130 J. H. MAIDEN. 



of the marshes and the deforestation of the low hills which 

 give birth to the river." 1 



Appendix III. — An instance of denudation in the United 



States. 



I will conclude with a graphic account by Mr. McGee 

 of the destruction going on at present to form the "bad 

 lands" of the State of Mississippi. I do not think that 

 truth has been sacrificed to fine writing and do feel that 

 what has been taking place in the Mississippi Valley has 

 its counterpart in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. 

 The quotation is from Bulletin No. 7 of the Forestry 

 Division of the U. S. Department of Agriculture : 



" With the moral revolution of the early sixties came an industrial 

 evolution ; the planter was impoverished, his sons were slain, his slaves 

 were liberated, and he was fain either to vacate the plantation or greatly 

 to restrict his operations. So the cultivated acres were abandoned by 

 thousands. Then the hills, no longer protected by the forest foliage, no 

 longer bound by the forest roots, no longer guarded by the balk and brush 

 dam of the careful overseer, were attacked by rain-drops and rain-born 

 rivulets and gullied and channeled in all directions ; each streamlet 

 reached a hundred arms into the hills, each arm grasped with a hundred 

 fingers a hundred shreds of soil, and as each shred was torn away the 

 slope was steeped and the theft of the next storm made easier. 



" So, storm by storm and year by year, the old fields were invaded by 

 gullies, gorges, ravines, and gulches, ever increasing in width and depth 

 until whole hill sides were carved away, until the soil of a thousand year's 

 growth melted into the streams, until the fair acres, of ante-bellum days 

 were converted by hundreds into bad lands, desolate and dreary as those 

 of the Dakotas. Over much of the upland the traveller is never out of 

 sight of glaring sand wastes where once were fruitful fields ; his way lies 

 sometimes in, sometimes between gullies and gorges — the " Gulfs " of the 

 blacks whose superstition they arouse, sometimes shadowed by foliage, 

 but oftener exposed to the glare of the sun reflected from barren sands. 

 Here the road winds through a gorge so steep that the sunlight scarcely 

 enters, there it traverses a narrow crest of earth between chasms scores 

 of feet deep in which he might be plunged by a single misstep. When 

 the shower comes he may see the roadway rendered impassable, even 



1 A. Woeikof . " De F Influence de F homme sur la terre." Ann. de 

 Geogr. X., 1901 (Quoted by Marcel Hardy in The Scottish Geogr. Magazine, 

 May 1902. 



