8 
during our severe winters is without doubt the principal reason why 
we are no longer able to raise winter wheat. It is only since the 
felling of the forests in Asia Minor and Cyrene that the locust has 
become so fearfully destructive in those countries, and the grasshop- 
per that threaten to become so great a pest to the agriculture of many of 
our States, breeds in injurious number only where a wide extent of 
country is bare of woods, such as the dry, treeless plains of Colorado 
and Western Kansas, which admit of the full heat of the sun to 
hasten the hatching of the eggs, which gather no moisture to destroy 
them, and which harbor no birds to feed upon the larvae. The ad- 
vantage of trees or plantations of timber in furnishing habitation for 
birds has been estimated much too low, and at this date, when we are 
year by year introduced to new insects that prey upon our crops, we 
cannot do too much to serve the birds, our constant friends. It is 
also a fact that the chinch bug is not able to traverse a tree-belt of the 
usual width of planting, the cold, damp soil presenting to them an 
impassible barrier. If this be true that the destruction of the forests 
makes the temperature more uneven, the summers more hot and dry, 
the winters more severe ; that it exposes our crops to the dis- 
tressful action of the southwest and the northwest winds ; decreases 
the amount of rainfall ; and dries up our springs and seriously dimin- 
ishes the flow of our brooks and rivers, going as dry watercourses to- 
day and raging torrents to-morrow ; if it renders our fertile acres 
liable to be covered by the constantly drifting sands ; deprives our 
fields bf the most useful protection of the snow, leaving them open to 
the rapidly increasing number of crop-destroying insects; that many 
crops easily raised under the shadow of the woods are no longer 
profitable, it is quite time that every prudent agriculturist should turn 
his attention to the subject of tree culture, that he may realize not 
only the immediate profitable returns in the way of increase of pro- 
duction, but also defend his fields from the more remote results that 
have rendered countries quite as fertile as ours, barren wastes, untilla- 
ble and uninhabited. 
It is estimated that to meet so largely increased needs of the people 
in the way of timber, that not less than twenty per cent, of our lands 
must be kept in forests, and as we are each day learning to live more 
rapidly, this amount will soon be found too small. Lands in Scotland 
and England, and in nearly all parts of Continental Europe, are now 
being or have already been planted with the Larch, Pine, and other 
hardy trees, and in such broken and hilly countries such plantations 
may prove sufficient. But in our level and flat Western States, the 
importance of tree-belts cannot be too strongly urged upon the atten- 
tion of our farmers. Of really waste and non-producing land we have 
fortunately very little, and our farmers will but slowly give up their 
annually producing acres in large masses to the much slower, though 
quite as profitable, crops of timber. But the necessity of shade-tree 
planting is so pressing that tree-belts around and across the farms are 
rapidly being pushed, and the testimony of such farmers as have an- 
