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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



country for centuries has done its work, 

 and I very much doubt if even a rational 

 system of forestry will ever bring back 

 to those hilltops again the magnificent 

 pines which once adorned them. Nature 

 has been too badly treated. The soil 

 which slumbered upon those slopes at 

 creation's dawn has sifted to the valleys 

 and the floods have carried it away to 

 the sea. Nothing now remains but ster- 

 ile rocks which bake in the glaring rays 

 of the torrid sun. 



Speaking of the wholesale destruction 

 of forests and the difficulties often en- 

 countered in getting trees to grow again 

 upon the same mountains reminds me of 

 an example to the point which I once 

 met with in Germany. Some years ago 

 I spent several weeks in the old univer- 

 sity town of Jena. On one of the hills 

 above that city, on the 14th of October, 

 1806, Napoleon fought and won the 

 great battle of Jena. Many of those 

 hills consist of white cliffs devoid of 

 vegetation, and I was informed that 

 something like 125 years ago, when the 

 poet Goethe was finance minister of the 

 little state of Weimar, the forests about 



Jena were cut down in order to create 

 funds for a depleted exchequer. No 

 steps were taken at that time to replant 

 what was removed, and although within 

 recent years many attempts have been 

 made to nurture trees upon those barren 

 hills, no practical results have been 

 achieved. 



The husbanding of the resources of a 

 country is a task which is fraught with 

 the deepest consequences to the welfare 

 of the people who inhabit it. Unless our 

 people wish to see the mountains of 

 Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, 

 Arkansas, and Oregon as barren and as 

 sterile of production as are the bluffs 

 above the city of Jena or the mountains 

 which skirt the coast of Asia Minor, 

 then it is high time that something radi- 

 cal be done. 



But if the forests have been razed 

 from many mountains in Asia Minor, 

 there still slumber beneath untouched 

 mines of every description which prom- 

 ise fabulous wealth, and this compen- 

 sates in some degree for the loss of 

 wealth in other directions. 



LESSONS FROM CHINA 1 



IF there is any one duty which more 

 than another we owe it to our chil- 

 dren and our children's children to 

 perform at once it is to save the forests 

 of this country, for they constitute the 

 first and most important element in the 

 conservation of the natural resources of 

 the country. There are, of course, two 

 kinds of natural resources. One is the 

 kind which can only be used as part of 

 a process of exhaustion ; this is true of 

 mines, natural oil and gas wells, and the 

 like. The other, and, of course, ulti- 

 mately by far the most important, in- 

 cludes the resources which can be im- 

 proved in the process of wise u c e ; the 

 soil, the rivers, and the forests come 

 under this head. 



Any real civilized nation will so use all 

 of these three great national assets that 

 the nation will have their benefit in the 

 future. Just as the farmer, after all his 

 life making his living from his farm, will, 

 if he is an expert farmer, leave it as an 

 asset of increased value to his son, so we 

 should leave our national domain to our 

 children, increased in value and not worn 

 out. 



There are small sections of our own 

 country, in the East an I in the West, in 

 the Aclirondacks, the W hite Mountains 

 and the Appalachians, and in the Rocky 

 Mountains, where we can already see for 

 ourselves the damage in the shape of per- 

 manent injury to the soil and the river 

 systems which comes from reckless de- 



* From President Roosevelt's message to Congress, December 8, 1908. 



