" We must have the land," said the settlers, " we don't want any boards, and there's 

 no sale for it in town." A hundred miles north of Toronto, and within fourteen of a rail- 

 road, I hare known heap after heap, acre after acre, square mile after square mile till the 

 ■forest was gone, where the splendid and massive rock elms, three to even six feet throuo'h 

 at the butt, the long clear basswood, good for many a use, the straight logs of valuable 

 ■cherry timber, and equally valuable red oak, with beech and maple, hemlock and iron- 

 wood, uncounted and uncountable, arose in smoke, a sacrifice to the Goddess of Ignorance 

 throughout the length and breath of the land. 



But one will say, "The land has to be cleared." Yes, and no. It was necessary 

 indeed to obtain land for the plough, but what I shall endeavour to shew in these pages, 

 is that, had great reserves of the inferior lands, and of the mountain lands, been spared 

 the axe, in proper and intermediate positions, good and constant succession of trees, and 

 large supply of timber might have been obtained therefrom, while the land which was 

 cleared would not only have yielded larger crops than the present much broader acreage 

 affords, but would have yielded them at a much smaller cost of anxiety and labour. This 

 point once demonstrated, we shall probably obtain some valuable ideas as to the road to 

 be travelled in utilizing the forests which yet remain to us. 



In the settlement of woodlands, such as Ontario was once entirely, it would be well 

 that those entrusted with the duty of choosing the sections to be occupied by new comers, 

 should reserve large portions of inferior land for forest purposes. The settler here, in 

 many cases, cleared, much to his own injury, hill, swamp, sand and hard pan which might 

 well have been left untouched, while there was, at no great distance, plenty of excellent 

 land. That poor land, left in forest, would have, by its climatic influence, rendered much 

 more easy, and consequently, much more lucrative, the production of crops on the other, 

 and would also, if fairly used, have continued an inexhaustible reserve of timber, of fire- 

 wood, and of fence. 



Allow me to give an instance of my own experience in this matter, illustrative of 

 the way in which heights of land, which should above all have been kept in forest, have 

 been carelessly deforested in Ontario. On one of my expeditions many years back, 

 undertaken in company with some other young men for the purpose of choosing farms 

 iimong the vast forests then existing in the Province, after travelling a good many miles, 

 we came to a district where there was evidently much good land, none of which, however, 

 seemed at that time to be in the market. It was a broad and a splendid forest, dense 

 with vast elm and heavy oak. There on all sides rose the mighty maple, rich in promise 

 of sap and overflowing trough, intermixed with many a lofty basswood not unsuga;estive 

 of futures even sweeter, for amid the blossoms thick among its massing foliage, high over- 

 head in buzzing millions the wild bees toiled and sang. Here and there, perhaps miles 

 apart, a settler had cleared a limited rectangular space, his small log barn and smaller 

 house half hidden by the waving luxuriance of his little patch of Indian corn, his field of 

 wheat, his bit of meadow, where, tall, interweaving with each other, and covered with 

 dull red flowers the clover and timothy, vigorous from the untired soil, climbed high 

 against and even overtopped the four-foot fences. All here was deep and loamy clay. 

 Travelling through continual and overhanging forest, we were not aware of the elevation, 

 but in fact the country through which we were passing was the gradually arising slope of 



