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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 729 



the preservation of the forests, and it is 

 criminal to permit individuals to purchase 

 a little gain for themselves through the 

 destruction of forests when this destruc- 

 tion is fatal to the vpell-being of the whole 

 country in the future. 



Action should be begun forthwith, dur- 

 ing the present session of the congress, for 

 the improvement of our inland waterways 

 — action which will result in giving us not 

 only navigable but navigated rivers. We 

 have spent hundreds of millions of dollars 

 upon these waterways, yet the traffic on 

 nearly all of them is steadily declining. 

 This condition is the direct result of the 

 absence of any comprehensive and far- 

 seeing plan of waterway improvement. 

 Obviously we can not continue thus to ex- 

 pend the revenues of the government with- 

 out return. It is poor business to spend 

 money for inland navigation unless we get 

 it. 



Inquiry into the condition of the Mis- 

 sissippi and its principal tributaries re- 

 veals very many instances of the utter 

 waste caused by the methods which have 

 hitherto obtained for the so-called "im- 

 provement" of navigation. X striking in- 

 stance is supplied by the "improvement" 

 of the Ohio, which, begun in 1824, was con- 

 tinued under a single plan for half a cen- 

 tury. In 1875 a new plan was adopted 

 and followed for a quarter of a century. 

 In 1902 still a different plan was adopted 

 and has since been pursued at a rate which 

 only promises a navigable river in from 

 twenty to one hundred years longer. 



Such short-sighted, vacillating, and 

 futile methods are accompanied by decreas- 

 ing water-borne commerce and increasing 

 traffic congestion on land, by increasing 

 floods, and by the waste of public money. 

 The remedy lies in abandoning the methods 

 which have so signally failed and adopting 

 new ones in keeping with the needs and 

 demands of our people. 



In a report on a measure introduced at 

 the first session of the present congress, the 

 secretary of war said: "The chief defect 

 in the methods hitherto pursued lies in 

 the absence of executive authority for 

 originating comprehensive plans covering 

 the country or natural divisions thereof." 

 In this opinion I heartily concur. The 

 present methods not only fail to give us 

 inland navigation, but they are injurious 

 to the army as well. What is virtually a 

 permanent detail of the corps of engineers 

 to civilian duty necessarily impairs the 

 efficiency of our military establishment. 



The military engineers have undoubt- 

 edly done efficient work in actual construc- 

 tion, but they are necessarily unsuited by 

 their training and traditions to take the 

 broad view, and to gather and transmit 

 to the congress the commercial and in- 

 dustrial information and forecasts, upon 

 which waterway improvement must always 

 so largely rest. Furthermore, they have 

 failed to grasp the great underlying fact 

 that every stream is a unit from its source 

 to its mouth, and that all its uses are inter- 

 dependent. 



Prominent officers of the engineer corps 

 have recently even gone so far as to assert 

 in print that waterways are not dependent 

 upon the conservation of the forests about 

 their headwaters. This position is op- 

 posed to all the recent work of the scien- 

 tific bureaus of the government and to the 

 general experience of mankind. A physi- 

 cian who disbelieved in vaccination would 

 not be the right man to handle an epidemic 

 of smallpox, nor should we leave a doctor 

 sceptical about the transmission of yellow 

 fever by the Stegomyia mosquito in charge 

 of sanitation at Havana or Panama. So 

 with the improvement of our rivers; it is 

 no longer wise or safe to leave this great 

 work in the hands of men who fail to grasp 

 the essential relations between navigation 

 and general development and to assimilate 



