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America, he says : " with the disappearance of the forest, all 

 is changed. At one season, the earth parts with its warmth 

 hy radiation to an open sky, and at another receives heat 

 from the unobstructed rays of the sun ; hence the climate be- 

 comes excessive, and the soil is alternately parched by the 

 fervor of summer and seared by the rigors of winter." 



Wm. Cullen Bryant says : " Our summers are becoming dryer 

 and our streams smaller. Take the Cuyahoga as an illustra- 

 tion. Fifty years ago large barges loaded with goods went up 

 and down that river. Now, in an ordinary stage of the water, 

 a canoe or skiff can hardly pass down the stream. And from 

 the same cause— the destruction of our forests — other streams 

 are drying up in summer." Almost every work on forestry 

 abounds in evidence that extensive forest denudation has 

 everywhere diminished the flow of springs. The case of the 

 famous spring in the Island of Ascension is often cited, which 

 dried up when the adjacent mountain was cleared, but reap- 

 peared in a few years after the wood was replanted. Several 

 lakes in Switzerland showed a depression of their level after a 

 general devastation of the forests. Siemoni says : In a rocky 

 nook in the Tuscan Apennines there flowed a perennial stream 

 from three adjacent springs. On the disappearance of the 

 woods around and above the springs the stream ceased, except 

 in rainy weather, but when a new growth of wood again shaded 

 the soil, the springs began to flow." Marchand says : " The 

 river that from time immemorial furnished ample water-power 

 for the factory at St. Ursanne dwindled so much when the sur- 

 rounding woods were cut that the factory was at last obliged to 

 stop altogether." President Chadbourne says that Salt Lake 

 contains nearly twice as much water as it did when the Mor- 

 mons came, and that the water supply is increasing throughout 

 the territory, not by an increase of rain, but cultivation 

 and extensive groves of trees have checked the influence of 

 drying winds and lessened evaporation.'* 



* Near my residence (Woburn, Massachusetts,) there is a pond upon which 

 mills have been standing since the early settlement of the town. These have 

 been kept in constant operation until within thirty years, when the supply of 

 water began to fail. The pond owes its existence to a stream which has its 

 source in the hills stretching some miles to the south. Within the time mentioned, 



