13 



than in the commencing years of its progress, as the stone rolling down hill at first 

 slowly, flies faster and faster as it continues to move. Much of our valuable soil has 

 already been washed away from the uplands ; many pastures formerly moist and green 

 the summer through, now dry and bare, furnish but scanty picking in most years to one 

 or two cows and a few sheep, and a very large proportion of our arable land, plough it 

 and manure it as we will (as just observed) smiles not with the prj>mise of former days, 

 when, as the proverb says, " If you tickled it with a hoe, it laughed into a harvest." 



The prospect is that if no governmental actions be taken (and I am now speaking of 

 our counties which have been long settled) as soon as the disforesting process is as com- 

 plete as it threatens to be, much of our higher plateaux, together with the long and some- 

 times steep slopes which, facing towards their nearest river beds, form so large a portion 

 of our best land, will lose fertility in the course of a few years to a marked extent. For 

 the rain will fall, the snow will descend, and will lie ; but where disforesting is general, 

 instead of being deposited — the first in refreshing and growth-producing showers, the latter, 

 by its slow melting in the woods feeding our thousand springs and rivulets, passing in all 

 directions under and through the cultivated fields, and yielding to them that moisture 

 which is to plants what the blood is to the human frame — will come the rain in heavy 

 torrents, which, instead of soaking into and manuring the cultivated land, will rush 

 violently across it, melting the snow in violent floods during thaws, and both carrying 

 away millions of cubic yards in solution of the cultivated earth that, had forests been left 

 in proper extent, would have remained, and not only would have remained, but would 

 have been enriched by the slow and beneficial passage across and through it, of those very 

 waters which now remove it from our fields. Nor do the lower grounds escape, for none 

 are so low as the bed of the rivers which drain them, though the fall may be less steep 

 thereto. 



The reckless disforesting, so strongly condemned by many American writers, which 

 has been practised by their countrymen, is now bearing its fruits in the terrible spring 

 and autumn floods which of late years have affected large portions of the United States. 

 The Americans might spare much of their care for the channels of the Mississippi if they 

 would restore the groves cut from the hills which fed its sources. To disforest a 

 mountain slope is to devote the height to barrenness, the valley to flood, and both to parch- 

 ing drought when drought is most injurious, when 



" ExustuB ager morientibus aestuat herbiB." 



Added to this absolute abstraction and loss of soil — and to a much greater extent 

 richness of soil — the loss by cropping, so to speak, in spite of nature, of taking from the 

 soil without allowing the recuperating influence which Providence has placed in position 

 to assist the farmers to perform their work, there is but too much reason to believe that 

 we shall in Ontario, unless care be taken, find ourselves in the position in which too 

 many countries now find themselves — compelled in order to grow crops and feed cattle, to 

 »ive double the labour, and yet not receive the return we might for half the work, had 

 we allowed the assistant forces of nature to remain in sway, and not destroyed the wood- 

 lands through whose agency they benefited the region wherein we dwell. To those who 

 have not considered the matter, these statements may seem overstrained. If my readers 



