a mountain range. We passed on further, the land did not now appear so rich. It 

 was still strong and fertile clay, but not at all the equal of that we had left. The oaks 

 were smaller, the maples harder of trunk, and dying at the top, dark masses of hemlock 

 frowned perpetual from the glade, and every here and there the spectre-like balsam, high, 

 gaunt and spire-crowned, pointed his warning branches to the hard, red soil below. 

 However, persuaded by settlers, who at any risk wished to bring other settlers around 

 them, we bought land, cleared it and buUt on it. Other settlers came and did likewise. 

 Then a while afterwards, when our road and clearings had introduced daylight for man}' 

 a mile, we understood what we had done — we had occupied the height of land. The rich 

 slope we had passed on one side was equalled, had we gone that far, by a slope of equal 

 richness on the other side of the mountain. But we had halted, and many had halted, 

 on the watershed, the summit of the mountains, a great table-land of many thousand 

 acres, rich in its uncleared state with springs of water (on my hundred acres I had six or 

 eight which promised to be never-failing), but of far inferior land to that which lay below. 

 There was the great mistake. The authorities of that day knew nothing of it, the settlers 

 knew nothing of it ; and those great slopes, extending many a league, are now cleared of 

 trees from highest ridge to far-distant valley on hither and farther slope, or showing 

 every prospect of becoming so. The inevitable consequences will as surely follow. The 

 land, even before I left that part of the country, was washing rapidly from the top. I 

 have seen it gather eighteen inches deep against the fence on the lower side of a field. 

 As for floods, since the leafy guardians of the height have been dislodged, I have seen a 

 creek which would have flowed in full volume between one's joined hands, with two hours' 

 rain roll down a red torrent which bore a ten pound stone some distance on its surface 

 before it sank. The old forest, left above, would have held the rain in bed, leaf, and 

 tangled brushwood for days, and sent it forth in gentle and gradual streams to the slope 

 below. The summit land should never have been sold for settlement. With proper care 

 in thinning and reproduction of trees, fenced against cattle and managed by foresters, that 

 wide extent of tree-crowded height might have stood for ever a valuable forest, furnish- 

 ing yearly lucrative supplies of saleable timber, and a far greater benefit, giving a 

 continual fertility — by attracting rain, by preserving its former steady and numerous 

 water-courses (seven-eighths of which are now dried up), and by preventing the now per- 

 petual washing away of the soil — to all the far greater extent of far more easily cultivable 

 land below. Let any one who ' knows the district I speak of think how scarce barn 

 timber and even firewood now is there, and consider how valuable a large reserve on the 

 height would have been to the whole country. This opportunity exists no more. The 

 land is in private hands or it is cleared. But we have many mountain ranges still unsold 

 which might be better managed. 



Perhaps I may be permitted to refer again to my remembrances, and to remark that, a 

 life-long resident of Ontario, and in my day largely engaged in clearing the forest 

 besides having had continual occasion to observe the work done in the same line by 

 many of my relatives, who, coming to this country in the earlier part of the century, 

 were mostly farmers, and what was long synonymous, choppers, I necessarily know some- 

 thing of the process and results of clearing. Their axes rung in many an Ontario forest 



in the dense bush near Chatham, among the heavy beech of the old Trafalgar survey on 



