white instead of red, intermixed with many a solid acre of the largest and tallest beech, 

 maple and basswood I have ever seen. We used to look from our more elevated region 

 upon this great carpet of tree-tops covering the valley with intermingling foliage, and 

 many of us thought we need keep no timber, we could always buy it or own it there. 

 Well, I was a boy, and ullist needs go raspberry picking one dry summer day, when we 

 had had no rain for six weeks, and we must, of course boil our tea-kettle, or rather big 

 tin can, and apparently the fire went out ; and I am afraid in fact, we cared very little 

 whether it did or not, for it was either long before the days, or far beyond the scope of 

 the three months fire regulations, though they now are in full force in that district. Well, 

 we went home, and about a week after, a column of dense black smoke could have been 

 observed to the northward, and somebody said, " There's a big fire along the shore." There 

 was indeed. The column of smoke broadened and blackened, and extended for weeks, nor 

 did it subside until the heavy September rain, nor was utterly quenched before the win- 

 ter snow. The devastation was melancholy to behold. The forest had fallen before it like 

 grass before the scythe. Our tea-kettle had cost thousands of acres. Cedar and beech, 

 oak and maple, were no more, and in their place, many summers after, a vast white carpet of 

 close standing Canada thistles used to overspread the land. No more reserve of timber 

 for us along the lake. But some will say, " At all events, the loss of the forest gave 

 room for crops.'' Unfortunately, it could not. Nature had planted and cultivated there 

 the only crop such soil could grow. 



The trees, by protection and careful use, could have been continued a source of 

 income for infinity ; but its burning took the top soil of a few inches of black earth from 

 off a carpet of pebble stones and boulders. The best of the soil was gone, and nothing 

 less than three centuries of rest, or the income of a Rothschild could restore it. 



The settler, too, can never fully realize the vast power of the settlers who are coming. 

 He sees indeed, the sixty or a hundred acres on which he has abolished the forest ; but 

 still he sees everywhere the embowering shade ; he drives to the village through avenues 

 of trees; he visits the next farmer across five miles of dense wood; nearly every hundred 

 acres he sees is a hundred acres of timber, but he does not so well understand, at first, 

 that for each there is an owner, and that each piece of good and many of poor land will 

 as surely, in a few years, find some one prepared to clear it, as that each separate snow- 

 flake in a January field will before June meet a sunbeam to disperse it into air. 



If we look from end to end throughout the settled portion of Ontario, we shall find 

 what the foregoing observations have led us to expect. There are as yet, on many farms, 

 portions of forest remaining, generally of small extent. But, as a rule, little care is 

 taken to exclude cattle or to continue in its efficacy the timber plantation as a perpetual 

 source whence many sturdy trees can every year be taken without injury to the continu- 

 ance of the grove. On the contrary, all over our older districts, as any one who has 

 travelled them as I have for the last forty years is well aware, the patches of reserved 

 timber are every year becoming smaller and smaller, nor is there any replantation 

 observable, at all calculated to fill their place. 



It must be thoroughly understood that unless powerful efiorts be made in the direc- 

 tion of replanting, the cultivated portions of Ontario will become almost denuded of trees. 

 The whole force of circumstances and nature point inflexibly in that direction. Portions 



