360 Transactions of the American Institute. 



mention, as thej are hardly adequate to home consumption and the 

 wants of England. Then from Michigan and portions of Northern 

 Wisconsin and Minnesota must come all the pine for a vast area ; 

 an area, indeed, scarcely bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the 

 Atlantic ocean. An inspection of the fleet and a tour through the 

 lumber-yards of Chicago will astonish one not conversant with the 

 magnitude and character of the territory to be supplied ; and it is 

 asserted that from Detroit alone(a smaller market) lumber has been 

 shipped to twenty-nine different States in a single season. The 

 demand from this section for the eastern and middle States has been 

 rapidly increasing : and the rapidly settling and extensive prairie 

 states alone will consume an amount scarcely to be estimated. It 

 must not be supposed that the pine districts, so-called, are by any 

 means all pine. The smaller trees, spruce, fir, tamarack, cedar, beech, 

 maple, elm, ash, white birch, basswood, poplar, &c., constitute bj 

 far the greater portion of those districts. Nor is it generally known 

 that lumbermen have already penetrated to the very headwaters of 

 every considerable stream and its branches. "We quote from the 

 Detroit Post of April 16 : " The lumber-camps on the Saginaw and 

 Muskegon rivers, during the past winter, in some places were less 

 than twenty miles apart." The one runs east and the other west, 

 thus extending nearly across the entire peninsula, and the pineries 

 are all in this manner penetrated by streams suitable for 

 " driving" (or floating) logs. Yet, portable steam saw-mills, with 

 their branching railroads, are facilitating the general havoc. The 

 absence of woodland is seriously aftecting many of our crops, 

 especially the cereals, and it is alarming to notice the failure of the 

 peach crop in New York, New Jersey, and even in portions of south- 

 cast Michigan, till recently well wooded. In the strong language of 

 a friend, " Palestine, once a highly fertile and beautiful country, 

 * a laTid flowing with milk and honey, ' is, at this day, a mere brick- 

 yard." Short-sighted cavillers against the Scriptures have' used the 

 barrenness of this country to disprove biblical accounts of its fertility. 

 They ignore the fact that invaders first stripped it of its forest. Then 

 the leaves, aptly called nature's lungs, no longer existed to preserve 

 the rain and dews and to protect the vegetation from the scorching 

 sun. A more modern illustration is in the Island of Madeira, which 

 the Spanish navigators used to view with aw^e as they beheld it in 

 the distance, ever shielded by a dense, overhanging cloud. Its 

 characteristic name is due to that circumstance. Existing? under a 



