226 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
observer may be deceived and led astray when only a casual 
visitor to a place. It makes one inclined to log it down as an 
axiom that no one ought to write about a place till he has 
been in it years, or months at least. 
As a beginning, Mr. Brooks laments the destruction of 
the forests, and attributes to it his ill-success in getting birds. 
Then he calls the destruction, wanton and wholesale. But I 
will transcribe a few paragraphs. ‘ Many of these latter (short 
logs which stud the river bed from end to end) appear to be 
stranded beyond the reach of ordinary floods, and there they 
remain rotting away until an extraordinary flood comes which 
will remove them. Such wanton and wholesale destruction 
of the timber of a fine valley is not to be met with anywhere 
else upon the face of the earth I believe. As a natural result 
birds have become scarce * * * * * * High up on 
a hill side a huge pine will be found cut down and rotting 
away, for which there are no existing means whatsoever of 
transport to the river. I found numbers of such trees in 
various stages of decomposition, and some too rotten even for 
removal as firewood.” a * ¢ ~ 
First about the logs. If Mr. Brooks had met with an 
- Ostrich, or even a Moa, on the sands, it would not have been 
a more remarkable thing than the fact that it did not strike 
him, an Engineer, that these logs would not remain “ rotting 
away till an extraordinary flood came,” but would be removed 
by human agency. Had he been a month or two later, he 
would have seen the sands swarming with men rolling the 
logs into the water and floating them off. Unfortunately for 
my purse, most of the logs put into the river, strand and 
have to be rolled in again several times, on this long stretch 
of sand, ere they get fairly off on their journey. What 
Mr. Brooks saw was a mere nothing. In May 1874 there 
were about 3,000 logs on the sands, I have seen nearly 
20,000. It will be a satisfaction to Mr. Brooks to know that 
all the logs he saw have long ago been made into railway 
sleepers, and should he travel on the Rajpootana or Hattrass 
State Railway, he may have them under his feet. 
Next for the “huge pines high up on the hill side cut 
down and rotting away for which there are no existing means 
whatsoever of transport to the river.” Mr. Brooks is a Civil (?) 
Engineer, and it is, I believe, a portion of his work to contrive 
means of transport in such cases. Here is another remarkable 
thing ; a whale, or the great sea-serpent, in the river, or a mam- 
moth or mastodon, in the forest, would hardly have been more 
remarkable ; for though Mr. Brooks, a Civil Engineer, could not 
see it, there were means of transport in every case, and without 
the aid of genii or fairies these huge pines have long ago been 
