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 ive 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 

 not a wise political economy endeavor to obviate such a result in our Western 

 regions 1 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 a? 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 public domain 1 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 settlement is sure. 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 tbau six times tbat of Pennsylvania. 



