The Forests of Canada. 



which has been lost through forestjfires in Canada is almost 

 incredible, and can only be appreciated by those who have 

 travelled much in our northern districts. The proportion 

 of white and red pine which has been thus swept away in 

 the Ottawa Valley and in the St. Maurice and Georgian 

 Bay regions, is estimated by the lumbermen as many times 

 greater than all that has been cut by the axe. Yet all this 

 is insignificant in quantity compared with the pine, spruce, 

 cedar, larch, balsam, etc., which has been destroyed by this 

 means in the more northern latitudes all the way from the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence to Nelson River, and thence north- 

 westward. It is true that the commercial value of this 

 timber was not so great as that of the more southern pine 

 regions which have also been partially luined. The total 

 quantities which have disappeared are almost incalculable, 

 but even a rough estimate of the amount for each hundred 

 or thousand square miles shows it to have been enormous, 

 and of serious national consequence. The writer had 

 traversed these great regions in many directions, and could 

 testify to the widespread devastation which had taken 

 place. Nearly every district was more or less burnt, the 

 portions which had been overrun by fire usually exceeding 

 those which remained green. These northern coniferous 

 forests were more liable than others to be thus destroyed. 

 In the summer weather, when their gummy tops and the 

 mossy ground are alike dry, they burn with almost explo- 

 sive rapidity. Small trees are thickly mingled with the 

 larger ones, and they all stand so closely together that their 

 compact branches touch each other, thus forming a sufiicient, 

 ly dense fuel to support a continuous sheet of flame on a grand 

 scale. Before a high wind the tire sweeps on with a roaring 

 noise, and at a rate which prevents the birds and beasts from 

 escaping. Thus, in one day, the appearance which a large 

 tract of country is to wear for a hundred years maybe com- 

 pletely altered. After a time the burnt district becomes 

 overgrown, first with shrubs and bushes, then with aspens 

 and white birches, among which coniferous trees by-and-by 

 appear j but finally at the end of a hundred and fifty years 

 or more they regain possession of the burnt tract. This 



