2 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
it shades the ground too much, or he wants to get a 
bird’s nest that is on it, a few nuts a squirrel has hid 
away in it, a coon off it, or some chestnuts. Any ex- 
cuse in the world serves as sufficient cause to justify his 
act of vandalism, and the axe is laid without mercy to 
the root of the tree. If these individual acts of vandal- 
ism were all we had to contend with we might rest easy ; 
but every year great companies with ponderous mills go 
to the heart of our forests and fell thousands of trees 
that have been hundreds of years growing. One firm 
alone in a western state runs two hundred saws. No 
less than 1,030,000,000 feet of lumber were cut in a sin- 
gle year in the State of Wisconsin. At the present rate 
ten, or at most twenty, years will see the end, and the 
forests of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin will have 
been destroyed. Fifty thousand acres of Wisconsin tim- 
ber are annually swept away to supply the Kansas and 
Nebraska markets alone. -New York has lost her maple, 
walnut, hickory, and has no big woods left worthy the 
name of forest, unless it is her Adirondacks. How long 
she will keep it is a question. In Pennsylvania the 
forests, except small portions of the Alleghanies, have 
been destroyed. All the remaining regions have been 
bought up by speculators, and the trees are merely held 
for a higher market. The fires and the saw-mills will 
soon do the work, and America become a treeless region. 
What difference will it make? ask the careless, A 
great deal, for with the destruction of timber goes away 
much of the usefulness of the country. Did you ever 
see a treeless land, or have you ever read about one? If 
not, ask travellers, or read carefully the histories of the 
Roman Empire, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, and portions 
of Italy. All these regions were once timbered coun- 
tries and richly productive. Now they are horrible des- 
erts, seamed with ravines and gullies, piled with ridges 
of sand, utterly incapable of reproducing the wood which 
once covered them. Behold the naked rocks and barren 
