EROSION OF UNPROTECTED SOIL : CLIMATE OF THE SIERRAS. 335 



I should not feel that I had performed my duty in the high trust with which you 

 have honored me, until I had called your attention very particularly to the condition 

 ■which the deatruction of forests has produced in the richest of agricultural and pas- 

 toral valleys. 



In following the course of the rivers I have found their beds everywhere incumbered 

 with sand washed from the mountain sides by the torrents that flow down them. 

 These streams bring down at every freshet those materials that are being eroded 

 along their banks, and leave in the place of fertile intervales nothing but vast banks 

 of gravel and sand. The rivers having no fixed channels can neither be used for 

 navigation nor irrigation, nor for mills, for these deposits make it impossible to per- 

 form any durable work of excavation or embankment. 



This condition of the streams is plainly due to the gullying of the hills on account 

 of the destruction of the vegetable covering, whether of trees or sod, which, while it 

 remained, afforded complete protection to the soil on the hills and mountains and 

 sheltered them from erosion. We may see in fact that these ravines multiply as we 

 approach the villages, and that they become less as we pass into the wooded regions. 

 The flow of the waters is regulated in like manner, being almost uniform in the 

 . woods but appearing as torrents when they reach the naked valleys. Numerous ex- 

 amples might be given in which these erosions following the cutting off of woods 

 have been arrested as soon as the surface was protected from the range of sheep and 

 goats and became covered with herbage and bushes. 



I have seen in no other country the destructive effects following the removal of the 

 natural covering so intensely manifested as in Roumania, for the reason that in this 

 country, the soil is mostly alluvial materials— sand, rounded pebbles, clay, and vege- 

 table mold, with no cohesion to hold them. It therefore follows that in sloping 

 places, where this soil is exposed, the finest thread of water traces a little furrow, 

 which soon becomes a deep ravine. The materials loosened by the currents that 

 form on the slopes from the melting of snows or from the rain-fall slide in great sheets 

 to the bottom, overwheming fields and hamlets and obstructing the roads. They are 

 then taken down by the rivers, filling wp their channels, and often changing their 

 coarse. 



The peasants, who have become owners of a large part of the valley-slopes, clear 

 what they can cultivate, and allow their flocks of sheep and goats to range over the 

 rest till all traces of vegetation are gone. Their feet loosen the soil, and directly the 

 destruction begins, the banks of the deepening channels continually falling in as they 

 gain in depth. Wo may at once foresee that in the near future the valleys will become 

 wholly uninhabitable unless a remedy is at once applied to this growing evil. The 

 danger appears so serious, that it calls for the most prompt and energetic action. 

 Roumania should have as much solicitude for its mountains as Holland for its dikes, 

 for it is threatened by its torrents as much as that country is by the sea. 



The remedy proposed, was a law of property, which should stop these 

 clearings, that ruia both the soil and owners, as well as the owners 

 below, and enforce a system of cultivation, that should arrest these 

 damages by removing the cause. The owners in the lower valleys 

 should have the means to compel their neighbors above to take. the 

 measures necessary to prevent their own ruin. In the case of Koumania, 

 it was suggested that this legislation should not be put in charge of the 

 forest administration, but rather in that branch of the service which 

 watches over the public welfare, and to those that have charge of navi- 

 gation, and the maintenance of roads and bridges* 



EFFECT OF CLEARINGS UPON THE CLIMATE IN THE SIERRAS. 



The rapidity with which the woodlands are being cleared off to sup- 

 ply fuel for smelting ores and other purposes of mines in the Pacific 

 States, has already been repeatedly noticed in this report. The effect 

 of this denudation upon the climate is thus discussed by a writer in the 

 Virginia Enterprise^ of Nevada : 



It will be but a very short time before we shall be able to observe the effect that 

 stripping the fine forests from the sides and summit of the Sierras will have on the cli- 

 mate of this State and California. In a very few years every accessible tree, even to 

 such as are only of value as fire-wood, will lie swept from the mountains. Even now 

 this has been done in some places. It is to be hoped that a now growth of pines or 



