326 
CATTLE AND THE FOREST. 
consumed by man, and the sheep is reared rather for its fleece 
than for food. Besides this, the ground required to produce 
the grass and grain consumed in rearing and fattening a graz¬ 
ing quadruped, would yield a far larger amount of nutriment, 
if devoted to the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished by 
his flesh; and, upon the whole, whatever advantages may be 
reaped from the breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that 
the cleared land devoted to their sustenance in the originally 
wooded part of the United States, after deducting a quantity 
sufficient to produce an amount of aliment equal to their flesh, 
still greatly exceeds that cultivated for vegetables, directly 
consumed by the people of the same regions ; or, to express a 
nearly equivalent idea in other words, the meadow and the 
pasture, taken together, much exceed the plough land.* 
In fertile countries, like the United States, the foreign 
demand for animal and vegetable aliment, for cotton, and for 
tobacco, much enlarges the sphere of agricultural operations, 
and, of course, prompts further encroachments upon the forest. 
The commerce in these articles, therefore, constitutes in Amer¬ 
ica a special cause of the destruction of the woods, which does 
not exist in the numerous states of the Old World that derive 
the raw material of their mechanical industry from distant 
lands, and import many articles of vegetable food or luxury 
which their own climates cannot advantageously produce. 
* The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, 
because, though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of 
vegetable aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves con¬ 
sume a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and 
cultivated as regularly and as laboriously as any other. 
The 170,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1860, 
and fed to the 6,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize 
employed in fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered 
the same year, occupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand 
labor and with Chinese industry and skill, would probably have produced 
a quantity of vegetable food equal in alimentary power to the flesh of the 
quadrupeds killed for domestic use. Hence, so far as the naked question of 
amount of aliment is concerned, the meadows and the pastures might as 
well have remained in the forest condition. 
