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and too isolated, and far too certain to vanish, to maintain the proportion of shaded land 

 necessary for climatic purposes. But these districts, it is said, give fair crops now. They 

 do not yield so easily as once, nor is the sky so propitious now, as the careful investiga- 

 tions of Dr. Bryce and Prof. Dewey, some pages back, show. But the great point is 

 this, — they soon will, in all human calculations, suffer severely. Now; if the matter be 

 commenced in time, we have yet space, before it be too late, to carry out what all civi- 

 lized countries have acknowledged the necessity of and are to-day engaged in, — the work of 

 making provision for a continuous forest area, and constant supply of merchantable timber. 

 Something can be done, and no doubt should be done, in certain parts of Ontario 

 towards replanting our destroyed forests — destroyed in localities where forest, to improve 

 climate and subserve agriculture, should especially have been allowed to remain. But 

 the great opportunity which yet remains is that of preservation. This is found to be the 

 case in India. The Government of that great country, expending yearly its hundreds of 

 thousands of pounds sterling for preservation and replanting, has not yet planted a 

 hundred thousand acres, while it has improved, is improving, and has to a very great extent 

 already changed for the better, the character of many millions of acres of forest land. If 

 we pass through much of the forest which Ontario still retains in governmental hands, 

 we shall find, here and there, many a large expanse desolated by fire and growing up 

 again, a brushwood choking itself to uselessness, covering a burnt and impoverished soil. 

 We shall find great areas of forest the lumbermen have culled of pine and spruce, of ash 

 and oak. Every here and there are the relics of their operations — the close hewn stump, 

 and, a goodly distance therefrom, the great pile of decaying branches where the head of 

 the tree had fallen ; while the whole distance between, if round timber had been got out, 

 shows nothing but a few scattered side limbs, but if square it is paved with immense 

 pine fragments — short thick slabs whose deep clean cut show the force of the score- 

 hacker's arm, and long lengths of those peculiar chips, slightly connected, thin and broad, 

 smooth on one side, the depth and straightness of which show how deftly the handler of 

 the broad-axe has plied his unwieldy tool, ; and if you come near the stump, and it 

 has been heavy timber squared for the English market, you will find in great masses, 

 hewn off, thrown away and rotting, as much clear timber as, sold at Toronto prices, would 

 go far towards the whole sum the lumberman will ever get for the log. The piles of 

 dehris are everywhere, and form a most inflammable portion of the touchwood of a forest. 

 Then before the strong oxen could drag the great log to the river down which it had to 

 be floated an avenue of smaller trees had sometimes to be cleared from the way, and these 

 likewise piled in desicating heaps, their skeleton branches protruding among the green 

 undergrowth, like the ghastly relics of mortality on a forgotten battle-field, cumber the 

 forest floor. 



You will find many places where trees are choking one another for want of air and 

 light, until in lapse of years some stronger one shall tower above his fellows. You will 

 find places where hurricanes have cut their way through the forest, and the trees lie for 

 miles, as the ranks mown down by the mitrailleuse. You will pass the solitary bush 

 road, the trees which once grew therein chopped right and left into the forest by the 

 makers of the track, where they lie in dry heaps for miles on miles, forming as pretty 

 a fire-track as one could wish to see. And everywhere you will find millions of young 



