34 BOTANY. 
Gulf of Mexico without passing through a forest five miles in extent, or 
large enough to be indicated on the map.” Then, again: “The woodlands 
of the East are separated from those of the West by a broad treeless plain 
from six to fifteen degrees wide.” It may be worth noting also that there 
is in these States and Territories an absolute want of a hard wood like 
our Eastern hickory, and almost no large growth of oak, such as we find here. 
The statement has been made that in the State of Texas there is an area 
four times as large as the State of Pennsylvania, over which there is neither 
a tree nor a shrub.* Making allowance for the extravagance of this asser- 
tion, it is sufficient to indicate how wide are its treeless areas. 
In view, then, of the acknowledged fact that in our older and more 
densely populated States we have an impending dearth of timber, would 
nota wise political economy endeavor to obviate such a result in our Western 
regions? Tree destruction began with us as a-necessity, but it has been 
matured into an instinct. With the comparatively small quantity of timber 
actually growing in the Western Territories, with the certainty of a demand 
for an enormous quantity as these regions are opened up, does it not appear 
that some restriction should be imposed on the almost ruthless destruction of 
the forests on the publicdomain? Take for example the Santa Rita Mountains 
in Southern Arizona, from which probably all the available timber will be 
removed before the real current of a steady and substantial immigration . 
shall have set into the neighboring Sanoita Valley. Or the instance fur- 
nished by Kern County in California might be still more in point, as its 
speedy settlementissure. Yet, actually in advance of this, what timber there 
is, is actually being swept away. Mr. John Muir’s paper on the Post-Glacial 
History of the Sequoia gigantea, in the Proceedings of the American Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Science, 1876, page 252, puts the case very 
strongly. He tells us that ‘one sawmill on the Kaweah cut over 2,000,000 
feet of ‘big tree’ lumber last season” (1875), “and that in these milling 
operations waste far exceeds use, for after the choice young manageable trees 
on any given spot have been felled, the woods are fired to clear the ground — 
of limbs and refuse with reference to further operations, and of course most 
of the seedlings and saplings are destroyed.” Then, too, come the destruc- 
* The entire area of Texas being less than six times that of Pennsyivania. 
