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follow me I will endeavour to show them how well they are based on facts, and how deep 

 our need in Ontario of action before the evil increases to a much greater extent, and 

 while the means of prevention are within our reach. 



I have spoken of the cultivated region of Ontario, which has been formed from our 

 best lands — our deep clay loam, and rich limestone country. But close to us is a far 

 greater danger in our inferior lands. 



The province of Ontario is not a broad limestone bed. When we go north a couple 

 of hundred miles, say as far as Muskoka, or a line running from it south-east, to near 

 Kingston, we came to a region of far less fertility, because based on a rock far less favour- 

 able to decomposition into fertile soil — here all is based on granite. There is no lime- 

 stone, there is no lime. You will find yourself as you go through Huntsville, Brace- 

 bridge, Magnetawan, and all the great Nipissing region, considering how cold the country, 

 rather startled to see that very few of the houses are plastered inside, but all wains- 

 coted with thin pine. You will find many large hotels without an atom more lime about 

 them than just built their chimneys; and that drawn a great distance at much cost. 

 There is no lime, it is a granite land. Be respectful, for you stand near the very frame- 

 work of the world, the great Laurentian rock. For my part, I had as soon my earthly 

 station were somewhere else. The land is not that of the old Home District. The rich 

 clay of the other is not here ; it cannot be ; there was no lime to make it, 



" Ere yet the little rills began , 



To feed thy bones with lime, and ran 

 Their course till thou wert also man." 



There is clay; but it is whitish, soapy, sandy : and there is a vast preponderance of 

 soft, peaty, powdery soil. There is much good humus in this, if it could be preserved 

 until a thick clover bed overlies it (and it will grow excellent elover), but it is, above any 

 land I have seen, that in which, when dried and thinned by partial settlement, I should 

 fear the ravages of fires. I have passed over many of what are called balsam flats, 

 which cover a vast part of that land, and though I heard some were richer, yet it -ftras 

 always my luck to be able to dig the tomahawk in the earth a foot deeper than its fifteen 

 inch handle, and find nothing but grey powdery soil resting on powdery soil, and that on 



red sand or poor white clay. There is much birch timber, but largely dying at the top 



the sign of weak soil. There are, left by the lumbermen, many poor or young pines ; 

 there are good beech and maple, but not the beech and maple of the old Ontario woods. 

 There is, where the lumberman has not wrought, much fair pine; but this taken away, it 

 will not be a heavily timbered forest, and it is one which will dry, especially as soon as 

 the settler cuts gaps in it here and there, and thousands of cattle are let loose to do more 

 damage than hide and horn, beef and tallow will ever pay for or begin to pay for. I say 

 what a life's hard won experience has taught me, — that they will dry the land, that fire 

 will run there, and that it is the very soil, and that it is the very timber where fire will 

 do much damage. On the high ridge lands it will burn to the bone. Let anyone go a 

 few miles north of Rosseau (many of our tourists yearly do so) and look at the forests 

 they will see there, or what were forests where the fire has passed, and the bare white 

 rock is visible as far as eye can see, with the ghosts of trees standing, gaunt, black, 

 and charred, in long and hideous rows. Yet this was forest protective of springs and 



