30 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



the instance of Governor Morton of Nebraska.^* In the following year, 

 F. B. Hough wrote at considerable length regarding the "growing 

 tendency to floods and droughts," asserting that it could "be directly 

 ascribed to clearing of woodlands, by which the rains quickly find 

 their way into the streams, often swelling them into destructive floods, 

 instead of sinking into the earth to reappear as springs." Leonard B. 

 Hodges, one of the foremost of the early conservationists, did more 

 than preach, for in 1874 he issued his "Practical Suggestions on 

 Forest-Tree Planting in Minnesota," and, as superintendent of tree 

 planting for the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, he did a great deal to 

 stimulate timber planting on the prairies. In 1876, James Little of 

 Montreal, one of the earliest writers on forestry, called attention to 

 the rapid destruction of timber in Canada and in the United States, 

 and presented a vast array of statistics to prove that a single decade 

 •would "make a clean sweep of every foot of commercial wood in the 

 United States east of the Pacific slope." The Centennial Exhibition 

 at Philadelphia in 1876 had an exhibit in the interests of forestry. It 

 was in 1876 also that the first forestry associations were formed — the 

 American Forestry Association at Philadelphia, and a state associa- 

 tion at St. Paul, Minnesota. The American Forestry Association 

 never thrived, and was later (1882) absorbed into a new association. 

 In 1877, F. L. Oswald wrote in the Popular Science Monthly con- 

 cerning the sanitary influence of trees : "Forests exhale oxygen, the 

 life-air of flames and animal lungs, and absorb or neutralize a variety 

 of noxious gases. Scirrhous affections of the skin and other diseases 

 disappear under the disinfecting influence of forest air. Dr. Brehm 

 observes that ophthalmia and leprosy, which have become hereditary 

 diseases, not only in the valley of the Nile, but also in the tablelands 

 of Barca and Tripoli, are utterly unknown in the well timbered valley 

 of Abyssinia, though the Abyssinians live more than a hundred geo- 

 graphical miles nearer the equator than their afflicted neighbors. . . . 

 Since the Portuguese have felled their glorious forests (those on the 



28 According to some accounts, the arbor day idea originated in 1865, with B. G. 

 Northup, secretary of the Connecticut Board of Education. Dr. Fernow thinks per- 

 haps the institution of arbor day hurt the forestry movement by leading people into 

 the misconception that forestry consists in tree planting. {Forestry and Irrigation, 

 Apr., 1908, 201: Fernow, "Economics of Forestry," 379: Proceedings, Am. Assoc, 

 for the Advancement of Science, 1873, 2.) 



