666 Plain, Prairie, and Forest. [ November, 
tegrated mass on the surface, as is the case with the harder met- 
amorphic rocks. These are the conditions specially favorable to 
the development of prairies; and it is under these conditions that 
prairies, in the Western sense of the word, are usually met with. 
A few words may be added for the benefit of those who are 
disposed to put confidence in the stories told by persons having 
land for sale at the West, in regard to the ease with which forest 
trees may be raised on the prairies, some even going so far as to 
maintain that building a fence and keeping out the prairie fires 
is sufficient to insure the speedy covering of the land thus pro- 
tected with a growth of timber. The best answer that can be 
made in a few words to these assertions is to quote from a 
pamphlet published by a practical man, Mr. Leonard B. Hodges, 
Superintendent of Tree Planting of the Saint Paul and Pacific 
Railroad Company. His object is to urge the importance to the 
West of raising forest trees; and does he say, “ Fence in your 
land, gentlemen farmers, and your forests will develop them- 
selves”? Quite the contrary ; he especially dwells on the point 
that even setting out “the trees will not answer, unless the land 
has been properly prepared. To use his own words, ‘ without 
this thorough preparation, failure and disappointment are inevi- 
table.” So arduous a task is it to raise forest trees on the prairies 
that the State of Minnesota passed a law in 1871 granting & 
bounty of two dollars a year per acre for ten years and for every 
acre planted with ‘ any kind of forest trees except black locust ; 
and Congress has gone further by actually giving to any settler 
the land, to the extent of forty acres, on which he will maintain 
a growth of forest trees for ten years. ‘These provisions will, we 
think, convince any one that raising timber on the prairies 18 not 
so very easy a matter, but rather something “ going against the 
grain ” of nature. é 
There are persons to whom the position of the plains = 
reference to the prairies will be a decided stumbling-block in the 
way of their acceptance of the views above advanced. They 
will say, “Do not the plains begin where the prairies leave ip 
and are not the latter simply the incipient stage of the former ‘ 
Do we not find the amount of precipitation growing gradually 
less as we approach the Rocky Mountains in going from the At- 
lantic coast, and are not the prairies simply the result of this de- 
ficiency, manifesting itself in only a partial covering of the nse 
face of the forests?” This does indeed seem very plausible - 
long as one has not examined carefully into the facts ; let us con 
