16 



I visited the planted forests of the Duke of Athole— -v/hose 

 estates, beginning near Dunkeld in Scotland, extend forty 

 miles by ten — in company with Captain Campbell Walker, 

 now the Conservator of State Forests in New Zealand, 

 who was long employed in the same service in India. He 

 said he had personally observed the drying up of springs and 

 decrease of the average amount of water in some of the 

 mountain forests in India, in which extensive clearing had 

 taken place, and that such clearing had unquestionably less- 

 ened the regular supply for springs and permanent flow in 

 the streams and rivers. While I was in England, the terrible 

 famine in India resulting in the starvation of over seven 

 hundred and fifty thousand people — more than the entire 

 population of Connecticut and Rhode Island — was a promi- 

 nent theme of public thought and talk and sympathy. Cap- 

 tain Walker, Dr. J. C. Brown, and other foresters expressed 

 the view that forest denudation, diminishing the springs and 

 lessening the former sources of artificial irrigation, was the 

 leading cause of this terrible calamity. Under the early rule 

 of the East India Company, there was a wide-spread devasta- 

 tion of the forests, and in later years the construction of 

 extensive railway and telegraph lines have created a new 

 demand for timber. Eecently the English Government has 

 adopted energetic measures for re-foresting the mountains, 

 and placed the remaining forests under the supervision of 

 competent foresters. 



In a paper read to the Vienna Geographical Society in 

 1875, Herr Wex, Counsellor of State, and Director of the 

 Government Works for the regulation of the flow of the 

 Danube, affirms that in the last fifty years the decrease in 

 the average level or comparison of the highest and lowest 

 flow of the Elbe and Oder has been seventeen inches, the 

 Rhine twenty-four, Vistula twenty -six, Danube at Orsova, fifty- 

 five. These measurements, embracing the greatest flood 



these hills, which were clothed with a dense forest, have been stripped of trees, 

 and what was never heard of before, the stream itself has been entirely dry. 

 Within the last ten years a new growth of wood has sprung up on the land 

 formerly occupied by the old forest, and now the water runs through the year. 

 Dk. Piper — Trees of America. 



