60 FOREST DESTRUCTION IN NEW SOUTH WALES. 



and a very eminent scientist, perhaps the most eminent in his own 

 line that has yet appeared in Australia, was among the chief 

 exponents of these views. It was then, and seems now to be 

 generally accepted that it is the trees that produce the rain, and 

 not the rain that produces the trees, and yet it seems to me that 

 a very little thought will show the converse of this to be true. 

 Rain may fall and does fall in the absence of forests, but it would 

 be somewhat difficult for the forests to grow unless the rain 

 fell first. 



The results of forest destruction at Glengarry, on the Page 

 River, were very remarkable, and similar results have followed 

 in a greater or less degree in all cases that have come within my 

 knowledge in the watershed of the Hunter River. 



All the dry water-courses or creeks that were of any size in the 

 ring-barked country became permanently flowing streams, and 

 even in the small gullies less than half a mile in length springs 

 broke out which are fairly permanent in most seasons. So that 

 a country which from 1847 to 1870 was without any water except 

 that contained in the Page River on the frontage, after having 

 the forest destroyed became so watered throughout its whole 

 extent, that one cannot go in any direction for more than half a 

 mile without coming across running water. 



And these springs and permanently flowing rivulets that were 

 produced on Glengarry by the destruction of the forests about the 

 year 1870 have remained permanent ever since, notwithstanding 

 the severe and very protracted droughts through which we have 

 passed in the last eighteen years. Of course they have been 

 affected by the droughts, and the quantity of water in them very 

 much reduced as has been the case with all sources of water 

 supply in the Colony ; but even in the most severe drought, 

 which ended here in March, 1886, the supply of water in these 

 rivulets and springs was ample for all purposes, The drought 

 which ended here in the beginning of 1886 was, as shown by the 

 rainfall records of the Government Observatory, one of the most 

 severe experienced since the Settlement of the Colony, or at any 

 rate since records have been kept, and the chief characteristic 

 of this drought was the unusually long run of dry years in which 

 the rainfall at almost all the recording stations throughout the 

 Colony was below the average for each place. 



In this part of the country there has not been any rainfall 

 record kept farther back than 1870, and my own record only goes 

 back to 1876 ; but there is on one of the mountains on Glengarry 

 what may be regarded as a natural drought-gage. Very nearly 

 on the top of the Lagoon Mountain, there is a lagoon or small 

 lake at an elevation of over 3,000 feet above sea level, about 

 70 yards in length and of considerable depth. This lagoon has a 



