DISCUSSION : FORESTS, RESERVOIRS, AND STREAM FLOW 527 
thoroughly understood it would be unwise to remove the forests. In Mr. Chitten- 
the region of the Yellowstone Park, however, of which 85% is covered %™ 
with forest, the writer has long felt that a removal of say one-third 
of the present timber, selecting for this purpose the areas of undesir- 
able lodge-pole pine, would promote every interest which that region 
serves. It would give wider pasturage for the game, it would give 
more frequent landscape views where now the tourist travels for 
hours at a time through monotonous forest, it would give a better 
distribution of snowfall and promote uniformity of stream flow, and 
it would be of great value in preventing the extensive range of forest 
fires. 
Concerning Mr. Leighton’s entire argument, the writer cannot 
forbear observing that if he had devoted a small fraction of the men- 
tal energy in trying to understand what the writer actually said that 
he has in attempting to disprove what he did not say, the greater 
part of his contribution would have been unnecessary. Most of his 
arguments which the writer cares to consider, have already been no- 
ticed. A few remaining points will here be taken up. 
Mr. Leighton’s citation of Dr. McGee’s opinions is simply a mass 
of misstatement which admits of no reply except a flat denial. No- 
where in his paper has the writer even remotely hinted that “there 
is no connection between rivers considered with respect to improve- 
ment and the sediment they carry”; or “that water is the object matter 
of the engineering art and sediment the object matter of scientific 
farming”; or that the sediment carried by a river is at one and the 
same time through and local freight. Until he knows more fully what 
Dr. McGee actually said, he will assume that Mr. Leighton has not 
quoted him correctly. 
It is to be hoped, also, that Mr. Leighton misquotes when he says 
that Dr. McGee “testifies that the Missouri is still a clear river after 
passing the Montana Bad Lands.” If Dr. McGee ever saw the Mis- 
souri River clear at any point below where it leaves the foot-hills of 
the mountains, he is the only person who ever saw it so, and the occa- 
gion was the only one on which it ever occurred. It was assuredly 
one of Mr. Leighton’s “freaks.” Below the point where the river emerges 
from the foot-hills and enters the alluvial bottoms it is never clear. 
The only time that it even approaches clearness is in the dead of win- 
ter, when the water-shed is locked in ice. In the winter of 1905 there 
was a prolonged period of very low temperature in the Upper Missouri 
Basin, the thermometer remaining well below zero most of the time 
for more than six weeks. The small streams all over the water-shed 
were frozen up tight. Curious to know to what extent the discharge 
of the river would shrink under these conditions, the writer caused 
