WITH UNCLE S%}VS NATURALISTS. FRIDAY, November 6» 1931. 



FOR BROADCAST PUKPOSES ONLY. 



ANNOUNCEMENT : Well, let's get out in the woods a^ain. Every other week 

 our Wilds Man leads us across country for a close up of Nature as it has 

 "been revealed to him hy Uncle Sam's Naturalists of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture Well, Mr. Wilds Maji, go ahead and we'll follow 



4i*4ti|iiti* 



"Boughs are daily rifled 

 By the gusty thieves 

 And the book of Nature 



Setteth short of leaves." 



So sings the poet. But you may gamble on it, that he didn't write 

 those lines while walking through the weeds. Kicking around through the 

 litter on the forest floor is about the last place to think of the book 

 of Nature getting short of leaves. 



But I guess a lot of folks think of the leaf' s job being done when 

 it falls of the tree. Far from it. There are several volumes of Naturels 

 stories right there on the forest floor, I am just going to touch on one 

 of them; which is by way of being a mystery story. And as in most good 

 mystery stories, the detectives have recently come in and cleared up the 

 ECr^stery. 



Of course, you all know that the leaves and litter on the ground 

 around the trees catch a lot of the rain water that falls on the forest. In 

 fact, a good bit has been said, first and last, about the effect of our forests 

 in helping to control floods by holding the water back, and feeding it into 

 the streams more slowly than the run-»off from bared and cultivated ground. 



The leaf litter on the ground under the trees is the most important 

 part of the forest in that respect. Foresters conpare leaves and litter 

 to a big sponge which soaks up and holds the water from running quickly away 

 to swell the floods. 



And it does act as such a sponge, or vast shallow reservoir if you 

 will, Mr, H, H. Bennett, chief of the soil erosion investigations of the 

 Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, tells me that until recently that was supposed 

 to be the chief function of the forest litter in controlling floods* 



But now we know that inportant as that is, it is not the chief thing* 

 Recently at one of our Soil Experiment Stations, the run-off of rainwater was 

 measured from a plot which had been burned over, and from another which still 



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