Dec. 9, 1893.J 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



491 



springs whicli broke out all along the base of the eastern 

 hills, and here, at last, we come to the point of my story. 

 For years past the supply of water from these springs has 

 been becoming more and more uncertain as the hills 

 were stripped of their clothing of wood, and the difficulty 

 became serious last year, in the late summer of 1893. 

 This was followed by a very cold January this year, 1893, 

 with but little snow, and the consequence was that nearly 

 all the lead pipes from the springs froze up and burst, 

 giving the village plumber all the business he could 

 attend to for many weeks this spring, and freezing all the 

 email brooks up solid, and destroying all the trout, for 

 which this section was once famed. 



Although occasional showers have kept the surface of 

 the ground in a moister condition this year, so that agri- 

 culture has not been materially interfered with , yet there 

 has not been rain enough to fill the springs, and many 

 families are to-day suffering from want of their accus- 

 tomed supply of water. 



This may seem trivial, but the greatest results are 

 brought about from an accumulation of small causes, and 

 there are probably hundreds of New England villages 

 that can tell the same story of the extinction or diminu- 

 tion of their water supply, due to the destruction of the 

 forests, 



"Many a little makes a mickle," as the old Scotch pro- 

 verb says, and these notes of the effects of forest destruc- 

 tion in one New Hampshire village, multiplied by the 

 number of instances to which it is equally applicable, 

 show the serious dangers which threaten our water 

 supply. 



There is still another point of importance to New 

 Hampshire which at first sight might be sneered at by 

 the "Gradgrind" school of political economists, and that 

 is the value of the forests to the State as an attraction to 

 summer visitors. 



Independent of the great beauty they add to the scenery, 

 and the welcome shade they offer in the heats of sum- 

 mer to the mountain climber and the glen explorer, they 

 keep the streams full and supply the lover of field sports 

 witli that most delightful of all recreations, trout fishing, 

 which is one of the great attractions to the hosts of visi- 

 tors to the White Mountains, who on a conservative esti- 

 mate are said to leave in the State $5,000,000 annually. 



To return to my observation of facts as a practical and 

 pertinent illustration. Up to the time of opening the 

 Connecticut River system of railroads, up this valley in 

 1847-9, the ranges of hills on either side the river were 

 practically heavily clothed with hard wood timber, maple, 

 oak, beech, birch and chestnut, with a few remaining 

 pines and hemlocks. 



The great bulk of the pine timber had been cleared 

 years before, though I well remember, when a small boy, 

 more than sixty years ago, being taken by my father to 

 see the bonfires one evening, where they were burning the 

 pine logs in piles, where they were cut to clear a small 

 piece of land near the village. There were a few old Nor- 

 way pines left on top of the Vermont ridge, and some 

 small lots of white pines belonging to old estates. The 

 Norways have long since gone, and aU the white pines ex- 

 cept a few which served to mark the boundary lines, or 

 grew on ledges or ridges inaccessible to any mode of con- 

 veyances. The straight oaks and chestnuts were con- 

 verted into railway sleepers and ties as fast as possible, 

 and the tops and branches used for fuel for the engines. 

 Luckily for the lovers of the forests, coal is now cheaper 

 than wood, and the roads all burn that for fuel instead, 

 and it is rapidly coming into use for all domestic purposes, 

 for which, on the basis that one ton of coal is equal to two 

 cords of wood, it is cheaper. 



The destruction of the old chestnuts and oaks has ex- 

 terminated the gray squirrels, of which my gun furnished 

 many a good famUy dinner fifty years ago. and the trout 

 brooks, from which my rod secured many a Sunday's 

 breakfast in spring and early summer, are deserted for- 

 ever by their spotted denizens, who have either been 

 boiled or frozen. 



A dozen or more years ago when, as a member of the 

 New Hampshire Fish and Game Commission, I was ex- 

 amining the waters of the State with a riew of restocking 

 them, and particularly of restoring the salmon to the 

 Slerrimac and Connecticut rivers, in both of which they 

 were once abundant, I met my old friend, the late Hon. 

 Geo. G. Fogg, who had returned from serving his country 

 as Minister to Switzerland, and he said to me that "our 

 labors would be useless unless we began at the other end 

 and restored the forests first." 



He had seen in the coui-se of his residence abroad the 

 damages which had been caused in years past by the 

 mountain torrents in the spring in both Switzerland and 

 Germany, and studied the forestry laws which those 

 nations have adopted to compel the land owners to cut 

 only full grown trees, and forbidding them to strip the 

 hillsides entirely of all the wood, great and small. As the 

 result of such observation he made the remark above 

 quoted, and the correctness of it has been proved by the 

 fact that several brooks, \Vhich I have since then restocked 

 in the Connecticut Eiver Valley, have been again stripped 

 of their trout by the dry summers, and the result of my 

 •labors entirely destroyed. 



Thus, as I have said, from minor and trivial facts as 

 illustrations, I have drawn up to my point of the import- 

 sance of the preservation of our forests as the conservators 

 themselves of our water supj)ly. 



Either by State or national legislation the cutting of 

 "natural growth" timber less than 12in. diameter at a 

 height of 3ft. above the ground should be forbidden, and 

 by this I intend to exempt all artificial plantations, such 

 as may be grown for use as "hoop, hop or bean iJoles," 

 and should also compel the removal from the forests of 

 all the refuse of tops and branches as well as of the mer- 

 chantable timber instead of leaving it on the gi-ound to 

 be kindled by a spark from the fire or pipe of some care- 

 less sportsman or heedless boy and thus destroy miles of 

 forest to no purpose. It may be said that the State has 

 no right to interfere with private property, to which I 

 reply that the health and welfare of the whole people are 

 always considered as superior and paramount to the pe- 

 cuniary rights of individuals, and that the same law of 

 eminent domain which is exercised in laying out railways 

 and determining many public rights is equally appUcable 

 to prevent the undue destruction of the forests, when it 

 can be shown that such destruction is far-reaching and 

 harmful in itself. 



The State of New Hampshire foolishly sold all its "wild 

 lands," about the heads of its principal rivers, "for a 

 mere song," to himber speculators twenty-five years ago, 



but many of the other States yet own such lands in their 

 own right, and with them as with the National Govern- 

 ment, there is no difficulty in enacting the necessary 

 laws, while as above stated, it seems to me that the ap- 

 plication of the laws of eminent domain will permit all 

 the States to accomplish the same purpose of forest pre- 

 servation. It is often said that there are more acres 

 growing up to wood in New England than are being 

 cleared, but I am skeptical as to the truth of the state- 

 ment, for I know that from the highest hill- top in town 

 I cannot see half the woodland which was visible in my 

 young days, and where a tree had to be climbed then, 

 after reaching the summit, to get a view there is now a 

 barren quartz rock with a few blueberry bushes growing 

 up round it, whereas the eye has a clear sweep of from 

 twenty to forty miles in every direction. 



Should this pi-ocess of devastation continue, as it has 

 within my recollection, the hills of New Hampshire will 

 in time be left as bare as those of Spain or Judea, which 

 tax both faith and imagination, to conceive of as ever 

 having been the promised Canaan, "flowing with milk 

 and honey." 



So much for prevention; let us now look at another 

 side of the question, greater economy in the use of wood, 

 and the substitution of other material for various pur- 

 poses. I spoke of the loads of "oak logs," coming into 

 the miU, to be cut up into "chair stock." Surely here is 

 a chance for the mechanic and metallurgist to devise 

 chairs and tables of brass or steel tubing, as well as bed- 

 steads, which latter can be seen any day in New York, 

 near Union Square, imported from Birmingham, and sold 

 if my memory serves me, for §20, as light, neat, clean and 

 affording no harbor for noxious insects. 



Another great object to be attained is a metallic railway 

 tie or sleeper, to which purpose thousands — I know not 

 how many — cords of wood are devoted annually. European 

 engineers are experimenting on this matter, and it is high 

 time we were attending to it ourselves. There are so many 

 purposes for which wood is indispensable tha,twe must use 

 every effort to presence it for them. 



Another great cause of forest destruction is the manu- 

 facture of wood pulp for paper, and here nature offers a 

 multitude of substitutes, many of them even better fitted 

 for the purpose than wood, although at present the first 

 cost may not be so low. The dry stalks of fiax, where it 

 has been raised only for the seed, all the plants of the 

 nettle tribe, aU the milkweeds, the stalks of the cotton 

 plant, are all valuable paper materials, and I see in a paper 

 before me to-day that some establishment in Kansas has 

 succeeded in making paper from stmflower stalks! There 

 are surely annual vegetables enough which can be grown 

 in suflicient abundance to furnish materials for paper 

 stock, without destroying the forests which preserve the 

 other great necessary for its manufacture, the waterl 



Then again, like the inhabitants of all older countries, 

 we must have more brick and stone houses to live in, in- 

 stead of contenting ourselves with "shingle palaces," The 

 extra first cost will in time be saved in insurance. Our 

 ancestors found the New World an imbroken forest, and 

 hewed their way into it with axe and saw in the best 

 practicable manner. Their descendants, following the 

 methods which were a necessity then, but are an extrava- 

 gance now, bid fair to leave it a desert, like the Old World 

 countries of which I have spoken already, and it behooves 

 every one who is able, by voice or pen, to warn his country- 

 men in time of the dangers wliich may follow if the laws 

 of Nature are heedlessly broken. Sam. Webber. 



WHAT IS A SALAMANDER? 



BY DR. R. W. SHUFELDT. 



Ali, sorts of opinions in history, both past and present, 

 have been entertained as to what the nature of a sala- 

 mander is. Aristotle, who wrote when science was com- 

 paratively in its infancy, believed that there were some 

 animals so constituted that they were incombustible. In 

 proof of this he cited the salamander, which "when it 

 walks through fire, extinguishes it." JEllian, too, evi- 

 dently believed this to be the case, and although he is 

 careful to state that salamanders are not born of fire, nor 

 is that their natural habitat ; yet when the bellows of the 

 forger fad to quicken the flame on his forge, there is a 

 salamander near, and the only remedy is to find and de- 

 stroy it. Phny, another sage of early time, firmly de- 

 clared that the saliva of a salamander applied to any 

 part of the body whatever would cause the hair to fall 

 out ; consequently we find Dioscorides referring to pre- 



listic moderns refer to the spirits of fire as the salaman- 

 ders of that element, and it is by no means uncommon 

 even to-day to find people in plenty who still have the 

 salamander myth in their minds, and will innocently ask 

 if such a creature does not really exist, and possess the 

 power to pass unharmed through an ordinary fire, quickly. 

 I know a captain in our army whom I never could con- 

 vince that those spiny-coated lizards of the west, popularly 

 known as "horned toads," were not "some kind of a sala- 

 mander, or a crustacean, that could pass unharmed 

 through the flames of a camp-fii-e." And another officer 

 of the same regiment, more open to conviction, had his 

 mind disabused by me of the belief it had, that larval 

 salamanders and the famous "Gila monster" were one 

 and the same animal, and that their "breath was poison- 

 ous," and would cause certain death to the person who 

 unfortunately happened to breathe it. 



In Europe, from the very earliest times down to the 

 present day, all the tail-bearing amphibia were considered 

 by nearly everybody to be salamanders, and consequently 

 popularly associated with the mythical creatures so named 

 by the ancient and medieval writers. 



Over a century and a quarter ago or in 1768, a natural- 

 ist by the name of Laurenti designated a genus of verte- 

 brated animals of the Class Amphibia, as the genus Sala- 

 rliandra, and to this genus biologists now restrict all the 

 typical forms known to us as salamanders. They are 

 most interesting creatures to study, and it is hardly neces- 

 sary to add, that they are not possessed of any of the 

 remarkable powers which the writers of the middle ages, 

 and both before and since, would have us believe. 



For the reader to fix the position held by the salaman- 

 ders in the natural system, he must know that the great 

 group we designate as the Amphibia, is primarily divided 

 into four other chief divisions, these being known as the 

 Urodela, the Anura, the Peromela, and the Labyrintho- 

 donta — the last being all extinct and are known to tis 

 only through their fossil remains. In the third men- 

 tioned we classify the peculiar little worm-like or snake- 

 like creatures of which the Concilia is an example, but 

 their natural history cannot occupy our space here. 

 Anura include a perfect host of animals — the tailless 

 batrachians — of which frogs, toads, and their kind are 

 prominent examples. Lastly we have the Urodela, a 

 group created to contain such remarkable and diverse 

 forms as the Siren, the Proteus, the Amphiuma or 

 "Congo snake" of the Southern States, the Menopoma, 

 and then a subgroup of the Urodela — the Salamandrida, 

 and it is the first subdivision of this — the Mecodonta that 

 contains, among numerous other genera, the genus 

 Salama7idra. 



Salamanders are found distributed very generally over 

 nearly the whole of Europe, especially the central and 

 southern parts, and they occur also in Syria and in Al- 

 giers. Great Britain, or the British Isles, lack them en- 

 tirely, nor are the salamanders found in the fauna of the 

 United States. These truly harmless little creatures se- 

 crete themselves under the debris of the forest in damp 

 and shady localities, where they feed upon numerous 

 kinds of insects and worms. They are viviparous, the 

 thirty or forty eggs of the female parent developing in the 

 oviducts at one time, and the young when born being 

 deposited in sluggish, stagnant water, where they live and 

 grow for some time. To the biologist, the development 

 of the young of the salamander offers a chapter in science 

 of great interest and importance, as they pass through a 

 series of stages, or a metamorphosis of a very instructive 

 nature. Neither physiologically nor structurally are they 

 for some time aa high in the animal scale as the parent 

 animals. In other words, among other things, they pos- 

 sess external feather-like gills, and consequently are com- 

 parable with the adults of a gi'oup of creatures lower in 

 the scale of creation than Salamandra — I refer to the 

 Perennibranchiata. 



I have said that we have no true salamanders in the 

 United States, but what we do have, are a number of 

 genera of amphibians, the representatives of which are 

 more or less nearly allied to SalamarLdra, and of these 

 genera, the genus Amblystoma is especially rich in forms, 

 being variously distributed all over the country. 



Some naturalists have fallen into the habit of calling 

 them salamanders, and in reality in external appearance, 

 one of our American "Elfs" or amblystomas, closely re- 

 sembles a continental salamander. Like the latter, the 

 young pass through a "tadpole stage," and a "perenni- 

 branchiatal stage" before assuming the arlult form. In 

 the latter condition they live in the fresh water pools, 

 have four limbs, and breathe by gUl-shts, that possess 

 feather-like external gills. To better appreciate the ap- 

 pearance of the adult of one of these creatures, I submit 

 here a drawing o'f our "tiger salamander" {Amblystoma 

 tigrinum) made from a photograph that I succeeded in 



THE TIGER SALAMANDER. 

 Natural size, from a photograph by the author. 



pared salamander oil to be used as a depilatory. Accord- 

 ing to Phny, too, the salamander was of cold complexion, 

 and had the power of emitting a cold, venom-like aconite, 

 but of such a virulent nature that it poisoned the wood 

 of trees over which the animal crept, and bread baked 

 vnth such timber would kill whoever ate of it. What was 

 mythical and fabulous in the writings of the early authors, 

 passed down with mediajval history as actual beliefs — be- 

 liefs strongly impregnated with similar absurdities. This 

 is seen in that remarkable work of the time, the Physiolo- 

 gus. which still taught that a salamander could quench fire. 

 But the Arabic Physiologus taught that it was a stone 

 that possessed that property. Later, asbestos proved to be 

 the stone in question, asbestos was the salamander of 

 Marco Polo, and a kind of incombustible cloth was manu- 

 factured from its fibres. Thus the Arabs, who knew not 

 whether a salamander was beast or bird, and in some 

 way mixed it up with the Phcenix, came to believe that 

 asbestos cloth was made either from the feathers or else 

 the hair of a salamander. So Bacon and some other -writers 

 of his titne called asbesto.s 3^^la^lande^'3 wool. Caba- 



obtaining in New Mexico, During the aquatic existence 

 of one of these amblystomas, they are known in Mexico 

 and southwestern United States as the axolotl, what 

 Cuvier, the great French naturalist, for a long time 

 thought to be an elf tadpole. He was the more certain of 

 this, inasmuch as they can in this immature stage re- 

 produce their kind! Axolotls were even I'ef erred by nat- 

 uralists to a different genus — Siredon, and were there re- 

 tained for a long time. Some of them were kept and 

 studied with great interest in aquaria at the Jardin des 

 Plantes at Paris, and it was here, to the astonishment of 

 aU, that their true nature was revealed. Without any 

 apparent reason one of the specimens one day sud- 

 denly was transformed into an adult amblystoma, and 

 the fact threw a flood of light into the natural history of 

 the entire group. Since that time they have been studied 

 by biologists all over the world, and the writer of the 

 present article had an excellent opportunity to gratify 

 his own tastes in that direction during a sojourn in New 

 Mexico for a period of five years. Through the Smithson- 

 ian Institution I sent xipward of 300 of the living young 



