste and desert follow the destruction of the forests in those 

 once favored localities. 



WASTED RESOURCES. 



We have wasted and are still wasting our resources in fish and game, in 

 forests and water sources, in the fertility of the soil and in other store- 

 houses of the nation's natural wealth, as if responsibility to the future for 

 our action as trustees of this magnificent inheritance had for us no exist- 

 ence. J. B. Harrison. 



ERA OF HUMAN IMPROVIDENCE. 



The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and 

 another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like 

 duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvi- 

 dence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished product- 

 iveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprav- 

 ation, barbarism, and, perhaps, even the extinction of the species. Geo. 

 P. March. 



"So profound is our ignorance and so high our presumption, that we 

 marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being ; and as we do 

 not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent 

 laws on the duration of the forms of life." Charles Darwin. 



APPALLING MAGNITUDE. 



The appalling magnitude of the destruction of timber in the Northwest 

 will, perhaps, be made plainer to you by giving the lumber statistics of the 

 cut of white pine in the Northwest for 1892, saying nothing of the enormous 

 hardwood cut. The number of feet, is as follows : 



