April 26, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



181 



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, APRIL 26, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article :— The Timber-supply of the United States. 



Notes from Central California Thomas H. Dotiglas. 



Notes of Mexican Travel. -II C. G. Prhigle. 



Foreign Correspondence:— Some \ew Plants W. Watson. 



Acokanthera spectabilis. (With figure.) 



Cultural Department: — The Cultivation of Bulbs in North Carolina, ^ 



Professor IV. F. Massey. 



Plants in Flow r J. tf. Gem^d. 



Sowing; Annuals J. N. G. 



Chrvsanthemuins T. D. H. 



Maxillaria Harrisoniae M Barker. 



Tomatoes C. E. Hunn. 



Correspondence :— Interesting; Points near Boston C. 



Polyanthus Narcissus at the Columbian Fair E. J. Hill. 



Wayside Planting; by Village Improvement Societies L. P. L. 



Pruning Grape-vines R. A. 



Recent Publications 



Notes ■• 



Illustration : — Acokanthera spectabilis. Fig. 30 



S3 



The Timber-suppl}- of the United States. 



SOME years ago, Mr. Henry Gannett, Geographer of the 

 United States Geological Survey, prepared a paper in 

 vi'hich he attempted to prove that the beneficial influence 

 of forests was not nearly as important as was generally 

 supposed, and that in some cases this influence was detri- 

 mental. In the course of his discussion he urged that " in 

 our arid region, which is dependent for irrigation upon its 

 streams, it is advisable to cut away as rapidly as possible 

 all the forests, especially upon the mountains, in order that 

 as much of the precipitation as possible may be collected 

 in the streams. This will cause an increase in the annual 

 flow of the streams, coupled with greater concentration of 

 the flow in the spring months." A fact worth noting is 

 that Major Powell, the distinguished Director of the same 

 Survey, also advocates the destruction of the western 

 mountain-forests, but for the contrary reason. He denies 

 that this destruction would concentrate the flow of the 

 water in spring floods, as Mr. Gannett asserts, but argues 

 that it would deliver the water more equably to the streams 

 below. According to Major Powell's theory, when the 

 trees are gone the snow will be swept into guUeys, so that 

 the available water-supply of the valley below will be de- 

 posited in snow-banks and trickle slowly into the general 

 circulation as it melts throughout the summer. The notion 

 that for either of these conflicting reasons, or for any other 

 reason, it is a patriotic duty to help on the extermination 

 of our western mountain forests has not made much head- 

 way, however, and no acts of the late administration have 

 received a more enthusiastic approval by the people and 

 by men of science than the establishment of forest-reserva- 

 tions, and, no doubt, the people are right. It is true that 

 some popular arguments for protecting the forest-cover of 

 the hills have been based on fancy or sentiment rather than 

 on fact, but the tendency of the most careful scientific in- 

 vestigation of recent times is to corroborate what has been 

 accepted as the teaching of experience, namely, that dis- 

 aster to the plain is sure to follow the destruction of the 

 forest-cover of the mountains. 



Mr. Gannett has just caused the wide publication of an- 

 other article to show the folly of extending any protective 

 policy toward the forest. The first part of the article, 

 which attempts to undermine the prevalent belief in refer- 

 ence to the influence of forests on climate and soil, needs 

 no consideration here, since no new facts are brought for- 

 ward, and even the unproved statements have all been dis- 

 cussed before. The second portion of the paper is devoted 

 to the question, "Is our timber-supply sufficient to with- 

 stand the great and increasing demands upon it.'" Mr. 

 Gannett contends that it is ; that,, in fact, the timber is 

 growing faster than it is cut away, or, in other words, that 

 we are not spending all our income, but adding to our 

 capital. It follows, of course, that there is no need to stay 

 the axe, but, on the contrary, since the supply of coal and 

 of iron ore can never increase, it is true economy to use 

 more wood for fuel to save the coal, and to use timber 

 wherever it can supply the place of metal to save our rap- 

 idly diminishing supply of iron. 



Mr. Gannett demonstrates the soundness of his proposi- 

 tion by a simple arithmetical calculation. There are in the 

 United States 750,000,000 acres of woodland. On each 

 acre forty cubic feet of wood are produced every year. 

 Therefore, the entire woodland of the country produces an- 

 nually 30,000,000,000 cubic feet of wood. Now, the annual 

 cut is between 20,000,000,000 and 24,000,000,000 cubic 

 feet, and this deduction leaves from six to ten billions of 

 cubic feet of wood to be added to our capital every year. 

 Now, this proof would be conclusive if the original data 

 were correct, but the fact is that these are little more than 

 guesses, and some of them wild guesses at that,. The given 

 extent of the wooded area of the country is based on several 

 estimates of varying value, and no one knows how nearly 

 correct any of them may be. It is well known, however, 

 that much of this territory, which is counted as woodland, 

 is not, in the remotest sense, a productive forest. And 

 how does Mr. Gannett know that each of these acres would 

 yield forty cubic feet of wood.? The amount of timber pro- 

 duced in a given time by any tree depends on the sort of 

 tree, the soil in which it grows, its age, and a hundred other 

 conditions, and the yield of an average acre over the so- 

 called forest-area can only be found with reasonable cer- 

 tainty after close investigation of the whole region. In the 

 farmr-eturns of the census, land was returned as forest which 

 had grown up with sprouts and Blackberry-bushes, and 

 might produce a hundred feet to the acre, or ten. In much 

 forest-land recently cleared, and afterward swept over by 

 fire which has burned away the soil down to the very rock, 

 there is now a growth of Briers and stunted Pigeon-cherries, 

 but it has no significance whatever in the timber-supply of 

 the country, although if let alone it would help to prepare 

 the ground for a forest some hundred years hence. The same 

 is true of the growth of scrubby trees which are extending 

 over ground which has once been cultivated in some New 

 England states, and there are miles of virgin forest still 

 standing which reached its maximum development long 

 ago and contain no more wood to-day than they did when 

 the Pilgrims landed. The chief of the Forestry Division 

 of the Department of Agriculture names twenty-five cubic 

 feet as the possible yield for an average acre of the so-called 

 woodlands in the United States, and in one of his annual 

 reports it is estimated that, instead of adding to our capital 

 several billions of feet of wood a year, we are actually 

 consuming twice as much as our woodlands yield. Mr. 

 Fernow, however, only gave this as an approximate esti- 

 mate, but it is withoutdoubtastrustworthy as Mr. Gannett's 

 assertions or the figures with which he fortifies them. 



To enforce his thesis, that the " laissez faire policy is the 

 best that can be devised for the protection of our forests," 

 Mr. Gannett goes on to " venture the assertion that there 

 is to-day nearly, if not quite, as great an area of woodland 

 in the United States as when the white man set foot on our 

 shores." When the New World was discovered, so far as 

 we can judge from the narratives of early travelers, and 

 from what we know of the climate and topography of the 



