PKACTICAL PAPERS—TIMBER GROWING. 349 
come when we are called upon to prosecute enterprises which 
look beyond the present generation for results. We mast, for 
our own national salvation, look threatening disasters full 
in the face, and prepare to avert them. If we are to achieve 
and maintain our manifest destiny as the greatest and most 
prosperous people upon the globe, we must at once commence 
laying the foundations of this success. One of the important 
steps in this direction is the cultivation of trees for their cli¬ 
matic influences and for uses in the mechanic arts. The wide 
extent of our American prairies renders this work far more 
imperative upon us than it has formerly been upon the people 
of transatlantic countries ] yet the history of many countries 
of the old world admonishes us of the folly of our present 
course of wholesale destruction of forests and neglect of plant¬ 
ing new ones for the use of future generations. 
The fact that our home groves are fast diminishing, without 
adequate efforts being put forth to make up for the loss, is ap¬ 
parent to all. But it is not generally realized to how great 
an extent the same is true of the pine regions of the north, 
from whence we now draw almost our entire supplies of timber 
and lumber for building purposes. Lumber is becoming dearer 
each succeeding year, not, as has been generally supposed, from 
the high price of labor, so much as from the fact that the tim¬ 
ber, at almost all points easy of access, is either thinned out or 
entirely used up, so that logs are now often drawn great dis¬ 
tances to the rivers, and floated long journeys, to reach those 
mills which, a few years since, w^ere supplied from adjoining 
forests. The amount of timber in portions of these vast pine 
regions has been greatly overestimated. I have traveled over 
and looked over hundreds of thousands of acres of these lands, 
extending from the southern point of Green Bay to lake Su¬ 
perior, and am fully persuaded that two acres out of three, in 
this great territory, are either destitute of trees or covered with 
such varieties as are almost worthless. The fires which sweep 
over these vast plains, and through the forests, destroy the 
young trees, except here and there an isolated tract, so that 
