March 17, 1897.] 



Garden and Forest. 



101 



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. V. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 1897. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Article : — Congress and the Forest Reservations 



Ceanothus in the Landscape of the Sierra Nevada George Hansen. 



Conifers on the Grounds of the Kansas Agricultural College. — IV. 



F. C. Sears. 



The Arrangement of Flowers. — III Dorothy Root 



New or Little-known Plants: — Cornus asperifolia. (With figure.) 



Cultural Department: — Early Spring Flowers J. N. Gerard. 



Notes on Ferns .' if. H. Taplin. 



Erythroniums Carl Pitrdy. 



Fertilizers for Forced Roses IV. G. G. 



Iris Japonica, Thunbergia laurifolia Edward J. Canning. 



Correspondence : — Horticulture in Colleges IV. E Britton. 



The Orange Fruit Worm Professor J. B. Smith, Sylvester Baxter. 



Meetings of Societies: — National Fruit Growers' Convention 



R ecent Publications 



Notes 



Illustration : — Cornus asperifolia, Fig. 13 .... 



Congress and the Forest Reservations. 



TWO weeks ago we described in these columns the 

 thirteen forest reservations established on the 2 2d of 

 February by President Cleveland on the recommendation 

 of a Commission appointed by the President of the National 

 Academy of Sciences, which has been studying the west- 

 ern forests during the past year. Late Sunday night, Feb- 

 ruary 28th, the Senate of the United States, on motion of 

 Mr. Clark, of Wyoming, proposed the following amend- 

 ment to the Civil Sundry bill, one of the great appropriation 

 bills then under discussion : ' ' And all the lands in the states 

 of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Washington, Idaho 

 and South Dakota set apart and reserved by Executive 

 orders and proclamations of February 23d, 1897, are hereby 

 restored to the public domain, and subject to settlement, 

 occupancy and entry under the land laws of the United 

 States, the same as if said Executive orders and proclama- 

 tions had not been made." The two reservations in Cali- 

 fornia were not included in this amendment at the request, 

 as we have been informed, of the senators of that state. 

 Possibly Colorado may have been written instead of Cali- 

 fornia, as no reservations have been established by Presi- 

 dent Cleveland in the former state. 



The Senate, deceived by the false statements of the repre- 

 sentatives of western mining and lumber companies who be- 

 came the champions of this amendment, passed it without 

 hearing a single word of protest. The following day the 

 Chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands prepared 

 an amendment to the Senate amendment providing that the 

 Secretary of the Interior be authorized to make sales of 

 timber on any forest reservation, now or hereafter pro- 

 claimed, for mining and domestic purposes, and to make 

 all needful rules and regulations for their management and 

 protection ; opening all the forest reservations to the loca- 

 tion of mining claims, authorizing the opening to settlement 

 of all lands in the reservation more valuable for agricul- 

 tural purposes than for forest uses, after inspection by a 

 person appointed or detailed for that purpose by the Secre- 

 tary of the Interior, actual restoration, however, being 

 made only after due publication or by proclamation of 

 restoration by the President based upon the recommenda- 

 tion of the Secretary of the Interior ; giving to prospectors 



and mineral claimants free access to all forest reservations 

 for the purpose of prospecting, locating and developing 

 mineral resources, and according them the right to acquire 

 titles to mineral lands in the same manner as for other 

 mineral lands in the United States. The President is fur- 

 ther authorized in this remarkable amendment to modify 

 at any time any executive order that has been or may be 

 made establishing any forest reservation for the purpose of 

 reducing its area or changing its boundary lines, and is 

 authorized to vacate altogether any order creating such a 

 reserve. This amendment, which was introduced into the 

 House Tuesday afternoon, March 2d, was carried by a 

 large majority, no one opposing it but the representatives 

 of two or three of the western states in which reserves are 

 located, who favored the adoption of the Senate amend- 

 ment. 



The House amendment, on the whole, was more to be 

 dreaded than the proposition of the Senate to annul the 

 proclamations of February 2 2d, because it meant the ruin 

 not only of the new reserves, but of the seventeen million 

 acres of forest preserved by earlier proclamations. It 

 empowered the Secretary to protect and utilize the reserva- 

 tions and to sell timber from them and to open them to the 

 location of mining claims. No appropriation of money, 

 however, was made to enable him to protect and manage 

 the reserves, although he was permitted to use for this pur- 

 pose, at his discretion, any part of the $90,000 appropriated 

 for the general care of the forested portions of the public 

 domain. This appropriation is notoriously too small for 

 the purpose for which it was originally intended, and it is 

 evident that no part of it could be spared for additional 

 protection to the reservations. The Secretary was author- 

 ized to sell timber from the reservations, but there are no 

 agents in his department who have the technical knowl- 

 edge and training needed to manage this business, and 

 until a responsible forest organization in the Interior De- 

 partment can be got into working order the rights of the 

 Secretary of the Interior to invade the reservations should 

 be carefully limited. 



Nor is it safe with the present methods and organization 

 of the Interior Department, and the existing lack of knowl- 

 edge of the topography of the reservations, to trust any 

 ordinary civil agent of the department to decide what part 

 of the reserved lands shall be thrown open to entry. The 

 actual taking of the land from the reservations is to be done 

 by the President or Secretary of the Interior, but this action 

 must necessarily depend entirely on the report of some 

 subordinate who will be subjected to temptations which 

 the agents of the great western mining and lumber-making 

 companies know only too well how to make effective to 

 modify the independent judgment of Government officials; 

 and it is safe to predict that the enactment of such an 

 amendment would, in the course of twenty years, strip the 

 reservations of their most valuable forests on the plea that 

 the land which produced them was valuable for agricul- 

 ture. More dangerous even is the authority giving to pros- 

 pectors and mineral claimants free access into the reserves 

 without any control of any sort by anybody. The first 

 thing a prospector does when he enters a wooded country 

 to look for minerals is to set fire to the woods in order to 

 expose the rocks, and the denser and more valuable the 

 forests the more anxious he is to burn them off. A large 

 proportion of the forest fires in the west are set for this 

 purpose, and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land 

 have been ruined by prospectors, the smoke of whose fires 

 obscured the sun for months last summer in the Kootenay 

 mining region of northern Washington and southern British 

 Columbia. 



In final conference both the Senate and the House of 

 Representatives receded from their positions, and when the 

 Civil Sundry bill finally reached the President it contained 

 only the following amendment concerning the forest 

 reservations : 



"The President is hereby authorized at any time to 

 modify any executive order that has been or may hereafter 



