9 . 
Price. | 202 [Nov. 16 & Dec. 7, 
success has been attained as in the High Alps. Where the trees grow, the 
springs flow ; where cut down the springs dry up, and the streams grow 
less in their channels. There is less rain fall, and the soil retains jess of 
what falls. 
On the west side of France from the Gironde to Bayone, are the Landes, 
or Sand-dunes, which are sands carried inland from the seashore by the 
winds, until they cover 2,500,009 acres, and threatened to engulf the de- 
partments of Landes and Gironde. These, however, have been planted 
with the pine and other trees, and the forests now protect the country be- 
hind them, and the sands have been considerably subdued by cultivation, 
and arrested in their inward progress. 
In Algerian Africa the French Engineers, from 1856 to 1864, had dug 
eighty three wells, which together yielded nearly twelve millions of gal- 
lons of water per minute, sufficient to nourish 125,000 palm trees. (The 
Earth, by Elisée Reclus, 95) ; so that even the desert may be made to yield 
fountains of water, and can be clothed with arborial fruit and verdure ; 
and it may be in this way that our treeless regions of the Far West can be 
attacked by American enterprise. Our warm south and south-west would, 
with supply of rain and irrigation, yield greatly increased quantities of 
semi-tropical fruit and forest trees of most valuable kinds. 
It is the work of reparation of the wrong that man has done to Nature, 
and the prevention of the repetition of such wrong, that must now be the 
subject of our consideration, practical action, and admonition to others. 
Let us first be sure that we are acting upon atrue theory. There are 
those who think that forests have but little or no influence in producing or 
attracting rains; men whose opinions are entitled to great consideration 
and respect. Yet we well know that whenever the currents of air, laden 
with the moisture of evaporation, strike the cooler mountains, rain is pre- 
cipitated. So woods, we may believe, may be so elevated and cool as to 
produce showers from clouds charged near to the point of precipitation, as 
the dew falls by a slight difference of temperature between day and night. 
Men in the valley or plain ofien do see clouds pass over them to fall as rain 
on hills and woods more elevated. We know too that countries have less 
rain-fall by reason of the deprivation of their forests. Travelers so report of 
Malta, the Cape Verde Islands, St. Helena, and in Aragua, Venezuela, ac- 
cording to Humbolt ; and in Egypt, where thedate palm and the olive have 
of recent time been plentifully planted, the rains have become more fre- 
quent : (Dr. Franklin B. Hough’s Report to Congress in 1874, p. 21)... Dr. 
Oswald reports that a rise has taken place in Egypt in the annual rain-fall, 
from 9 to 16 inches, since the increased planting of trees. 
It is quite certain that trees preserve the waters in the ground, and 
maintain the flow of the springs and streams. If trees be felled, and the 
sun be let in, the ground is dried, and its moisture is carried away by 
evaporation instead of percolating into the earth to reach the channels of 
the springs, and these also dry up. If the springs fail, the rivulets must 
fail, and rivers must full. 
