VI. 3 



EFFECTS OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE 

 FOREST UPON ANIMAL LIFE 



IT is a simpler matter to tabulate the changes which have 

 taken place in animal life than to trace the actual influences 

 which have brought these changes about. Most of the in- 

 fluences act indirectly and obscurely, beating against the 

 habits of woodland creatures until the old habits are broken, 

 and the creature reforms its ways to fit new conditions, or, 

 since the reformation of an engrained habit is no easy thing, 

 itself becomes broken in the process and succumbs. 



PHYSICAL CHANGES WROUGHT BY DESTRUCTION 

 OF THE FOREST 



Forests keep a country moist, and tend to equalize the 

 temperature, since they check air currents and evaporation. 

 It is said that Canadian lumbermen can work at ease in the 

 forest when the temperature is many degrees below zero, 

 and when in the breezes of the open plain such a tempera- 

 ture would render work impossible. Professor Marsh thus 

 summed up his study of the physical effects of the destruc- 

 tion of the North American forests : 



When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its 

 vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash 

 away the parched dust into which that mould has been converted. The 

 well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which en- 

 cumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris, and 

 except in countries favored with an equable distribution of rain through the 

 seasons, and a moderate and regular inclination of surface the whole earth, 

 unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, 

 becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of 

 swampy and malarious plains. 



It is possible that Professor Marsh exaggerated the evils 

 which follow disappearance of forest growth says a critic, 

 " Marsh found a fool in the forest, and the fool was man "- 

 but the latest and most thorough investigation of the climatic 



