November 4, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



441 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles : — Forests and Floods 



Botanical Discoveries in Central China 



Baden-Baden Eei-. Henry Ewbank. 



The American Persimmon Professor C. S. Plumb. 



Foreign Correspondence: — Cambridge Botanic Gardens IV. Watson. 



Entomological: — Another Plum Scale Professor T. D. A. Cockerell. 



New or Little-known Plants: — Aspidium cristatum X marginale, Davenport. 



(With figure.) George E. Davenport. 



Cultural Department: — The Origin ot Garden Gladioli Ernst. H. Krelage. 



Hybridizing Orchids H. A. Burberry. 



Orchid Notes.— II E. O. Orpet. 



Perennial Phloxes. . ... William Tricker. 



A Dwarf Stock for the Peach Professor E. S. Goff. 



Correspondence : — Lilium Washingtonianum Carl Purdy. 



A Good Variety of the Jerusalem Artichoke J. H. Van Ness. 



October in Kentucky Fanny Copley Seavey. 



Autumn Color ot the Liquidambar Edward J, Canning. 



Recent Publications *. 



Notes 



Iliustration :— Aspidium cristatum X marginale, Davenport, Fig. 58 



\GE. 



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Forests and Floods. 



IN the first number of Garden and Forest, published 

 nearly nine years ago, there appeared an article by 

 Francis Parkman on the forests of the White Mountains. 

 He showed that these mountains owed the greater part of 

 their charm to the primeval forests that still covered them, 

 and that they brought to the state of New Hampshire a 

 sure and abundant income by attracting tourists and their 

 money. He added that if the speculators who had 

 their eyes on these forest-lands were permitted to work 

 their will the state would find its most remunerative prop- 

 erty sadly lessened in value, and that the mountains, when 

 robbed of the woods, would become, like some parts of 

 the Pyrenees, desolate, inhospitable and unfrequented. He 

 added that the preservation of these woods would save the 

 streams which flow from them, especially the Pemigewas- 

 set, the main source of the Merrimac, from the alternate 

 droughts and freshets to which all streams are exposed 

 when the mountains in which they take their rise are de- 

 nuded of their forests. The final sentence of his article 

 was: "This subject is one of the last importance to the 

 mill-owners along these rivers." 



During the present month, at the annual meeting of the 

 Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, in Manchester, New 

 Hampshire, the report of Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge, the 

 treasurer, was read. He spoke of the ruin caused by a 

 flood in April, 1895, when the water rose to a height never 

 known in the Merrimac River before that day. The water 

 ran ten feet deep over the great dam, which was so seri- 

 ously injured that it took all summer to repair it and replace 

 the granite blocks and columns under the gate-house. But 

 for these repairs the entire dam and the gate-house would 

 probably . have been swept away by the torrent which 

 rushed over it on the second of March, 1896, when the 

 water rose a foot and a half higher than it did in the pre- 

 vious spring, carrying away bridges and compelling the 

 factories to stop work and leaving six thousand operatives 

 without employment. Mr. Coolidge added that the only 

 explanation, in his judgment, for the increasing violence of 

 these floods was the cutting down of the forest about the 

 headwaters of the Pemigewasset and other affluents of the 

 Merrimac. The result has thus emphasized the warning 



to mill-owners sounded by Mr. Parkman and other forward- 

 looking men years ago. 



Of course, there is a great deal of misinformation pub- 

 lished every year in regard to the influence of forests on 

 rainfall, but no fact in physical science is better established 

 than that the cutting away of timber on high mountains 

 and their slopes is the cause of great variation in the water- 

 flow. The rainfall and melting snows are hurried away 

 more swiftly from highlands on which there is no forest 

 cover, and so the high water becomes an inundation and 

 a calamity, while the extreme low water which follows is 

 almost as much of a calamity. This is not a matter of theory, 

 although the reasons are evident and have been frequently 

 stated in these columns and elsewhere. It is the experience 

 of the Old World which is being repeated in the New, and 

 disasters of this sort will be more frequent and more 

 lamentable unless the safeguards which nature has fur- 

 nished are respected and preserved. Mr. Coolidge did not 

 state the case too strongly when he said that if the present 

 practices are continued, manufacture by water-power of the 

 Merrimac will become impossible in New Hampshire. No 

 new mills will be put up, the old ones will be driven to the 

 use of steam, and, therefore, they will be put to a great dis- 

 advantage in competition with other cities where coal does 

 not need to be transported so far. Certainly the situation 

 justifies Mr. Coolidge's earnest appeal to every one who has 

 the prosperity of New Hampshire at heart to exert his utmost 

 influence to induce the Legislature of that state to protect 

 the forests which still remain. 



It is unpleasant to be constantly sounding alarms and 

 predicting calamities. No gift of prophecy is needed to 

 foretell the ruin which will follow if the devastation of the 

 forests of the Appalachian region from Quebec to Alabama 

 goes on for the next twenty-five years as it has done. 

 And who can estimate the desolation which will ensue if 

 the floods are let loose from the still loftier ranges which 

 feed the Columbia, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, 

 or who can imagine the extent of the inland sea that will 

 roll over the Mississippi valley when the water barriers are 

 removed from the eastern slopes of the great Continental 

 Divide and the sources of that immense water system in 

 the central north? Common prudence ought to arouse the 

 legislatures of the various states and of the nation to face 

 this problem now, which is of more vital importance to the 

 life of the Republic than any question of tariff or of 

 currency. 



Dr. Augustine Henry, of the Chinese Customs De- 

 partment, well known to all lovers of plants from his 

 many botanical discoveries in central China, is now 

 stationed at Mengtse, in Yu-Nan, situated in an elevated 

 plain 4,500 feet above sea-level and surrounded by moun- 

 tains reaching an altitude of 8,000 or 9,000 feet. The prin- 

 cipal trees of this region, Dr. Henry writes us in a personal 

 letter, are Quercus (fourorfivespecies), Viburnum (three spe- 

 cies), Hydrangea (one large tree and three or four shrubby 

 species), Sambucus, Rhododendron (two arborescent spe- 

 cies), two large arborescent species of Aralia, ten species 

 of Rubus, two of Roses, four or five species of Pyrus, and 

 Fatsia papyrifera, the Chinese Rice-paper plant, growing 

 wild. Near the summit of the mountains growing in the 

 forest are Elelostemma, Panax repens, three species of 

 Polygonum, Thalictrum, Valeriana, Lilium giganteum, 

 four or five Labiateas, two or three Cyrtandrea-, etc. On 

 lower levels what is probably a distinct species of Pyrus 

 and an Abies resembling Abies Davidiana. Gleditsia Dele- 

 vayi, with enormous pods, a tomentose Fraxinus, Albizzia, 

 Dalbergia, etc., are found. One hundred and thirty spe- 

 cies of Ferns have already been collected in this region 

 by Hancock, ten of them being undescribed species. 

 Dr. Henry writes : 



I anticipate that I shall make a grand collection here, as the 

 country is very varied. Onlv two days oil one descends into 

 the tropical valley of the Red River, so there is every kind of 

 climate close at hand. The endemic species are, I think, 



