222 GEOLOGICAL SUEVEY OF THE TERRITORIES. 



are but poorly sheltered, if at all, and their farms are worse than poorly- 

 fenced. To the expense of lumber more than to any other cause must 

 be attributed the general dilapidated appearance of our agricultural dis- 

 tricts. Efforts to improvement in these respects lead to a forced system 

 of farming; too frequent cropping and little or no nursing of the land; 

 to thai sameness of production which we have had cause so severely to 

 condemn. The cost of lumber and of wood is already discouraging every 

 mechanical, every manufacturing, and every commercial industry of the 

 State ; for the use of these articles is in some way an important ele- 

 ment in them all. The advancement of all our towns and cities in 

 building and improvement is being now retarded very much, directly 

 and indirectly, by the cost of these necessary articles of life. The cost 

 of houses enhances the price of rent. The price of rent and cost of 

 wood add materially to the general expenses of living, and these in turn 

 enhance the price of labor of every kind, and consequently decrease the 

 production and retard the general prosperity and improvement of the 

 cities and country. If this be the case now when we are so young and 

 our population so thin, when the demand for these articles is increased 

 twenty-fold and the supply decreased in the same ratio, who can depict 

 the condition of our State ? 



"■ We have estimated that not over one-twentieth part of the surface 

 of our State is now covered with heavy timber, and we believe we are 

 within the bounds of truth when we state that not over one-eighth of 

 the entire surface is covered with trees of any description whatever. It 

 is the opinion of the best judges, founded on historical facts and a long 

 series of observations and experiments, that at least one-third of the 

 surface of any country should be forests ; that this relation between 

 forest and cultivated land will secure the most advantageous conditions 

 of climate, and the greatest amount of productions for the sustenance 

 of human and animal life. Fire has undoubtedly been the original and 

 active cause of so great a proportion of prairie or untimbered land 

 within our borders. Being once destroyed, the consequent climatic con- 

 dition of the country has prevented a reproduction of the original forests. 

 Nature now, unassisted by man, can never effect that reproduction, 

 without some great physical revolution that will change the whole fea- 

 tures of the country. That the nakedness of the earth's surface is the 

 cause of the extreme wet and dry seasons in our State, and particularly 

 of the destructive floods to which the valleys are subject, cannot for a 

 moment be doubted by any one at all acquainted with the laws of nature, 

 and the agency of those laws in the production and modification of 

 climate through the forests of a country. For want of space we cannot 

 enter into a full discussion of this important branch of this subject, but 

 will state a historical fact in the language of one of the best authors who 

 has ever written on this subject. Han. G-. P. Marsh, speaking of the 

 effect of the destruction of forests upon the different countries of the 

 earth, says : ' There are parts of Asia Minor, of ISTorthern Africa, of 

 Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes, set 

 in action by man, has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost 

 as complete as that of the moon. The destructive changes occasioned 

 by the agency of man upon the flanks of the Alps, the Appenines, the 

 Pyrenees, and other mountain regions in Central and Southern Europe, 

 and the ijrogress of physical deterioration, have become so rapid that, in 

 some localities, a single generation has witnessed the beginning and the 

 end of the melancholy revolution.' Words could not more truthfully 

 describe the effects produced by similar causes in some portions of our 

 own State. Mr. Marsh continues : ^ It is certain that a desolation like 



