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The reason for this is obvious. Wherever one travels in the United 
States he will, half the yea, find our rivers and streams muddy and 
chocolate-colored, laden with sand and soil. What occasions this con- 
dition? The loss of the best part of your’ farms; millions of dollars? 
worth of farm values go down therivers every year for lack of attention 
to a proper maintenance of forest growth. 
The soil is washed by the rains from the fields into brooks and rivers 
because you have plowed to the water’s edge, instead of leaving a belt 
of torest cover along the banks; itis washed from the slopes and knolls 
because you have bared them, and the rain b eating down first hardens 
the ground and then being unable to drain off subterraneously has car- 
ried the soil and débris down the slope, gullying the hillside, reducing 
its farm value, and filling up the rivers, while making river and harbor 
improvements more expensive, and in these you pay the penalty for not 
keeping your soil at home. It is computed that in the hill lands of 
the State of Mississippi alone the loss of agricultural lands from this 
cause amounts to 10 per cent yearly. 
‘The forest cover with its interposing foliage and undergrowth, its 
protecting floor of fallen leaves and twigs, its intricate root system and 
its fallen trunks and branches, first retards the rain on its way to the 
ground, thus breaking its force, and then retards the surface drainage 
and prevents the rush of water which takes place over naked soil. 
And if larger areas are being denuded in a hill country or in the 
mountains, the chances are that both the flow of springs and the flow 
of brooks and rivers are made uncertain, because the forest which acts 
as an equalizer in time and quantity of water-flow is cut off. 
The streams that used to keep the ponds well filled for the sawmill 
and the gristimill and furnished a never-failing supply for the farms, 
how many of them run dry insummer? And yet with the warm rains 
of spring and melting snow, they overflow their banks and swift waters 
carry away fences, bridges, and enbankments, and in the larger streams 
the floods make’sad havoe and destroy millions of property. 
Thus what the farmer is doing on his farm or leaves undone in the 
way of forest management is felt not only by himself, but by a large 
area far away from him, and ultimately the large cities, which depend 
for power, drinking water, or for navigation upon the regular drainage 
waters of the country, find themselves in danger and distress. 
At first sight to the farmer, who sees only his immediate surround- 
ings, if would appear impossible that his action or inaction should breed 
such results, but as all great effects are the result of many small causes, 
so the many little rills and runs and rivulets carrying each its quota of 
water, earth, and rocks from the denuded slope to the river, make the 
great floods more dan gerous than they were before, because large 
masses of water run off at once and the débris stows back its flow. 
There is another influence of the well-placed wood lot, the absence of 
