American F'orkst Congress 27 



pleasant ones, where people even flock for their recre- 

 ation and their health. 



The same careful and methodical policy is being 

 introduced in our colonial dominions. There the dif- 

 ficulties are sometimes very great, because the havoc 

 has been more complete. We try, for example, to 

 reinduce trees to give back to Southern Tunis its 

 pristine fertility. Most of it is now a sand desert. 

 What it was in Roman times we know by the ruins and 

 the inscriptions. The capital of the South, Suffetula, 

 as it was called, consists now in scattered ruins in the 

 midst of absolute desert. One of the inscriptions dis- 

 covered contains a description given by an old Roman 

 veteran of what his villa was. He had retired there 

 after his campaigns, and describes the trees, the plots 

 of grass, and the fluent waters which adorned his 

 retreat — now buried under the shroud of the desert 

 sand. 



The Arab conquest destroyed all the trees there, and 

 killed the forest. The punishment was not long to 

 follow. No forest there. No men. Not long after 

 the conquest, the mischief was already considerable, 

 the land was desolate, and an Arab chronicler, seeing 

 the havoc done, recalled in his book the former times 

 of prosperity, adding: "But in those days, one could 

 walk from Tripoli to Tunis in the shade/' 



I shall add only one word. There are, as you know 

 full well, two great classes of forests, and no more. 

 There is the wild forest and there is the civilized forest. 

 People who know forests only through books — I mean 

 through bad books, not the books written by members 

 of this assembly — fancy that the wild forest is the 

 thing. A time there was, too, when people thought 

 that the wild man, the man in the state of nature, was 

 a nest of virtues, and that, leading a kind of simple 



