78 



Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 



human race is in no way responsible for the changes which have 

 brought ruin upon some countries that were once prosperous and in a 

 comparatively high state of cultivation. 



He says, that an excellent opportunity has been offered, in New 

 England, for throwing light on the question whether disforesting a 

 country does really change the character of its climate, or materially 

 diminish its rain-fall. There is no doubt that New England was, not 

 long since, a country well covered with a forest growth. That it was 

 such when its settlement by the whites began, 250 years ago, is a 

 generally admitted fact. The aboriginal inhabitants had not in any 

 perceptible degree taken from it, during their occupancy, its character 

 as a great forest. Take the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, 

 Connecticut, and the Southern half of Vermont and New Hampshire, 

 where as respects the abundance of timber, the territory has been re- 

 duced from the highest to the lowest condition since the settlement of 

 the country by the whites ; and mainly within the last fifty years. 

 Here is where the observations upon rain-fall have been taken more 

 fully and for a longer period than elsewhere upon the continent, and if 

 disforesting a country is followed by a decrease of the precipitation, in 

 the region cleared of its trees, we ought to find some evidence of the 

 fact in the case of Southern New England. The statistics, however, 

 do not, in the least, indicate any diminution of the rain-fail, but on 

 the contrary, an increase of rain, on the average, since 1835, is dis- 

 tinctly indicated, for the Atlantic sea-board, from Maine to Virginia, 

 including a considerable part of New York where extensive clearings 

 have been made in the last fifty years. 



All about the Bay of San Francisco the removal of the timber has 

 gone on, within the past few years, with the greatest rapidity, but there 

 is no statistical proof that the rain-fall in that region has been 

 diminished since the occupation of it by an English-speaking people. 

 Under no circumstances does our country, in any part of its vast area, 

 furnish any support to the theory that removing the forests brings 

 about any change in the climate or tendency to barrenness and desola- 

 tion. 



The earliest travelers described the prairies of the great west just as 

 we see them now. Geologists tell us they have existed for thousands 

 of years, but no one has heard any complaint about the want of the 

 precipitation of rain in the State of Illinois, which is almost wholly a 

 prairie country, nor that less rain falls in the prairie regions of Minne- 

 sota than on the timber lands of Wisconsin. 



