104 
GEOLOGY OF NORTH CAROLINA. 
of our predecessors and our own, by planting our old fields with the 
seeds of future forests and fortunes. 
In most of the countries of Europe forestry comes in for a very large 
share of attention of both citizen and government. The conservation, 
propagation and improvement of forests, constitute an important de- 
partment of public administration, as they are reckoned an indispensable 
element of national wealth ; and the schools and colleges and officers 
which abound everywhere in this interest, are a sufficient evidence of the 
important place which the subject occupies in public and private econo- 
mies. 
We shall doubtless come to that some day ; and at our present rate of 
progress, very soon, as to a large part of the State. In some portions of 
it already there is not timber enough to repair tho annual decay of the 
fences; and yet the old habit continues of abandoning half worn fields to 
sedge and sassafras, and pines and briars and gullies, and of clearing “ new 
grounds,” at a greater expense than would be necessary to restore the old, 
taking no account of the value of the forests destroyed in the process, 
which is almost always greater than that of the land after it is cleared ; 
and this, while there is at least three times as much land cleared as can 
be properly tilled by the present agricultural force of the State. And the 
plan of fencing adopted when the whole country was forest-covered, and 
as one means of disposing of a considerable part of it, is still continued 
long after not only this state of things has ceased to exist, but also the 
main purpose of fencing at all, which was to render available for cattle 
grazing the rich natural pasturage which abounded in the “forests pri- 
meval,” but have been long since extirpated, except in the higher and 
almost unpeopled regions of the mountains. 
And as the pasture plants of our original forests have disappeared almost 
entirely from our flora, and as under a similar reckless system of forest 
destruction to our own, the forests of the old world have been impover- 
ished and reduced to mere shreds and shadows of their probable original 
variety and extent, so will the most characteristic and valuable elements 
of our unequalled forests disappear, one by one. How this can come to 
pass is already but too evident to any one who has observed the woful de- 
struction within a single generation of the long-leaf pine, for example, 
the most valuable forest tree of them all, or of the juniper, or the pal- 
metto, both on our own coasts, and especially of South Carolina; or of 
the white pine of the northeastern and lake states and of Upper 
Canada. 
Agricultural. — First, as to the variety and kinds of agricultural pro- 
ducts , it is obvious that they will be proportioned to, as they are depen- 
