8 



exception of a few favored cases that have escaped the general 

 ruin, to be no longer capable of affording sustenance to civil- 

 ized man. If to this realm of desolation we add the now 

 wasted and solitary soils of Persia and the remoter East, that 

 once fed their millions with milk and honey, we shall see that 

 a territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which 

 sustained in by-gone centuries a population scarcely inferior to 

 that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been 

 entirely withdrawn from human use, or at best is inhabited by 

 tribes too few, poor, and uncultivated to contribute anything 

 to the general, moral, or material interests of mankind. The 

 destructive changes occasioned by the agency of man upon the 

 flanks of the Alpg, the Appenines, the Pyrenees, and other 

 mountain ranges of Central and Southern Europe, and the 

 progress of physical deterioration, have become so rapid that 

 in some localities a single generation has witnessed the begin- 

 ning and the end of the melancholy revolution. A destruction 

 like that which has overwhelmed many once beautiful and 

 fertile regions of Europe awaits an important part of the ter- 

 ritory of the United States, unless prompt measures are taken 

 to check the action of the destructive causes already in 

 operation." 



Indeed we have already a great Sahara in Connecticut pro- 

 duced by improvidence and neglect. The local traditions tell us 

 that the ''sand-blow," covering so large an area in the towns 

 of North Haven and Wallingford, which, with its clouds 

 of dust, is a literal eye-sore to all travelers on the New Haven 

 & Hartford Railway, was once finely wooded. Here and 

 there clumps of low cedars and pines, the lone relics of a 

 former growth, still resist the drifting sands. So general is 

 the conviction that this sand blow is utterly irreclaimable 

 that it has long since been abandoned to hopeless sterility. 

 I shall be happily disappointed if my plan for utilizing it is 

 not regarded by many farmers as visionary and impracticable. 

 The feasibility of reclaiming the barren sands of Connecti- 

 cut, even the wastes of Wallingford and North Haven, is 

 proved by many facts. While agent of the Massachusetts 

 State Board of Education I visited every town of that State, 



