504 DISCUSSION: FORESTS, RESERVOIRS, AND STREAM FLOW 
Mr. Chitten- a thorough believer in its great importance. He has not said a word 
against the interests of legitimate forestry, but he has attacked a 
spurious forestry which in these later days is trying to substitute a 
shadow for a reality and make the shadow the main issue. Deeply sig- 
nificant is the statement by Mr. Todd that: 
“There seems to be a great popular belief, even among some resi- 
dents of the Lower Mississippi Valley, that deforestation is largely 
responsible for most of the recent great floods.” 
Suppose that this popular belief, which finds its source in the scien- 
tific bureaus at Washington, were to be carried to its logical conclu- 
sion, and the people of the valley were to spend money provided for 
flood protection in pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of reforestation. 
Could the teaching that would lead to such a result, and jeopardize 
life and property for a chimera, be considered scarcely less than crim- 
inal? Happily, the sober counsel of the engineer will always stand 
in the way of any such foolhardy project as this; and although there 
is every reason to believe that, if the suggested bond issue of 
$500 000 000 for improving our navigable waterways were made, a large 
slice would be asked for, for forestry purposes, it is not to be believed 
that the better judgment of the country will ever sanction it. 
The writer insists that forestry should stand on its own bottom, 
and not bolster itself up by the aid of interests with which it has 
no connection. The preservation of timber for this and future genera- 
tions, the maintaining of woodland for the pleasure of the people, for 
their protection against storms, and in many places as the most avail- 
able preventive of soil erosion and the drifting of sand—these are the 
true purposes of forestry, and to the promotion of these ends its 
propaganda should in the main be confined. 
In the further matter of public policy, involved in the location of 
our national forests, the writer willingly defers to Mr. Pinchot’s more 
extended study, but he nevertheless desires that Mr. Pinchot’s state- 
ment, that only existing virgin forests are adapted for future reserves, 
be clearly understood. Possibly the writer has been unduly influenced, 
through his experience in mountain forests, by the great drawback in- 
volved in the inaccessibility of such regions. Hundreds of times he 
has heard visitors to the Yellowstone, in riding through those extensive 
fields of down timber, remark in substance, “What a pity it is that all 
this timber cannot be near New York or Boston, where it could be 
used ;” and anyone who has seen how every scrap of wood is gathered 
up in foreign countries and turned to use, and how eventually the 
same will be true of this country, cannot but realize the importance 
of having our forests convenient to the homes of the people. And 
when he considers the greatly increased cost of lumber from getting 
it out of inaccessible places, and the further cost of transporting it 
over great distances, he realizes still more fully the same necessity. 
