133 
" But the clanger does not cease there. The navigation of the great rivers 
gradually silted up by this waste from the mountains is rendered very difficult. So 
much is this the case that even Russia, a country so uniformly flat, is threatened in 
the use of its great waterway, the Volga. The investigations ordered by the Russian 
Government have demonstrated that this is the result of the drainage of the marshes 
and the deforestation of the low hills which give birth to the river."* 
B 
B. " The soil, once denuded of its forests and swept by torrential rains, 
rapidly loses first its humus, then its rich upper strata, and finally is washed in 
enormous volume into the streams, to bury such of the fertile lowlands as are not 
eroded by the floods, to obstruct the rivers, and to fill up the harbours on the coast. 
More good soil is now washed from these cleared mountain-side fields during a single 
heavy rain than during centuries under forest cover. 
" The regulation of the flow of these rivers can be accomplished only by the 
conservation of forests." (President Roosevelt's letter of transmittal to the Senate 
of a report of the Secretary for Agriculture relating to the Southern Appalachian 
region, 1901.) 
C. I will conclude with a graphic account by Mr. McGee of the destruction 
going on at present to form the " bad lands " of the State of Mississippi. I do not 
think that truth has been sacrificed to fine writing, and do feel that what has been 
taking place in the Mississippi Valley has its counterpart in the Hunter Valley, 
New South Wales. The quotation is from Bulletin No. 7 of the Forestry Division 
of the United States Department of Agriculture. 
" With the moral revolution of the early sixties came an industrial evolution ; 
the planter was impoverished, his sons were slain, his slaves were liberated, and he 
was fain either to vacate the plantation or greatly to restrict his operations. So the 
cultivated acres were abandoned by thousands. Then the hills, no longer protected 
by the forest foliage, no longer bound by the forest roots, no longer guarded by the 
balk and brush dam of the careful overseer, were attacked by raindrops and rain- 
born rivulets, and gullied and channelled in all drections ; each streamlet reached 
a hundred arms into the hills, each arm grasped with a hundred fingers a hundred 
shreds of soil, and as each shred was torn away the slope was steeped, and the theft 
of the next storm made easier. 
" So, storm by storm and year by year, the old fields were invaded by gullies, 
gorges, ravines, and gulches, ever increasing in width and depth until whole hillsides 
were carved away, until the soil of a thousand years' growth melted into the streams, 
until the fair acres of anti-bellum days were converted by hundreds into bad lands, 
desolate and dreary as those of the Dakotas. Over much of the upland the traveller 
is never out of sight of glaring sand wastes, where once were fruitful fields ; his way 
lies sometimes in, sometimes between gullies, and gorges the ' Gulfs ' of the blacks, 
_____ ' - _______ ^_ ^ . : _ _ . > ^- 
A. Woeikof, "De 1'Inflnence <Je I'homme sur U terre." Ann. tie Geoqr,. X, 1901. (Quoted by Maroel Hardy 
in The Scottish Geogr. Magazine, May, 1902.) 
