44 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
story and song have sunk into insignificant streamlets, 
subject to sudden rises and overflows inundating and 
covering with gravel and sand the former fertile valleys. 
The destruction of the forests of the Vosges and Ceven- 
nes sensibly deteriorated the famous fertility of Elasas 
and the rich valleys of the Rhone. 
The same discoveries, although in a lesser degree, we 
are now making in various parts of the United States. 
The wholesale stripping of our republic’s soil of its tim- 
ber, continued at its present accelerated rates, a quarter 
of a century later will be followed by a long era of 
physical degeneracy and climatic deterioration that must 
sap its industrial and even its intellectual energies, and 
reduce its fair and salubrious bosom to the aspect of a 
South American lano. 
Unless there can be excited a national interest in this 
subject, and preventive measures are set on foot, the vast 
interior of the United States must part with a great por- 
tion of its magnificent agricultural, manufacturing, and 
commercial prosperity. 
I say that the distribution of rainfall in the United 
States is almost identical with the distribution of its 
forests. The eastern one third of the United States is a 
well-watered and well-wooded area. The prairie region 
east of the Missouri has a moderate amount ofrain. The 
parallel of 60° is the northern limit of the forests. Dr. 
Hayes said he had often covered a whole forest, well 
grown, with his hat. This was in Greenland, but unless 
we protect our forests the same may some day be said 
of the United States. 
