ever cut down.” But unhappily it is not 
necessary to limit ourselves to conjecture 
as to what may happen in extreme cases 
of this kind. In at least one country in 
modern times we have seen exemplified on 
the largest conceivable scale the terrible 
consequences of defying the ordinances 
of Nature by destroying the forests and 
neglecting to replace them. “China,” 
writes Mr. Emerson Hough, dealing with 
“The Slaughter of the Trees” in “Every- 
body’s Magazine” (May, 1908), “‘is the 
best instance of a land that never cared 
for forestry. She builds houses now of 
little poles, uses for fuel saplings, shrubs, 
herbage. Her children literally comb the 
hillsides for bits of roots and shrubs for 
fuel and fodder. The land is bared to 
the bone. It is a land of floods. Villages 
are Swept away, hard-tilled fields rwined. 
Starvation always stalks in China. Alter- 
nate floods and water famines follow the 
waste of forests.” The most striking il- 
Justration of these evils in the history of 
China is the record of the Hwang-Ho, the 
great Yellow River which drains the 
Northern Provinces, and twice within the 
last forty years has flooded vast areas of 
densely peopled country, destroying mil- 
lions of the inhabitants in a few hours. 
In the great flood of 1868, and again in 
1887, the Hwang-Ho ig credited with 
something like seven million victims; anc 
considering that the floods covered ten 
thousand square miles of territory, 
studded with 3000 villages, the estimate 
is probably not excessive. Possibly the 
illustrations to this paper—some of which 
were submitted to Congress by President 
Roosevelt, with his last Message, in 
which he dealt with the necessity for 
reforesting the United States—may 
give some faint idea of the 
and desolation that thus 
follow the Passing of the Forest. 
In China the work of _ destruction 
is still going on. The Hwang Ho is peri- 
odically flooded, and millions of lives are 
Sacrificed simply because the forests in 
Northern China have been cut down and 
never replaced. “They cut off the trees 
ruin 
inevitably 
10 
then the shrubs, then the grass until pot 
a single living thing remained on the 
mountain sides. The rain washed the 
soil from the rocks. With infinite pati- 
ence every year they build terraces wher. 
ever they can to save a little of the goi| 
for agriculture. The once fertile valley 
lands are covered with gravel and rocks, 
the debris of floods. The territory that 
was once fertile is now bare, its flourish. 
ing cities are falling into decay, the land 
is becoming uninhabitable.’ And all this 
devastation and waste of property and 
life, and this destruction of man’s handi- 
work have been due to the reckless cut- 
ting down of forests. The picture of de- 
solation that some of these illustrations 
reveal may stand as a general type of 
the effects of deforestation in all coun- 
tries in varying degrees. The loss of fer- 
tile soil, the submergence of productive 
land under a superincumbent load of bar- 
ren debris and detritus from the hillsides, 
the choking of river beds, the diversion of 
rivers from their courses, and the disas- 
trous floods that inevitably follow such 
changes—all these evils are in every land 
the direct consequence of the wholesale 
extirpation of timber trees. 
WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES SUFFER. 
It would be easy to aceumulate great 
masses of evidence of a character 
similar to the foregoing, but I may 
content myself with a few typical 
instances. In Stanford’s “Compendium 
of Geography and Travel,” I find the 
following reference to Cyprus in regard 
to deforestation and its effects:—“The 
disappearance of the woods, now reduced. 
to about 400 square miles in the southern 
uplands, has seriously affected agricul- 
tural prospects. With the forests went 
the soil which was washed down to the 
plains, choked the river beds and formed. 
malarious swamps; the hills became bare 
rocks incapable of growing a blade vt 
grass, and the locust at once took pos 
session cf the barren ground; whilst the 
absence of trees deprived the earth of 
its annual fertilising leaf mould. There 
is now a stony desert at the S.E. end 
