DISCUSSION: FORESTS, RESERVOIRS, AND STREAM FLOW 545 
will occur any time when the thermometer does not go above thirty- Mr. Chitten- 
two degrees within a short time after a storm. The importance of dem 
presenting as small a surface to the action of such an air ag that is 
very apparent, and it is in storing up the snow in heaps and packing 
it away in deep pockets that the economy of nature is manifested. The 
center of the body will not melt at any time, and it requires. a very 
warm. day to get at the underside of the snowdrift. The grass will 
be growing all around it before the ground underneath it gets warmed 
up sufficiently to start a stream from it, but let a tree stick its head 
up through the crust and it [the snow] will go quickly. ‘I have yet 
to see the first body of perpetual snow lying among the trees. It will 
hardly do to say that the timber lies below the line of perpetual snow, 
for there are many banks which only disappear entirely once in ten 
years or so (when there comes a long dry summer), which have trees 
growing higher up on the same mountain side. 
“In any case, I do not wish to be understood as favoring the destruc- 
tion of the forests of this or any other country. I never cut down a 
tree in my life and never saw one fall without feeling that I had lost a 
friend. Whatever is proven, there will always be abundant reasons 
for preserving extensive tracts of woodland everywhere that trees will 
grow, and it is time the matter became one of public concern.” 
IV. 
The following extract is given on account of its historic interest, 
and because it presents in exaggerated form the quixotism of the Ohio 
River reservoir project which the writer has criticized in his paper. 
It is from a book written by Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr., entitled “Fhe 
Mississippi and Ohio Rivers;” published in 1853, pages 303 to 305. 
“Réservoirs may eventually be made of sufficient capacity to hold 
all the annual excess, and make the daily flow almost entirely uniform. 
The banks of the Ohio and Mississippi, now broken by the current 
and lined with fallen trees, ready to be swept by the next freshet into 
the channel, there to form dangerous snags, may yet, in the course of 
a very few years, be cultivated and adorned down to the water’s edge. 
In the opinion of the writer, the grass will hereafter grow luxuriantly 
along the caving banks; all material fluctuations of the waters will be 
prevented, and the level of the river surface will become nearly sta- 
tionary. Grounds, which are now frequently inundated and valueless, 
will be tilled and subdued; the sandbars will be permanently covered, 
and, under a uniform regimen of the stream, will probably cease to 
be produced. The channels will become stationary. The wharves 
will be built as the wharves on tide water, with little, if any, refer- 
ence to the fluctuations of the surface. ‘The lower streets of all the 
river towns, no longer exposed to inundations, will acquire new value. 
The turbid waters will be arrested in the upper pools, and the Ohio 
first, and ultimately the Missouri and Mississippi, will be made to 
flow forever with a constant, deep, limpid stream. The ice will be 
swept off as it forms, and neither cold nor drought will longer be 
suftered injuriously to affect the navigation. The ocean steamers will 
