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PHIPPS, Toronto. i foranttf: PRINTED BY C. BLACKETT ROBINSON, 6 JORDAN STREET. 1883. '*^"' ,>,^~.?;ftf^f''T»-^ Ml y>'^:- E E P O E T ON THU NECESSITY OF PRESERVING AND REPLANTING FORESTS. COMPILED AT THE INSTANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF ONTARIO, BY R. W. PHIPPS, Toronto. Soronta: PRINTED BY C. BLACKETT ROBINSON, 5 JORDAN STREET. 1883. ■w en) To the Honourable S. C. Wood, Treasurer of Ontario, Sir, — Agreeably to the instructions of the Ontario Government, I have prepared a report on the important subject of the forests of the Province. The object of the Govern- ment, as I have understood and endeavoured to carry it out, has been to circulate the information procurable in so popular a form as to ensure its being generally read, and thereby to enlist the understanding and sympathies of all in the valuable work contem- plated — that of preserving such portions of forest as are necessary for our future supplies of timber, and for that still more important result, which the maintenance of forests secures the great climatic and agricultural benefit derived from regular supplies of mois- ture, whether in river, spring, or rainfall. The subject has long been one of my favourite studies, my first writing thereon in the Canada Farmer and other journals dating thirteen years ago, while I have had myself much personal experience, which I have found useful in preparing the report, a work which, I may remark, has occupied me several months. I have concerning the matter actually presented, followed the plan generally observed in other countries in drawing up such documents, namely, that the first Report should present the scientific aspect of the case as applicable to the country in question, together with statements of what steps have been taken by other governments in such matters, the results which have attended their efforts, as well as the causes which led to their action; accompanied by such additions to the stock of facts as personal knowledge enabled me to supply, and compilations, in as concise a form as po.«sible, of such evidence touching the subject as is on record from the pens of gentlemen well acquainted with Canadian affairs, and such quotations as bear most directly from the most celebrated writers in America and Europe, concerning the advisability of action in the care of and reproduction of forests, and their explanation of the great principles on which such advice is based. Such reports have generally been preparatory to a more exact personal examination of the country, and the obtaining of evidence from individuals in its different localities, which, the writer would suggest, should now be undertaken. It may be added, that of the various scientific explanations adduced, no' ■ t has been given except on the highest authority, nor without consulting numerous authorities, of some of which I now ap^iond a list. Of those authorities to which I am chiefly indebted, I may mention the various reports presented from time to time to the American Government, the valuable report compiled by the Commissioners of the Ontario Govern- ment concerning the Forestry Congresses at Montreal and Cincinnati ; the Montreal press reports of the former ; the numerous excellent writings of Prof. Hough, U.S. Forestry Department ; some very useful and exhaustive reports concerning the examinations made by the East Indian Government in the system of European Forestry (for which I have to thank Hon. M. Joly and Prof. Goldwin Smith) ; Le Traitement des Bois, par Ch. r EM EL *':""i:" "^"-^ ijlrdftl'i'' I iv. Broillard ; Los Bois, par Dupont et La Grye ; Les Arbres, par Schacht ; Brown on Forests and Moisture ; and Roboisement in France, by John Crombie Brown, LL.D., Edinburgh ; The Forester, by James^rown, LL.D., Stirling ; Bagneris on Sylviculture ; The Earth as modified by Human 'Action, by Zoo. P. Marsh; The Trees of America, by D. J. Browne, Now York ; the far-famed meteorological worJcs of Herschel, Flammarion, Glaisher, Humboldt, and others ; the reports of the various conservators of forests in Australia, New Zealand, and India ; Lasett's Timber and Timber Trees ; Chapman's Geology of Canada ; Vallis' Influence of Forests, etc., etc. It may be remarked that this report, with the same or even less labour, might easily have been made much more bulky. But I have rather chosen to reject as much as pos- sible, so as to leave, in the present form, an amount of information more likely to secure perusal than if further extended. li jwn on LL.D., ulture ; •ica, by narion, ests in pnian's : easily an poa- secure INTKODUCTION. As a profaoo, porhaps I cannot do Imtter than ask tlx; read"-!' to pf>ru.sH, I nctvl not ask him t) aliniro, tho foUowin:^ tuautiful pioce, fro:u " N'aturo, or tho Pootry of Earth and Soa," by Madaino Michelet : — " Alas, in how muny places is tho forest, which once lent us its shade, nothing more than a memory. The grave and noble circle, which so bnKttingly adorned the monntain, is every diy contracting. Where you cami' in tho hope of seeking life, you rind but tlie imago of death. " Oh, who will really undertake the defence of the trees, and rescue thom from a general an 1 senseless destruction \ Who will elo(juently set fortli their manifold mission, and their active and inco-isant assistance in the regulation of the laws which rule our globe ] Without them, it seems delivered over to the Ijlind d;stiny which will involve it again in chaos! The nntivj powers an I puriricators of the atmosphere through the respiration of their foliage ; avaricious collectors, to the advantage of future ages, of the solar heat, it is they, too, which arrest the progress of the sea-born clouds, and compel them to refresh the earth ; it is they which pacify the storm, and avert its most disastrous consequences. In the low-lying plains, wliich had no outlet for their waters, the trees, long before the advent of man, drained the soil by their roots, forcing the stagnant waters to descend, and construct at a lower depth their useful reservoirs. And now, on the abrupt declivities they consolidate the crumbling .soil, check and break in the torrent, control the melting of the snows, and preserve to tho meadows the fertile humidity wliich in due time will overspread them with a sea of flowers. " And is not this enough I To watch over the life of the plant and its general har- mony, is it not to watch over the safety of humanity ( The tree, again, was created for the nurture of man, to assist him in his industries and his arts. But on this immense subject I cannot dwell. Only, it is our very emancipation. It is owing to the tree, to its soul earth-buried for so m my centuries, and now restored to light, that we have se- cured the wings of the steam engine. " Thank Heaven for the trees ! In this book, and with my feeble voice, I claim for them the gratitude of man. Let other writers of greater authority come to their assist- ance, and restore them to the earth, before she is utterly stripped, before she becomes an arid and uninhabitable desert. " One day, as seated before a forest of firs already marketi for the axe, I was lost in a sad and silent dream. Another dreamer, who could well interpret rv thoughts, told me that he came from the Engadine, the most elevated and the coldest region of Switzer- land, where the fir ceases to grow, where the larch can barely liv?, but where the arolla prospers, and hardily plants its roots on the edges of the glacier. It is a hero ! I ex- claimed ; we are in Switzerland, and should we not see it 1' ' You must make all poaflible haste,' replied the stranger. ' In the war which man has declared against the Tree, the last of the aroUas will soon have disappeared.' " CONTENTS. The Past and Present Forest of Ontario. -The Writer's Experience—Danger of Fire t.. ''''"''' Remaining Forest The Mechanism of a Tree 1.6 How Moisture is Retained in Forests lo The Great Natural System which Gives Rain in Due Season 20 Dew 2(5 Marshal Vaillant's Experiments *i\) Connection of Forests with Production of Rain .,, Horschel on Radiation Dr. Bryce on Forests and Rainfall. ... M The Lessons of History and some Contemporary Evidence .^g Statements Collated from the Works of Distinguished Writers on the Subject 40 Forests and their Management in other Countries 7, Experiments in Planting in the States and Canada, and Directions Founded thereon !»8 Report of the Hon. H. J. Joly •' 113 The Heights of Land in Ontario The Great Forest to our North-east. 124 Protection tmm Fire 1 2r» The North- West Territory of Ontario ,o« i-^i The Position in which Forests would Best Affect the Ontario Climate 123 Trees by the Roadside A Word on the Present Amount of Forest in Ontario jon The Possible Profits \ Ravages of Fire 134 The Pine Lumber Remaining Forest Existing in Ontario Counties , ,.,. Map of Heights of Land in Ontario— opposite page 122. Map of Forests — opposite page 136. REPORT ON THE immi]^ af f mminj mi Iteplatitittg ^m^U. Whe.v the paddles of the Frenchmen first broke the clear waters of Toronto Biy, and their canoes grated on the bright beach of sand which then surrounded that harbour, Ontario, from the Detroit to tlic Ottawa, was under the roof of the forest. It contained at that time, as has been well remarked by one of the best qualified judges in the United States, perhaps the most valuable masses of timber which ever existed in a region of its size. There were hundreds of thousands — nay, there were millions of acres of magnificent maples, two feet — three — four feet through, their rugged trunks rising clear, separate, distinct, to the lofty arches of the forest, like the pillars of some great cathedral, over- shadowing and crushing out by their ponderous vitality all inferior growths, so that below a carriage might have been driven for many miles in any direction, unimpeded through the park-like woodland. There were vast sections of beech timber, their clear blue-grey stems standing far away in the indefinite perspective of the forest, and here and there reflecting from their shining surfaces the occasional rays by which the sun was able to penetrate the mass of foliage overhead — great trees — three, or even four, fourteen feet logs to the trunk, a reservoir of plane-wood which would have lasted all the carpenters of the world for a century. There was white-oak, would have ribbed the navies of Europe, and ash sufficient to plank them all to the water-line. There are many perfect works in the forest, there is none more perfect than the white ash. Its shaft, round and perpendicular, sheathed in serrated bark of clear cut channels unique in their beauty, forms a picture the very axe might be loth to destroy. There were* hickory trees by mil- lions, the shaggy outer-covering, hanging in strips from the huge red-brown trunks, had kept the world in axe-handles till doomsday. There were miles upon miles — there were hundreds of miles of wide-spreading cedar flats, where the traveller's foot might all day long press the mossy covering of their protruding and gigantic roots, while around him still arose on all sides the upright shafts, the curious leaning branches of that most pic- turesque of trees. There were dark and apparently illimitable forests of hemlock, of which axe and fire have long since found the limit, as the tanners are learning to their ccit. There were millions of silver-skinned birches, and iron-woods in countless numbers. .1 1 ; I And above all others in use — above all others in money value, everywhere piercing the hard-wood foliage roof, rising to double its height above it ; lofty, dense, sombre, fully exposed to. but almost immovable by, the tempest, stood in far-spreading masses the giants of the forest — the great Canadian pine. It is not to be supposed that the forest of that day stood in clearly defined sections of different woods. Trees of other species from the predominant always intermixed, but in many sections to so slight an extent that those who saw that vast woodland can well remember where, every here and there, all appeared maple, all beech, or all hemlock, far as eye could discern. "What kind of land is it?" asks Cooper's Major of the Indian. " All sugar-bush ; what you want better 1 " is the reply. If the lord of these servants should at any time return from a far country, and demand to know the use the Canadians had made of his talent of timber, we should be puzzled to extricate it from the napkin of fire in which we had wrapped it. For the advance of the Anglo-Saxon across the North American region has been, so far as the trees are concerned, like that of Attila, who boasted that no grass ever grew where his charger's feet had trodden. No destruction was ever more ruthless, more injurious, more lasting in its eflects, or more difficult of repair, than that to which Canadians, for the past hundred years, have cheered one another on. Among all the politicians who have in turn saved our country, few of them have thought it worth while to attempt to save the timber. And yet much might very easily, very valuably, have been done towards that end. But the Genius of Preservation was absent, while that of Destruc'ion filled the land with his voice. Here might have been seen a rustic, placidly destroying a grove of white pine, worth a million of dollars, in order to uncover a barren waste of sandy land, which at first gave but little wheat, and has siace p:xstured but a few cow.s ; there another, devoting to the fiames a district of red oak, would have kept Malaga five years in wine puncheons, that he may bare a piece of hard red clay on a mountain slope, which he shall try to cultivate for a few years, and shall abandon w^lien the winter torrents have M-ashed the scanty humus away from the hard pan which all impenetrable lies below. Here is yet another who, to advance himself a little by burning in June a fallow which should have lain till fall, and thereby save a matter of ten of twenty dollars, has let fire run through five hundred acres of good hemlock bush, killing the young trees, girdling the old, and half ruining the soil for future agricultural purposes. Here you might have seen one rolling together and burning great logs of black walnut (a wood invaluable for furniture, of which the Canadian supply is Ion' ^ exhausted, and the United States supply almost so), in order to make a farm, all ^»otit of which for forty years would not reach one-tenth of the sum the walnut, if left standing till now, would easily have drawn. Nay, an item which will be more comprehensible^ by every one, I have myself seen, on the sandy lands near Toronto, g eat heaps of almost clear pine, worth to-day forty dollars a thousand, given over to the flames. All old residents of Toronto can well remember the days before the railways — the old wharves piled high with pine for steamboat fuel — the long procession of wood- waggons, two cord on each — down Yonge street, and from the Kingston and Dundas roads. I fancy the pine so used would now sell for a good deal more than all the steamers and all the freight they ever carried. " We must have the land," said the settlers, " we don't want any boards, and tinge's no sale for it in town." A hundred miles north of Toronto, and within fourteen of a rail- road, I have known heap after heap, acre after acre, square mile after square mile, till the forest was gone, where the splendid and massive rock elms, three to even six feet throigh at the butt, the long clear basswood, good for many a use, the straight logs of valuable cherry timber, and equally valuable red oak, with beech and maple, hemlock and iron- wood, uncounted and uncountable, arose in smoke, a sacrifice to the Goddess of Ignorance throughout the length and breath of the land. But one will say, "The land has to be cleared." Yes, and no. It was necessary indeed to obtain land for the plough, but what I shall endeavour to shew in the^e pages, is that, had great reserves of the inferior lands, and of the mountain lands, been spared the axe, in proper and intermediate positions, good and constant succession of trees, and large supply of timber might have been obtained therefrom, while the land which wus cleared would not only have yielded larger crops than the present much broader acreage affords, but would have yielded them at a much smaller cost of anxiety and labour. This point once demonstrated, we shall probably obtain some valuable ideas as to the road to be travelled in utilizing the forests which yet remain to us. In the settlement of woodlands, such as Ontario was once entirely, it would be well that those entrusted with the duty of choosing the sections to be occupied by new comers, should reserve large portions of inferior land for forest purposes. The settlor here, in many cases, cleared, much to his own injury, hill, swamp, .sand and hard pan which might well have been left untouched, -vhile there wfts, at no great distance, plenty of excellent land. That poor land, left " est, would have, by its climatic influence, rendered much more easy, and conseque. ^ , much more lucrative, tha production of crops on the other, and would also, if fairly used, have continued an inrsxhaustible reserve of timber, of fire- wood, and of fence. Allow me to give an instance of my own experience in this matter, illustrative of the way in which heights of land, which should above all have been kept in forest, have lieen carele.ssly deforested in Ontario. On one of my expeditions many years back, undertaken in company with some other young men for the purpose of choosing farms among the vast forests then existing in the Province, after travelling a good many miles, we came to a district where there was evidently much good land, none of which, however, seemed at that time to be in the market. It was a broad and a splendid forest, dense with vast elm and heavy oak. There on all sides rose the mighty inaple, rich in promise- of sap and overflowing trough, intermixed with many a lofty basswood not unsug;esti\ e of futures even sweeter, for amid the blossoms thick among its massing foliage, high over head in buzzing millions the wild bees toiled and sang. Here and there, perhaps miles apart, a settler had cleared a limited rectangular space, his small log barn and smaller house half hidden by the waving luxuriance of his little patch of Indian corn, his field of wheat, his bit of meadow, where, tall, interweaving vith each other, and covered with dull red flowers the clover and timothy, vigorous from the untired soil, climbed high against and even overtopped the four-foot fences. All here was deep and loamy clay. Travelling through continual and overhanging forest, we were not aware of the elevation, liutin fact the country through which we were passing was the gradually arising slope of ii ■ I OH 4 a mountain range. We passed on further, the land did not now appear so rich. It was still strong and fertile clay, but not at all the equal of that we had left. The oaks were smaller, the maples harder of trunk, and dying at the top, dark masses of hemlock frowned perpetual from the glade, and every here and there the spectre-like balsam, high, gaunt and spire-crowned, pointed his warning branches to the hard, red soil below. However, persuaded by settlers, who at any risk wished to bring other settlers around them, we bought land, cleared it and built on it. Other settlers came and did likewise. Then a while afterwards, when our road and clearings had introduced daylight for many a mile, we understood whit we had done — we had occupied the height of land. The rich slope we had passed on one side was equalled, had we gone that far, by a slope of equal richness on the other side of the mountain. But we had halted, and many had halted, "^ on the watershed, the summit of the mountains, a great table-land of many thousand acres, rich in its uncleared state with springs of water (on my hundred acres I had six or eight which promised to be never-failing), but of far inferior land to that which lay below. There was the great mistake. The authorities of that day knew nothing of it, the settleiu knew nothing of it ; and those great slopes, extending many a league, are now cleared of trees from highest ridge to far-distant valley on hither and farther slope, or showing every prospect of becoming so. The inevitable consequences will as surely follow. The laud, even before I left that part of the country, was washing rapidly from the top. I have seen it gather eighteen inches deep agarnst the fence on the lower side of a field. As for floods, since the leafy guardians of the height have been dislodged, I have seen a creek which would have flowed in full volume between one's joined hands, with two hours' rain roll down a red torrent which bore a ten pound stone some distance on its surface before it sank. The old forest, left above, would have held the rain in bed, leaf, and tangled brushwood for days, and sent it forth in gentle and gradual streams to the slope below. The summit land should never have been sold for settlement. With proper care in thinning and reproduction of trees, fenced against cattle and managed by foresters, that wide extent of tree-crowded height might have stood for ever r. valuable forest, furnish- ing yearly lucrative supplies of saleable timber, and a far greater benefit, giving a continual fertility — by attracting rain, by preserving its former steady and numerous water-courses (seven-eighths of which are now dried up), and by preventing the now per- petual washing away of the soil — to all the far greater extent of far more easily cultivable land below. Let any one who knows the district I speak of think how scarce barn timber and even firewood now is there, and consider how valuable a large reserve on the height would have been to the whole country. This opportunity exists no more. The land is in private hands or it is cleared. But we have many mountain ranges still unsold which might be better managed. Perhaps I may be permitted to refer again to my remembrances, and to remark that, a life-long resident of Ontario, and in my day largely engaged in clearing the forest, besides having had continual occasioa to observe the work done in the same line by many of my relatives, who, coming to this country in the earlier part of the century, were mostly farmers, and what was long synonymous, choppers, I necessarily know some- thing of the process and results of clearing. Their axes rung in many an Ontario forest — in the dense bush near Chatham, among the heavy beech of the old Trafalgar survey, on on the pines of the Yonge street line, away north in the Gwylliaiburies, farther yet to tlit» right and left of the Georgian Bay, in the woods where now stands Whitby town, and in many another forest glade, now forest glade no more. I have seen vast districts around me, where from elevated points we could once overlook many thousand square miles of forest and of lake, changed in a few years from leafy shades to sunny fields. In all my experience, though I have known many farmers who, believing that " ther'll alius be wood," cleared off every stick, and have now for many years bought wood, and in 8om« cases coal ; and though I knew some (myself included) who made spasmodic and ignorant attempts to preserve some forest, yet I never knew one who seemed at all lik«ly to secure to his successors enough timber on their own land. No doubt there are such ; but I have not been aware of them. This arose from many causes. Some cared little so their turn was served, and I have seen a farmer point to his ten or twenty acres of wood yet uncleared, with the remark, " Well, 1 guess that'll last my time. I didn't own no bush to begin with, nor no land neither, and my sons'll be better off than I was, for they'll have the land anyhow. Be- sides, there'll always be lots of wood in this here wooden country." Then, the pressure of poverty was sometimes severe, and men sometimes driven almost to starvation point, had little scruple in destroying a hundred dollars' worth o ' timber to procure five dollars' worth of wheat, when they knew they could get the five dollars, could not get the hun- dred then, and were by no means sure that they ever would. Again, ignorance was very general. Few of us knew that, in destroying the forests, we were, in effect, pledging ourselves to pay a heavy rent for our farms. There is nothing now better known to the world of science, than the fact that any deforested country will cost the cultivator at least four or five dollars more per acre, to obtain the same crops which nature would have assisted him to procure, had a proper interspersion of forest reserves remained to continue the natural moisture and preserve the original fertility of the soil. And I may remark that it was impossible that this should be then known, as it is known in the present day. The knowledge, or rather the proof of the knowledge, had not been arrived at. It is only of late years that even the older nations of Europe have attempted carefully to investigate the matter. For instance, when, in 1870, I took occasion to write in the "Canada Farmer," and other journalistic literature of the day pretty extensively concerning this matter, I found no such stores of knowledge, or of reference, as at present exist. Even in that short interval of twelve years great progress has been made. Fresh experiments have been carried out, and new and valuable information obtained, in American, European and Asiatic countries. The American Government, warned by the rapid decrease of their forests, and consequent and evident injury to the productive power of their soil, have for some years past had in operation a Forestry Bureau, which, under the efficient management of Dr. Hough, is doing excellent service, and has now issued its third volume of reports. France and Switzerland, convinced by recent experience of the injurious results of deforesting their mountain districts, are replanting at great expense the most elevated plateaux. In the case of the former country, vast additional outlay has been incurred, and with the most gratifying success, in establishing along the sea coast great plantations of valuable timber, a benefit to the climate, a source of profit to the proprietors, and a complete remedy for, and prevention •1 :f V- against the vind-carried waves of sea sand, which previously every adverse gale scattered in masses far inland, to the utter destruction of the arable soil. In both these countriep,- within the same period, as well as in Germany, in the far distant region of Australia, and, indeed, in most civilized lands, schools of forestry have been improved or have been established, provision made for the drawing thence annually a body of trained foresters for the service of the State, and govermnontal machinery created, whereby their services will be at once and continually available for the preservation of existing and the planting of fresh sections of woodland. But of all this, while the chief mass of Ontario timber was destroyeil, little was known to the world, and less to the destroyers. If, here and there some one had more skill in natural philosophy than his brethren of the log heap, he also had skill to see that he alone could not impress the masses in such a matter, and that his efforts would do but little to preserve the naturally assisting relation between forest leaf and ear of grain. Some few I heard of as having enclosed, thinned and protected from tire and cattle their modicum of woodland ; but so few and far between were these that I never knew person- ally one. I knew thousands who did not. Those few who had means and will lacked experience and teachers. I remember, when little over twenty years of age, I made my tirst experiment in clearing a hundred acres. I left ten acres of solid, lofty timber in a strip along the north side as a shelter against the coldest wind. It was for ultimate, not for immediate service, for behind it stretched, broad and untouched, the forest of many miles in depth. The strip, when its border stood fully exposed by my clearing operations, formed a pretty picture. Thick with dense young trees below, and great hemlocks, red oaks of mighty size, waving beech and heavy maple nodding their leafy heads, above, it stood (for my fires had not touched it), from ground to summit twigs, a wall of living green ; which, when the cool daybreak air of June, purified beyond the imagination of city dwellers by many a charcoal heap, had covered the great leaf masses, the branches, the angular rail fence below, and every forest weed around, with myriads of bright and glancing drops of dew, shone, flashed an I waved along its whole emerald length, and down a thousand opening and closing vistas, like the wall of Fairy-land itself. "Thess other country fellows," thought I, "chop down everything, but I shall preserve this beautiful growth, at least, whatever happens." Well, time passed on. Next year was a dry summer, and an English gentleman who knew considerably less than the little we knew, cleared at one fell swoop a hundred acres behind mine, and burnt the soil of half his farm beyond redemption in the process. I was many miles away, and what shall hinder his fires from, by way of a gentle commencement, running all around the border, and some forty feet into my pretty reserve. Down went my young maples by the thou- sand J my little hemlocks, their roots burnt from under them, stood in blackened and spectre-like rows. The beauty of the strip was gone. Next year, a poor settler lived near with some cattle he could not feed, so turned them loose. They did not leave a young tree nor a green branch they could reach in my ten acres. The result of these combined attacks was that the moisture seemed to leave the strip. The vegetable coating of massing roots and rotting leaves was swept away, and the great trees which tire and cattle could not destroy, seemed to dry, perish and fall of pure desiccation. In tivo yoxva tho green bit of fresh forest was a desolation of dry and rattling stalks, tit for nothing but the axe, and scarcely for that. But (and here was our lack of knowledge) had tire and cattle been excluded, the green bush had, with care, been green to-day. Throughout Ontario clearing has been largely similar. It has been pursued without plan or system, utterly oblivious of the great and vital principle that, in this country, as in all others, there were certain portions which should be left as forest, because the ground would be valuable for that purpose, and scarcely for any other; and certain por- tions which should also be so left, as elevated above the rest, they form the natural conductors to attract rain, storehouses to preserve it, and slopes down which, in driest weather, the refreshing streams still carry the reserved moisture from the wooded hill top, to the arid and parching soil a" a distance, but below. Then, as for reserves on each farm of timber and tire-wood ; lot us consider how these have been provided for : — On each one, two, or three hundred acre lot as it happened, the original proprietor left generally " some bush," here, there, or anywhere in that part where it would least interf-re with the cultivation of his cleared land. Well, fire would run in some of these reserved portions and it would blow down, fill with weeds, become an eyesore and be cleared otf and "cropped." Or, the farm would be divided and sold ; the bush lot buyer would have too much bush, and would clear most of it, so that now the two or three hundred acres would have but ten or twenty acres of forest. Or, the whole would be cleared ; the cultivators saying to one another, " Oh, there's lots of bush down on the sandy flats that never will be cleared (and here comes in the saving clause) in our time ; we can always get wood hauled to our own doors in winter at one or one and a half dollars a cord. Let us clear off all the plaguy trees and crop the land!" Or, a demand for cordwood for railroad or other purposes would spring up, and the farmer would be induced to sell his bush to the choppers. Notice how this would affect the one who had cleared. Fie had said, " So-and-so Ims hundreds of acres of wood ; he can always sell to me." Others say so of others ; but the demand carries off the very woods they had been depending on. Then they must cut down the small groves they had been intending to keep " no matter what happens ;" or they go to others and say, " Well, wood's very scarce round here ; I don't want a twenty miles' hauling job ; tell you what, if you'll let me have some out of your ten acre block, I'll give you a dollar and a half a cord and cut for jayself. There ! " The oflfer seems large to one who has been used to pay for having the wood destroyed, and he takes it. Others offer more, and the ten acre lot goes, and is in grass. Then tho masses of woods, bounding his vision on every side, here a solid wall bordering his farm, there a strip along the horizon, were at first apt to deceive the settler into a belief of the continuance of the forest. I mentioned one a few lines back as saying, "There will always be wood on the sandy flats." I will give here a little bit of experience showing how such expectations have been dissipated. Along the low shores of a great lake stretched a forest, wherein stood cedar trees, good enough and many enough for Solomon's Temple, if he had been contented with ii ? 8 white instead of red, intermixed with many a solid acre of the largest and tallest beech, maple and basswood I have ever seen. We used to look from our more elevated region upon this great carpet of tree-tops covering the valley with intermingling foliage, and many of us thought we need keep no timber, we could always buy it or own it there. Well, I was a boy, and must needs go raspberry picking on< dry summer day, when we had had no rain for six weeks, and we must, of course boil our toa-kettle, or rather big tin can, and apparently the fire went out ; and I am afraid in fact, w<^ cared very little whether it did or not, for it was either long before the days, or far beyond the scope of the three months fire regulations, though they now are in full force in that district. Well, we went home, and about a week after, a column of dense black smoke could have been observed to the northward, and somebody said, " There's a big fire along the shore." There was indeed. The column of smoke broadened and blackened, and extended for weeks, nor did it subside until the heavy September rain, nor was utterly quenched before the win- ter snow. The devastation was melancholy to behold. The forest had fallen before it like grass before the scythe. <.)ur tea-kettle had cost thousands of acres. Cedar and beech, oak and maple, were no more, and in their place, many summers after, a vast white carpet of close standing Canada thistles used to overspread the land. No more reserve of timber for us along the lake. But some will say, " At all events, the loss of the forest gave room for crops." Unfortunately, it could not. Nature had planted and cultivated there the only crop such soil could grow. The trees, by protection and careful use, could have been continued a source of income for infinity ; but its burning took the top soil of a few inches of black earth from off a carpet of pebble stones and boulders. The best of the soil was gone, and nothing less than three centuries of rest, or the income of a Rothschild could restore it. The settler, too, can never fully realize the vast power of the settlers who are coming. He sees indeed, the sixty or a hundred acres on which he has abolished the forest ; but still he sees everywhere the embowering shade ; he drives to the village through avenues of trees; he visits the next farmer across five miles of dense wood ; nearly every hundred acres he sees is a hundred acres of timber, but he does not so well understand, at first, that for each there is an owner, and that each piece of good and many of poor land will as surely, in a few years, find some one prepared to clear it, as that each separate snow- flake in a January field will before Jur a meet a sunbeam to disperse it into air. If we look from end to end throughout the settled portion of Ontario, we shall find what the foregoing observations have led us to expect. There are as yet, on many farms, portions of forest remaining, generally of small extent. But, as a rule, little care is taken to exclude cattle or to continue in its efficacy the timber plantation as a perpetual source whence many sturdy trees can every year be taken without injury to the continu- ance of the grove. Oil the contrary, all over our older districts, as any one who has travelled them as I have for the last forty years is well aware, the patches of reserved timber are every year becoming smaller and smaller, nor is there any replantation observable, at all calculated to fill their place. It must be thoroughly understood that unless powerful efforts be made in the direc- tion of replanting, the cultivated portions of Ontario will become almost denuded of trees. The whole force of circumstances and nature point inflexibly in that direction. Portions of the forest left standing will not, without care, continue many yearH in a state produc- tive of timber or beneficial to the climiite. These trees have grown, root and trunk, in the shade. Tho outside, rows, exposed to the sun, wither gradually, decay, and are easily uprooted by the force of the wind, injur- ing the inner and younger trees in their fall. Then, if cattle are allowed entrance they will kill every young tree, a process which, as far as my observation extends, dries up the soil in small blocks of forest, and precipitates windfalls of large trees in all directions. In tine, the forest in most sections of Ontario, if left to itself in isolated patches, rapidly deteriorates. When wo add to this the continual pressure in all directions, inducing owners to sell their wood and clear their lands, we must admit that if no active move- ment be made for their preservation, the forests which once overspread Ontario will soon give place to a bare and denuded surface, broken only by the low branches of an occa- sional orchard or the few trees which some one, here and there, has set in line along his fences or around his house. That tliere is cause for much apprehension in the matter is a fact which can be well proven by contemporary experience, and it would be impossible to find a better method of obtaining such than by examining what has happened in those portions of Canada settled previously to our own. Let us look to old Lower Canada, the present Province of Quebec. Let us first consider the character of its inhabitants. The Lower Canadians are industrious, thrifty and home-loving. Their climate is a severe one. So far as the habits of their ancestors may be thought to influence, it may be remarked that no other nation were so careful in the preservation of their forests as, when they settled Quebec, were the French. There is, then, every reason to suppose that Quebec has been as well treated in that respect as Ontario is likely to be. May I, then, ask the attention of my readers to the condition of the older settled portions of Quebec, a state of affairs which any one travelling in that Province can verify, and which no one aware of the character of the witness whose testimony I am about to quote, will for a moment doubt. I allude to the Hon. H. G. Joly, of Quebec, from whose valuable report on "Forestry in Canada" I shall elsewhere quote further. With reference to the matter at present before us he says : — "As far back as the year 1696 the attention of the French Governors of Canada was drawn to the wasteful destruction of the forests, and they were called upon to check it. Nothing, however, was done by them, and little has been done since. The result stares us reproachfully in the face, especially in the Province of Quebec, the oldest in the Dominion. The old settlements are painfully bare of trees ; you can sometimes go miles without seeing any trees worth looking at, and the passing stranger fancies himself in a country more denuded of trees than the oldest parts of Europe. There is a large district of very good agricultural land south of Montreal, where the scarcity of firewood, which is a matter of life and death in our climate, has compelled many a farmer to sacrifice a fine farm and leave the country. There are many other spots in the Province nearly as bad, and unfortunately the process of destruction is going on even now in more places than one." There is no reason to suppose that the residents in our Province of Ontario will be, if left to their individual guidance, more careful of their wooden reserves than have been our French Canadian friends. If on the one hand the Lower Canadian habit of parti- tioning their farm lands among the members of a family was likely to create a demand ti i i 10 for more fu«I and more tiiiih»r from etich hutulrod acres than is our own, it in to l)e remeinliered that in their rigorouH cliiiiato they had greater caune to fear a scarcity, and had every necessity to practise the art of replanting and of husbanding their woodlandH. Nor had they at the time most of their clearing was performed an excuse for carelensnesH in reservation of timber, which has to a great extent prevailed in Ontario, namely, — the certainty of Iniiiig able, by means of the number of railways, which in every direction chequer the surface of the latter Province, to purchase coal at reasonable rates. The Province of t^ueliec had been sixty years in the hands of the British before coal was even to any extent used in New Vork city. On the other hand, to my own knowledge, many an Ontario farmer has cut down his last tree, Kold off the timber from his last five or ten acres of bush, with the consoling reflection, " Well, if the woocon(lary cause, yot further deteriorates. If we take into consideration what has occurnnl as previously stated, concerning the destruction of forests in the Province of Qiiubuc and its results, and remember that the same state of atlairs exists in many of the older settled 8tat«'s of the adjoining Union, and remember also how little isolated and individual action can do in the way of remedy, there is no avoiding tlio conclusion that, in our own Province of Ontario, unless the strong haml of (iovornniental assistance is brought into operation, even the small reserves of woodlaml which hero and there dot the surface of our present cultivated territory will disappear, and their absence will produce the same results as have in other countries invariably been found to follow similar losses. Tn the eastern portion of the United States the same deterioration of soil is observable, and has proceeded step by step with their disforesting. Many once fertile farms tliere are now abandoned through sterility ; while, as if to point out more clearly cause and etiect, as will be shown by ({notations further on, the operations of replanting which have Iwen in progress for thirty or forty years in certain districts there, have not only produced new forests but improved growth in the adjacent cultivated lands. This is especially the case in Massachusetts. Speaking of Massachusetts tree planting, we may remark that that whole eastern coast, following the French success, is conciuering the sand tlrift with the pine tree. Numerous instances are given where these artiticial plante.tions are now yielding merchantable timber, and some where the original woodlands, preserved for that purpose and properly managed, had yieldeil larger returns than money devoted to the purchase of lots afterwards forming part of the most flourishing cities, and of course pay- ing well. It should be noticed hero that Nature, always benevolent, has offered b remarkable inducement here. The very lands most useless to the agriculturist — the light and almost baiTen sands — are those on which, according to French, German and Ameri- can experience, we may hope for most success in planting the most desirable, the most rapidly disappearing of all our timber, the great Canadian pine. Sombre, indeed, as thtit dark tree passed by .^neas on the downward way. " Ulraus opacn, ingenii, ijuain Heileui Somnia vulgo. V.%n.'\ tenere fenint, fnliismie sub omnibus hierent ;"' or, we may translate freely, — Vast elm, iinperviiius to diiylight's Ijeains, Where live the Visions und where liaunt the Dreams. But no tree of all the forest will serve Ontario so well as these tall, gloomy guardians of the soil, valuable for the timber they yield, doubly valuable for the climatic influence their giant height and dense foliage exert, forming a link as they do in the transmission of moisture between the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. Already a great number of the smaller streams which formerly flowed continuously throughout the length and breadth of Ontario are dried up, or only run during the floods produced by spring thaws or autumn rains. With the utter disappearance of our forest reserves, those which yet remain will more and more entirely disappear. 12 Formerly the interspersing belts and large masses of yet untouched forests held, in a manner afterwards to be explained, during the summer period of vegetation, great reservoirs of moisture, which causing a continual flow of water-courses throughout and under our fields, watered and fertilized the land, and was in itself, as we shall hereafter see, at once the cause and the result of the frequent spring and summer showers which so greatly aided the labours of the husbandmen. It is noticeable, I may remark at this point, that in many parts of Ontario where formerly portions of newly cleared forest ground could be reasonably expected to yield a large crop per acre, adjoining land as well wooded and of precisely the same constituents, so far as soil is concerned, will not now when cleared and cropped give anything like the same amount. It is also observed that ploughed land some years under cultivation, in similar localities, compared with ploughed land of many years back, although now worked with the advantage of improved implements, far greater care in ^he rotation of crops, and the application of a quantity of manure quite unobtainable in the old days, frequently fails to yield an equal return to that formerly secured with rougher cultivation and infinitely less labour. The old settler remembers the once spontaneous growth, and is apt to say with Hood in the " Haunted House " : — " A merry place it was, in days of yore ; But something ails it now ; the place is curit." The land is haunted by the spectre of its former fertility; the fertility which in our greed we sl«w. We were not satisfied with the golden egg of the field, we must, to get all at once, kill the goose — the woodland which nurtured the field ; and we have neither fair forest nor fat meadow. We said with the fabled rebellious members, " What is the good of feeding this useless stomach ? The limbs are the valuable parts." " What," said we, *' is the value of this woodland? The field it is which gives the crop." But as the stomach got thin the limbs got thinner ; as the forest grew small the field returns grew smaller. We had destroyed the regularity of the summer rain, that for which Virgil bids his husbandmen pray : — " Humidae solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas, Agricolae," — or, if you accept my translation of the first part : — " That moist and warm arrive the spring, That frequent showers the summer bring ; Still, farmers, ask when vespers ring Ask in your matin prayer. " As I have just remarked in the case of Lower Canada, we have been too apt to believe that over-cropping alone has occasioned the evil. It has no doubt had something to do with the matter, but there is too much reason to believe that an equally powerful factor is to be found in the far less favourable distribution of moisture which our careless disforesting operations have brought about ; and if this be the case even at present, what have we to look forward to as our present scanty interspersing reserves disappear, except a still more unfavourable climatic condition and one becoming worse much more rapidly 13 than in the commencing years of its progress, as the stone rolling down hill at first slowly, flies faster and faster as it continues to move. Much of our valuable soil has already been washed away from the uplands ; many pastures formerly moist and green the summer through, now dry and bare, furnish but scanty picking in most years to one or two cows and a few sheep, and a very large proportion of our arable land, plough it and manure it as we will (as just observed) smiles not with the promise of former days, when, as the proverb says, " If you tickled it with a hoe, it laughed into a harvest." The prospect is that if no governmental actions be taken (and I am now speaking of our counties which have been long settled) as soon as the disforesting process is as com- plete as it threatens to be, much of our higher plateaux, together with the long and some- times steep slopes which, facing towards their nearest river beds, form so large a portion of our best land, will lose fertility in the course of a few years to a marked extent. For the rain will fall, the snow will descend, and will lie ; but where disforesting is general, instead of being deposited — the first in refreshing and growth-producing showers, the latter, by its slow melting in the woods feeding our thousand springs and rivulets, passing in all directions under and through the cultivated fields, and yielding to them that moisture which is to plants what the blood is to the human frame — will come the rain in heavy torrents, which, instead of soaking into and manuring the cultivated land, will rush violently across it, melting the snow in violeat floods during thaws, and both carrying away millions of cubic yards in solution of the cultivated earth that, had forests been left in proper extent, would have remained, and not only would have remained, but would have been enriched by the slow and beneficial passage across and through it, of those very waters which now remove it from our fields. Nor do the lower grounds escape, for none are so low as the bed of the rivers which drain them, though the fall may be less steep thereto. The reckless disforesting, so strongly condemned by many American writers, which has been practised by their countrymen, is now bearing its fruits in the terrible spring and autumn floods which of late years have affected large portions of the United States. The Americans might spare much of their care for the channels of the Mississippi if they would restore the groves cut from the hills which fed its sources. To disforest a mountain slope is to devote the height to barrenness, the valley to flood, and both to parch- ing drought when drought is most injurious, when " ExustuB ager morientibus lestiiat hcrbis." Added to this absolute abstraction and loss of soil — and to a much greater extent richness of soil — the loss by cropping, so to speak, in spite of nature, of taking from the soil without allowing the recuperating influence which Providence has placed in position to assist the farmers to perform their work, there is but too much reason to believe thiit we shall in Ontario, unless care be taken, find ourselves in the position in which too many countries now find themselves — compelled in order to grow crops and feed cattle, to give double the labour, and yet not receive the return we might for half the work, had we allowed the assistant forces of nature to remain in sway, and not destroyed the wood- lands through whose agency they benefited the region wherein we dwell. To those who have not considered the matter, these statements may seem overstrained. If my readers II' ;f' W 14 follow me I will endeavour to show them how well they are baaed on facts, and how deep our need in Ontario of action before the evil increases to a much greater extent, and while the means of prevention are within our reach. I have spoken of the cultivated region of Ontario, which has been formed from our best lands — our deep clay loam, and rich limostone country. But close to us is a far greater danger in our inferior lands. The province of Ontario is not a broad limestone bed. When we go north a couple of hundred miles, say as far as Muskoka, or a line running from it south-east to near King.ston, we came to a region of far less fertility, because based on a rock far less favour- able to docomposition into fertile soil — here all is based on granite. There is no lime- stone, there is no lime. You will find yourself as you go through Huntsville, Brace- bridge, Magnetawan, and all the great Nipissing region, considering how cold the country, rather startled to see that very few of the houses are plastered inside, but all wains- coted with thin pine. You will find many large hotels without an atom more lime about them than just built their chimneys; and that drawn a great distance at much cost. There is no lime, it is a granite land. Bo respectful, for you stand near the very frame- work of the world, the great Laurentian rock. For my part, I had as soon my earthly station were somewhere else. The land is not that of the old Home District. The rich clay of the other is not here ; it cannot be ; there was no lime to make it, '' V.re yet the little rills began To feed thy bones with lime, and ran Their course till thou wert also man." There is clay ; but it is whitish, soapy, sandy : and there is a vast preponderance of soft, peaty, powdery soil. There is much good humus in this, if it could be preserved until a thick clover bed overlies it (and it will grow excellent clover), but it is, above any land I have seen, that in which, when dried and thinned by partial settlement, I should fear the ravages of fires. I have passed over many of what are called balsam flat.s, which cover a vast part of that land, and though I heard some were richer, yet it was always my luck to be able to dig the tomahawk in the earth a foot deeper than its fifteen inch handle, and find nothing but grey powdery soil resting on powdery soil, and that on red sand or poor white clay. There is much birch timber, but largely dying at the top — the sign of weak soil. There are, left by the lumbermen, m\ny poor or young pines ; there are good beech and maple, but not the beech and maple of the old Ontario woods. There is, where the lumberman has not wrought, much fair pine; but this taken away, it will not be a heavily timbered forest, and it is one which will dry, especially as soon as the settler cuts gaps in it h'sre and there, and thousands of cattle are let loose to do more damage than hid^9rsed with millions of miniature cisterns. Then, every hollow on tix; T\r iro 1- obstructed by fallen and rotting logs, blocking and holding in position tha '^ov/ of vatc .i^itil the humus below fully absorb it, while the whole surface of the earth is crossed, ruorossed and crossed again by a chequer- work of partially elevated roots, the box-like openings between which perform the same function. If we go below 19 tlie surface we shall find the solid earth beneath the mass of vegetable decomposition pierced everywhere with upright and porous pillars of wonderful tubular structure — the large and perpendicular tap-roots which many trees possess, passing deep into solid clayey strata otherwise impermeable, and sending through the triturated earth which surrounds them, a slow and steady supply of water to a thousand subterranean and spring- feeding channels, which, travelling away from the forest and under the cultivated fields, supply the great lower bed of moisture, that continually rising, fertilizes the upper soil, and finally passes oS to find in brooklet, lake or river, their course to ocean again. On this great natural bed and reservoir, rain may fall in torrents, only to be held there in suspension till it gradually, and in such degrees as are best. fitted to promote the bene- fioient work of nature, flows away in curving creek, in rippling rivulet, nourishing and feeding the thirsty earth as it goes. On this same gnjat bed, vast mountains of winter snow may pile themselves, protected by the overhanging branches and dense thickets of underbush, against too rapid thaws in Spring, thoroughly moistening and soaking the whole great mass of humus and roots, and furnishing a vast field for evaporation ready to part with its watery treasures to the surrounding atmosphere, at the fervent bidding of the warm sunbeams of April or of May, the period when vegetation needs them most — the period for which nature has stored them and at which she delivers them, and the period, if you notice, at which she takes care no dense foliage obstructs the action of the sun. Thfen, reversing the process, when in times of drought, the forest bed has parted with its surface treasure of moisture, the deeper roots can and do draw, from the subter- raneous and concealed channels, a vast supply for the trees themselves, which again passes through the leaves into the air, and falls in rain or dew. Let us view the forest under a different aspect from that which is open and apparent to the natural eye. Let us consider that great portion of its actual being, life and functions which are carried on by means of water. This forest, with all its ponder- ous trunks standing around us, solid, firm, impermeable, has been in its day, from root to leaf, but water, gases and vapour, and is still but a channel for their passage, the passage by which its existence is continued, its growth fostered, its death in due time obtained and its reproduction secured. The forest is a river ; deep around its interlacing roots the joining waters fill everywhere the land, they separate, they mount in every trunk continually in upward flowing streams, they separate again in their course to. every branch and every leaf, they again separate in their passage to the outward air through the thousand openings in these ;" they join the air, they form a dense and vapour-saturated atmosphere above the forest top, above the whole far-spreading and wind-tossed sea of glittering leaves, and they rise perpetually a body of innumerable tons of invisible water, cool and damp from the forest depths, to meet the coming south-west wind bearing its liquid treasures fresh from the warm equatorial region, treasures of moisture rich as that of the forest exhalation, far more extensive but far more heated than their's. They meet, and the junction of the ditferently heated masses necessarily precipitates both in rain ; it falls to the ground ; it may pass by innumerable channels to the distant ocean, it may rise to the nearer atmosphere through wheat, through grass, through forest leaf again. Every forest is an immense fountain of water rising perpetually from earth to sky, falling ever from sky to earth again. 20 Moisture Supplied to the Air by Forests. The forest land being always shaded, by the dense masses of foliage above, from the summer sun, is then much cooler than the surrounding earth of the open country, a coolness increased by the damp atmosphere within and surrounding it, produced by the «xhalations of the leaves, by the droppings of the great accumulations of dew, which col- lect on its great extensions of leaf surface in the course of the night, and by the evapora- tion from the ground itself, which, as before observed, is almost a perpetual bed of moisture. The amount transpired by the leaves, as shewn in the preceding paragraph, is «normous. The forest then is continually sending out and sending upwards, dense accumulations of vapour. It necessarily sends them upwards, the vapour of water being the lightest and most inclined to rise of all vapours. Therefore, there will be above the forest a large stratum, or it may be a column of air holding in solution as much vapour of water as it can bear, without forming cloud, and ready, when the proper natural cause occurs, to form a cloud, and thereafter in due time to be precipitated in rain. What may occasion this we will speak of further on. Moisture Increased by Prevention of Winds. Another cause which adds to the moisture in the field surrounding a forest is the great influence it exerts in modifying the force of the wind. When the stratum of air immediately above the fields has, in drying the fields, taken up a portion of its moisture, that moisture will pass off slowly to the stratum of air above, and that in turn to the next above ; but if the stratum of air next to the ground be rapidly moved across the ground by the wind, it is no longer simple evaporation into one stratum, that portion of fltratum moves off immediately with the wind, and is immediately succeeded by another portion of the same stratum, and that by another and another as rapidly as they can pass over the ground, each in turn, taking what moisture it can rapidly imbibe. Therefore, a portion of country protected by an adjoining forest from rapid winds, may remain, although exposed to sunshine, for weeks, in good moist and growing condition, while a rapid drying wind passing over it for even one day, might have taken from the ground much more moisture than it could spare, and have very injuriously affected the crop. To prevent this is one great use of even very thin lines of trees. The QREA.T Natural System which gives Rain in due Season. Providence gives man the means, if he choose to avail himself of them, of procuring all through the growing season, frequent growth assisting showers. The means are given him of continuing and preserving to himself thousands of rivulets, " the upper springs and the nether springs," so that few good sized farms need be without a creek or spring in some corner or another, where you may always be surp of water for your cattle, without having to spend hours a day pumping it from a well, and not getting then a constant sup- ply, or one nearly aa healthy as the stream j without having, when wells dry, to drive your cattle across your neighbour's fields, meeting his black looks, because he is sure it is you who leaves his bars down, and moreover he don't calculate he'll have more water than 21 he wants, and " doesn't believe he contracted to sapply the country," without, worse still, having to tramp after your beasts three or four miles along the dusty roads to a creek. Or, if you have plenty of water, and your neighbours none, it is hard to say whether you are much better off. If you supply them you are a thoroughfare without a toll-gate. If you refuse, you are a tyrant, and are informed over your fences that "there will be water when you're dead and maybe you'll want it yourself before yon die." More, the water which supplies moisture for the crops comes largely from below. It is not because the rain fell on the herb of the field that growth chiefly proceeds, though that does good ; but it is because the earth received the water, and the great underground system of natural pipes and channels has obtained its due supply. If, during the shower, some malevolent giant should hold his umbrella completely over your farm, his spiteful intentions would be, in large measure, frustrated, for the whole network of channels, which everywhere tunnel the soil — millious invisibly small — millions conveying vast quan- tities — would have all over the land receivf^d their share, and your land would receive from below some compensation for what the overgrown gentleman had kept off above. It is this underground store, which, in a dry time, sends moisture up to the roots, and thence to leaf and twig. The dry board lying on the ground will split and crack in the sun — the pitch will boil out of the seams of the upturned boat — the rock will glow till it will nearly burn your finger ; but the plant will not — it is cool, green and moist long after all around is parching. It has had no rain ; it may not flourish, but it does not die. It has other means of obtaining moisture, and one of them is by drawing through its roots from below, water, which, it may be, fell in rain two months before, has been preserved on forest floor or subterranean cavity till now, has now in its turn passed on its course to the sea, and in its way preserves from death the growing herbage till the rain from above give it of life a new and a firmer hold. If my readers will travel with me a little way on a very dusty road of dry techni- calities, we will endeavour to find a clear explanation of what brings rain, and what causes the winds which bear the clouds along. Let us here remark that when we see a cloud apparently cohie with the winds, we need not be sure it came at all. That cloud may have been above us in propria persona, but we could not see it. The air may have had much water in it which we could not see ; the wind may have brought sufficient cold to condense the moisture, when we could see it at once. The cloud in that case did not come. The means of changing it into visible form came. A writer says in relation to a certain storm in India : — " Previous to such a down- pour of rain the heavens were perfectly clear, without a cloud to be seen ; yet there, it may be, the whole of that moisture was suspended, dissolved in the air. The rain cloud may have appeared to proceed from beyond the horizon, and to come thence, advancing with resistless force, borne forward by the gust of wind, more like a tornado than aught else ; but there are reasons, and these satisfactory ones, to warrant the conclusion that the cloud had not been blown thither by the blast, but had been formed at the various points of its advance by the wind suddenly cooling down the air below a temperature at which it could hold the moisture in solution, very much as is the case with the sand and dust filling the air immediately before the falling of the rain ; whatever proportion of these may have been brought from a distance more or less remote, most of it may have been seen raised from the ground on the spot as the mighty rushing wind passed on in its course, and the little lapse of time between the appearance of this precursor and the pre- cipitation of the rain was only such as was occupied in the aggregation of the rain 22 particles into the larger drops which fell, and the precipitation of these by gravitation and by the blast, aided, it may be, by the co-operation of electric force, the process being essentially the same whether the blast have come on as an onward moving cold wave or have advanced as an advancing whirlwind which raised the air through which it paased to an elevation at which, it may be in consequence of sudden expansion, the temperature was too low to retain all the moisture in solution. " With the copious evaporation going on from the leaves of a forest, there is nothing surprising in any change of wind producing a cloud or mist above a forest, where formerly the air had been perfectly transparent, and everything known in regard to such phenomena makes it probable that in general, if not invariably, the cloud is produced there, and not attracted thither by the forest." Let us go on with the explanation, premising that it is founded on the one given by Herschel, and published in the '* British Encyclopaedia ;" that it has been adopted by Flammarion, one of the leading French meteorologists, who published an exhaustive work containing it in 1879; and that this work is edited by Mr. Glaisher, one of the leading British authorities of to-day. It is aa follows : — At the equator, where, as we all know, it is always very warm, the broad heated ocean sends up, as is the nature of water when heated, vast quantities of itself in the form of vapour. At the same time the air there is always being heated, and rises as the vapour does, with great force, but not with nearly so much as the vapour. Vapour of water is the lightest of all known vapours, and except hydrogen and ammonia, the lightest even of gases. How much lighter than air it is you can see for yourself, if you notice how fast it climbs through the air from the pot to the ceiling. True, the air has not quite its chance ; it, too, would climb fast if it were hot. But heat it as you will it could not climb like that. Now, the quantity of water sent into the air in the tropics by evaporation is immense. It is calculated that throughout the whole great equatorial region there rises thus annually a body of water sixteen feet deep. That is over half an inch a day. That does not sound large, but it will sound larger when you think how it grows. Turned into vapour, even at only fifty degrees temperature, it takes a space many thousand times larger than before, or some thousand feet high over the whole region. Add to this that the air it has been forced into when thrown upwards from the ocean is itself expanding largely, and therefore becoming lighter and rising also, you will see that there is an immense body of air and vapour being sent upwards very rapidly and constantly over the whole great equatorial region. Now this uprising leaves no large vacuum of its own size, as a body of that dimension would if sent upward in some circumstances. There is no vacuum left whatever, for the water is below and con- tinually affords fresh vapour. But north and south there is abundance of air ; air, too, which has not been heated as has that of our central body which is going up ; and as the central body over that vast space — remember we are speaking of a belt round the world thousands of miles wide — as it gets heated, rarefies and rises, the great cooler and more solid bodies of air north and south rush in, themselves become dilated in the scorching heat, and rise upwards in their turn along with the immense volume of vapour, which being still more inclined to rise than they are, hurries them aloft ; so that at the equator, or rather in the great equatorial regions, are two great masses of air rushing from the temperate regions, north and south, towards the equator, meeting, rising, and going opwards together with the vapour arising from the sea. 23 tor, the >mg We will here pause to take into our calculations another item. These winds (these two north and south coming masses of meeting air, form the tradewinds, as they are called. These winds, though starting to go from north and south towards the equator, do not get there as north and south winds ; for the earth keeps turning round from west to east, so that on the north the tradewind is a north-eadt wind, and on the south its meeting tradewind is a south-east wind. These came, we remember, from the temperate zones, leaving of course a space there which is instantly occupied by another mass of air rushing in from the polar regions north and south. Now we will follow our meeting tradewinds upwards from the equator. Forced upwards above the surrounding strata of air, beyond the levels of equilibrium, they flow over to north and south towards their respective polar regions. These are the anti-trade- winds, and they are acted upon by the earth's rotating movement as are the tradewinds before mentioned, so that these returning currents blow from the south-west in our northern hemisphere, and from the north-west in the southern hemisphere, always, how- ever, towards the poles and from the equator. Near the poles, they approach the. point whence the polar air started to move towards the equator, to fill up the gap occasioned by the rising equatorial air (or rather, there is no gap, but to prevent the gap which would have been had they not pressed in). Well, at this point near the poles they, as fast as the polar air starts towards the equator, press into its place, follow it, go to the equatorial regions in the tradewinds, rise up there and come back again to the poles in the anti-tradewinds, and the current is complete. Now, at first the anti-tradewinds coming back towards the poles keep high in the air, so that they and the tradewinds below, going towards the equator, are quite separate ; but once past the tropical circle they come down near the earth and blow towards the poles on the same level as the tradewinds coming from the poles. They are therefore upon the same level, and kept asunder only by the rotating action of the earth. There are, to qubte Flammarion, " points at which these two currents come together, and their differ- ent qualities cause numerous and sometimes disastrous atmospheric disturbances. Their beds get shifted over the surface of the globe, and the succession of one after another in the same place produces sudden variations in the state of the sky." To avoid confusion they are, from the point at which they flow on the same level (where, I mean, the anti- tradewind above flowing towards the poles, comes down to the same level as the trade- wind below blowing from the poles), called no more trade or anti-tradewinds. The anti-tradewind is from here to the poles called the equatorial current of air, and the tradewind the polar current of air. you will remember that in our northern hemisphere the anti-tradewinds returning from the equator blow from the south-west ; the tradewinds coming from the poles blow from the north-east. We will remark, therefore, in passing that the equatorial current must, as being laden with moisture risen from tho tropic seas, be humid, warm, and bring much moisture with it, while the polar current, coming from the arctic regions, >vill be cold and dry. But these two currents are varied in their moisture-bearing capacities by many local and other circumstances ; great mountains condense their moisture ; the warm Gulf Stream has much to do with evaporation in its course ; great stretches of prairie and of woods cause differences. Here, for instance, in Toronto our Observatory records would 24 I give the humid windH as ranging from east round to Bouth-went, largely south-eaat. This is explained by some who have given thought to the subject as being caused by much moisture pauning from the equatorial current, high above us, into lower currents blowing other ways, by the fact that the Rocky Mountains deprive the west wind of much moisture, and by the passage of moisture here across the Atlantic States from the warm Qulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico. Many acute observers, however, hold strongly to the south-west wind being the rain-bringer. Still from the equator, one way or another, bu** of course from the south, most of our moisture comes. It may be here r«marked that in order clearly to comprehend the motion of the winds, it is well ever to keep in mind the fundamental law, that all movements of the atmosphere are in consequence of the property gases possess of being expanded by heat, and that the heat of the sun keeps all in motion. Here is an instance, from the meteorologist Spang, of the meeting of these two winds forming whirlwinds : — " The polar current, in its course towards the south, held in suspense by the eciuatorial or warm current, may be compared to a body of water confined by a dam, except that the dam has here also a positive force, and if released, a motion of its own. If this aerial dam is broken at some point on the surface of the earth, the air of the polar current above the break will sink into it, and there will be formed in its upper region a depres- sion or trough corresponding to the break. That portion of the equatorial air which has opposed the sunken polar air will rush with great force into the depression, and produce an eddy or whirl, and cause a rotary storm and a cloud to be formed which assumes the form of an inverted cone. This cloud is formed by the sudden and profuse condensation of the moisture contained in the air of the equatorial current, which is thrown suddenly into higher and colder regions, and sometimes the temperature is so greatly reduced that the vapour, after being condensed freezes, and hail is formed by the centrifugal force of the rotary storm." The two winds just described may be said to be the only two winds in the world. All the rest are but modifications of these, occasioned by what may in comparison be considered local causes. The different divisions and apportionments of land and water here and there cause many inferior rarefactions and condensations, which produce all the varied phenomena of tempests, hurricanes, gales hither and thither, which continually take place. This forms a chief part in the great plan of Nature. By this many move- ments necessary in fitting this world for the habitation of beings like ourselves, are set in operation. One very important one, which we shall frequently have occasion to notice, is that by this means is borne upwards from the equatorial seas and towards the poles that vast mass of moisture previously described. It does not of course all go as far as the polar regions, though a great portion does. Much falls back in rain in the tropics, and much on the way north and south. It may be here observed that no doubt large evaporation of water is continually occurring elsewhere, on ocean, lake and river, and on land as well as in the tropical zone. But the last is the chief source of supply. We will now leave this part of the subject and go on to another intimately connected therewith, which i^ necessary to be considered before we can make further headway. 25 The Production or Rain. To quotn from the excellent author I havt) JuHt uiontioned, "The water in not motionleBH either in the depths of the oceanic ba^in, in the soliil ice, or in the atmosphere. Thanks to the always active power of the sun, to the aerial currents, the water rises vertically from the depths of the seas to its surface, becomes vaporized at all tempera- tures, ascends in the shape of invisible vapour through the ocean of the air, Wcomes condensed into clouds, travels across continents, falls again in the shape of rain, filters through the surface of the soil, passes along the strata of impermeable clay, springs up as a source or fountain head, descends by the streamlet into the river, and falls from the river back into the sea again." The vapour of water, as we have seen, rises from the ocean, mingles with the dilating and arising air, and in immense quantities ascends into the higher regions of the atmos- phere. Will my readers now for a moment study this little table. It is but nine lines :— • At 1 4 deg. a cubic foot of air is saturated with water by the weight of 1 grain. 30 41 49 56 66 80 88 100 H tt <• II M It 2 grains 3 4 5 7 11 14 20 as ics, rge on rill th, When we thoroughly comprehend the effect of the fact stated in this table, we understand why two clouds or two currents of air more or less saturates! with Mipoxir of water, coming into contact at certain temperatures, produce rain. It oocura in the follow- ing manner : — We will notice that a foot of air at a temperature of one hundnxl (the heat of a ve*%' hot day indeed) will hold twenty grains of water. If it were only at thirty desnvs it would hold but two grains of water. Now let us suppose a n\ass of a thousand cubic feet of air at 100 degrees, and holding twenty thousand grains of water. ^^'elI, a cold current of air comes along, meets our cubic mass, and (.xxils it down to thirty degrees. It can only hold two thousand grains now ; the cold current has servetl an ejectment on the odd eighteen thousand grains, and they must fall out. They would fall out first into cloud, then into rain, and that is a rough sketch of the way in which rain is produced. But we will go more slowly, and first show how a cloud is formed. Here are the words of an excellent writer on the subject, so concisely put and so clearly, that we cannot do better than copy them : — " The invisible vapour of water spread through the atmosphere becomes visible when a decline in the temperature or an addition of moisture brings it to the point of satura- tion. Suppose, for instance, that a certain quantity of air at eighty -six degi-ees contains 478 grains of vapour of water, this air will be quite transparent. If by some cause or other this air descends to seventy-seven degrees, or receives an accession of moisture (either will do) it will become opaque. If it is done by the lowering of the temperature, a diminution of nine degrees of heat will cause 108 grains of vapour of water to be con- densed and to become visible. This is what a cloud really is : vapour of water which the 26 iw»* air, being saturated, is no longer able to absorb, and which becomes separated from it by passing into the state of small vesicles." This is the ^ay clouds form, and, as you will see by the following, it is but by a continuation of the same process they are precipitated in rain. If the cold current which has produced them from the warmer atmosphere continue to exert its condensing force, or if a more saturated current arrive, the process goes on, and now becomes molecular ; that is, the larger particles rapidly come together in still larger ones, the force of gravi- tation begins to be felt, and the whole process is described by that great meteorologist, Herschel, as follows : — " In whatever part of a cloud the original ascensional movement of the vapour ceases, the elementary globules of which ic consists being abandoned to the action of gravity, begin to fall. By the theory of the resistance of fluids, the velocity of descent in air of a given density is as the square root of the diameter of the globule. The larger globules, therefore, fall fastest, and if (as must happen) they overtake the slower ones, they incor- porate, and the diameter being thereby increased, the descent grows more rapid and the encounters more frequent, till at length the globule emerges from the lower surface of the cloud, at the vapour plane, as a drop of rain, the size of the drop depending on the thick- ness of the cloud-stratum and its density." Now, if my. readers have but followed these leai.ied gentlemen through their technicalities they have grasped this plain fact : — Rain is thi, orecipitation from the air of moisture which was more than it could, at the degree of heat to which contact with a colder stratum of air had reduced it, hold in solution. And to show how elevations, especially if wood-crowned, produce rain, any one can also easily see that if a saturated current of air arrve at a mountain chain or other height, and have to rise into the colder atmosphere above, getting colder one degree, according to the season, as they rise 200, 250 or 330 feet, as the air is the colder the higher we ascend, it must in consequence part with, as rain, much of the moisture it carries. Let us remember, too, that rain differs from cloud only in being formed of drops produced by the mutual attraction of lesser drops, which rapidly fall by force of gravitation to the earth instead of floating, as the smaller particles of moisture composing the cloud had been, in the air. inl md lea sayi Dew. We will now tmvel onwards to another important point, and will do our best to observe che operation of dew. To understand this we have simply to remember that the earth's surface is heated in the day by the sun, and gets much colder at night, the heat it has obtained being what is called radiated off. Some objects cool in this way much more than others, some leaves of plants more than others. Whatever it may be which cools these, these cool the air next to them, and produce the same effect as the cold stratum of air we have just been speaking of in connection with clouds ; (when it strikes the warmer stratum, that warmer stratum is cooled so much that it cannot hold all its moisture, and cloud is formed, and afterwards, if the process be continued, rain) ; so the grass, the leaves, paper, glass, wood, all these cool quickly by radiation, form the cool stratum here and compel the air close at hand to part with its moisture to them. We see it in the ut the mouths of a tree (the spongioles, as they are called, at the ends of the roots), they will notice that these take in as much water as the tree needs to carry up its nourishment and act as its vehicle to the leaves, where all water not needed is sent off by transpiration into the air. Now the leaves, it may be supposed, having no such functions, not being the sentinels at the root gates, may transpire while they live as much water as is sent up to them, and we may suppose the transpiration machine working furiously, when the Marquis had cut off the connections with the roots, as a steam engine with the regulating valves left unattended. They would, no doubt, take it in at the severed end of the branch, and send it off by the leaves. But though the forest draws much up, and transpires it, this experiment does not prove that it draws up the enormous quantity spoken of. Taken with this understanding and qualification, however, we can well believe the rest of the Marquis's comments, which are in fact generally adopted as correct by meteor- ologists, and of which Mr. Orombie Brown, a high authority, thus speaks: — "With 31 regard to the main fact, that the emiasion of moisture by the leaves of the forest is very great, we are at one. " The Marquis's views thus largely corroborated are : — " It is an accepted fact, and not without reason, that the neighbourhood of forests is cold and damp. This is far from astonishing when one thinks of the enormous volume of g water transformed by forests into vapour, and the quantity of heat absorbed in this trans- formation. This heat must have been obtained somewhere, perhaps from the soil of the forest and that of the neighbourhood. " In the same way there should be great damp in the neighbourhood of forests,, especially when the temperature is high, and it cannot be otherwise, on account of the • enormous amount of water in the form of vapour which is discharged by forests into the adjacent atmosphere. " This vapour is emitted ,in much greater abundance during the day than during the night. Towards night, a little after sunset, when the general temperature begins to fall, the transpiration not yet having time to slacken, and ascending into a colder air changes into visible fog, like our own breath in like circumstances, and this fog in its turn becomes a cloud on the following morning, when the sun warms its particles ; but whether clouds or fogs, they will be carried away by the first breeze co descend in showers. " If these details as to the formation of forest fogs be correct, such fogs should be more frequent in calm weather, when the air is naturally mbre moist and especially when the contract is greater between the cool of the evening and the heat of the day. The test of conditions for the formation of thick fogs is especially complete, at least in our climate, towards the end of summer and the first half of autumn ; and it is during this period that the phenomenon is most frequent and noticeable. " If the transpiration carried on by the leaves were coloured and perceptible, it would be a grand sight to see great columns of vapour ascending majestically into the air, diminishing by their heights the distance between the tops of the trees and the stormy clouds ; and as this vapour facilitates the passage of electricity, by increasing the moisture of the air with which it mingles, the facility with which isolated trees are struck with lightning can be accounted for." If my readers have followed me, and we have succeeded in arriving at a clear explana^ tion, we will now have had : — 1. A short account of the manner of growth of a tree. 2. The system of the winds and their method of conveying moisture. 3. The causes of the moisture being precipitated and falling to the earth as rain. We will now proceed to notice : — I I The Connectiok of Forests with T'm Production op Rain. We have observed that the winds returning, charged with heat and moisture, from the equator in their course to the north pole, bear with them an immense quantity of water. As has been said, the torrid seas send their surface, sixteen feet deep, to the skies in the form of vapour in a year. Of this it has been computed that six feet are dis- charged in rain in the tropics, the remainder sent towards the poles, towards the north pole about six feet — a tremendous mass of water. In addition, we must remember, vast though lesser amounts of water, are taken up from the rest of the surface of the world, both land and sea, and though the south-west winds, evident or concealed by changing currents, must be our chief supply, yet water-charged clouds from other sources pas^ over in all directions as well. 82 Kjt^ From abundant proof and many observations, as well as from the natural reasoning ' concerning what must be the case under such circumstances, it is evident that there is arising from forests a vast amount of vapour of water, which, as we have seen, is the lightest of vapours. This vapour will necessarily be cool, as is the forest region from which it comes. The winds bearing moisture coming from the south will not be generally as cool. These, meeting the ascending streams of cool and moist air arising from a forest region, must be deprived thereby of their power of holding a great part of the water they carry, which must shortly descend in rain near the place of conjunction, according to the tem- perature of the approaching v ir^l. trd the amount of water it bears. Thus we have the o jain oi ^roof, and the direct influence of forests in securing rain • during summer given in its completion. Spring and summer are the seasons when the internal functions of trees are in their greatest activity ; then is transpiration most active ; then rise from them most columns of humid air towards the clouds. Spring has not so many leaves, but then the sun nio-.^es the forest, and draws from the ground — the bed of moisture, as before explair.e< •••i.i i^}^oi "; .-'cl meeting the south, south-east, or south-west wind forms rain. And these sea'^ois, bi.>ri\ig .-Tid summer, are those in which rain is most needed by the thirsty li Ms and the growiu^; -i^^^-a^-ion. This is the value of woods to the farmer. We have now gone over the complete a^^^^em . ./". n&^iration of moisture by wind throughout the atmosphere from equator to poles and back to the equator again. But it was also remarked that there were many important circumstances of local origin which , produced local results in the distribution of moisture and the arrangement of climate. To us in the Province of Ontario there are existing very important local circumstances indeed, which undoubtedly have a great influence, that is to say, the presence of the great lakes. Our chief reservoir of moisture, as is that of all the world, is the equatorial ocean. But our lakes also greatly help, and there is no doubt that their presence largely contributed to the establishment of the splendid forests we have destroyed, and to the accumulation of the layer of rich land on which those woods rested. We cannot do better than now to call to our assistance the aid of a gentleman who has given, as far as I can find, the best explanation of these local phenomena. Dr. P. H. Bryce, M.A., of Toronto. But before reading this it would be well to study carefully the few pages following, here, after which the other as connected with-these great principles, will be much better comprehended. The article is from the world-renowned pen of Herschel, and is fully in accord with the explanations of writers of a late date : — Of Land and Water as Recipients and Communicants of Heat. " Of the solar heat which actually reaches the surface of the globe, that which falls on water penetrates it to some moderate depth and is absorbed internally, while that which is incident on land is wholly absorbed superficially, or within a very minute thickness. Water, moreover, is eminently a non-conductor of heat, so that once received into its sub- stance, it is only diffusible by agitation ; and since this, however violent at the surface of the ocean, diminrshes rapidly with the depth, the ultimate communication of heat down- wards to any considerable depth is a very slow process. By far the greater portion of the 33 daily supply of heat to water, then, may be said to float within a moderate depth of the surface, forming a kind of reservoir of heat. On the other hand, water is a good radiant, and as such is continually, both day and night, giving off radiant caloric, which is absorbed by traversing the aii", and thereby tends to raise the temperature of the latter medium. Hence, it is most probable that much of the heat so radiated off is detained in the lower strata of air. Meanwhile a balance is struck in the water itself of the quanti- ties received and parted with, by the preponderance of one or the other of which it gain" or loses in average temperature in the twenty-four hours. Thus, in the warm season, when days are long and nights short, the general temperature of the air is slowly rising above its annual average, and vice versa in the opposite season. Below a certain depth, however, the temperature of the ocean would appear to be determined by other causes, and to be very little dependent on its superficial amount or fluctuations. It results from the ob- servations of Kotzebue, Beechy, and Sir James C. Ross as a general fact ascertained by thermometric soundings that the deep sea water below a certain level, determined by the latitude, is of invariable temperature throughout the globe, and that a very low one ; the calculations of Lenz founded on Kotzebue, results, gi\ ing 36° R, and those of Ross, 39^.5 (which last is the temperature at which pure water attains its maximum of density). The depth at which the flxed temperature is attained, is about 7,200 feet at the equator, diminishing to latitude 56° on either side of that line, where it attains the surface, and the sea (superficial currents apart) is of equal temperature at all depths. Thence, again,, the upper surface of this uniform substratum descends, and at 70° of latitude has already attained a depth of 4,500 feet. Thus the ocean is divided into three great regions ; two polar basins in which the surface temperature is below 39°, and one medial zone above it, attaining 82° at the equator, and at the poles of course the freezing point of sea-water. It is within these respective regions only then, that superficial currents can act as trans- porters of meteorological temperature. "The habitudes of dry land with relation to incident heat are very different. There is no mobility of parts, and the communication of heat downwards is therefore entirely a process of conduction. But what is most influential, is the fact that the absorption is performed strictly on the exposed surface, which therefore in the instant of absorption fixes upon itself within a very minute depth all the heat which, falling upon water, would in the same instant be disseminated through many feet or yards of its substance. The mere superficial film then becomes much more heated, and since it is a law of radiation that its intensity increases rapidly with the temperature of the radiant surface, it radiates out on the very instant a much larger fraction of the total incident beat, than in the case of water, besides imparting to the air, by contact communication a proportionally greater amount. In water, the absorbed heat is for the most part withdrawn from the radiant action, enveloped and husbanded. In dry land it is instantly and wholly exposed to such action in its most intense form. It is no uncommon thing in dry and light (i. e. badly conducting) soils, in hot climates to find a superficial temperature of 120° to 140° F.,or even more. " That portion of the heat which enters the soil is conducted downwards, and so long as the surface is gaining in temperature a wave of heat is continuously propagated down- wards into the eartli. When the surface, however, by the decline of the sun, begins to lose heat, this ceases, and (the radiation still continuing) what may be called a wave of cold (less comparative heat) begins to be propagated, and so on alternately during the day and night. These waves as they run on spread forwards and backwards, and so by degrees neutralize and destroy each other. Thus the diurnal fluctuations of temperature beneath the surface grow continually less as the depth increases, the rate of diminution depending on the " conductibility " of the soil. In ordinary soils, the difference between the diurnal and nocturnal extremes becomes imperceptible at four feet below the surface. In like manner the general increase of heat due to the summer season, and of cold during winter are propagated in similar, but larger and fuller annual waves, which, in their turn neu- tralize each other at more considerable depths and become imperceptible at forty or fifty feet. Prof. Forbes has shown in an elaborate memoir on this subject that at depths varying from fifty-seven to ninety-nine feet according to the nature of the soil, the annual variation does not exceed 0°.01 C. a I ii! 34 " The absorption of incident heat as 8olar heat and its radiation outwards as terres- trial heat (i. e. heat of a much more absorbable nature) by the solid surface depends very much on the nature of its substance ; but if the ground be covered with vegetation, the whole of the incident heat is returned back either by radiation or contact communication, to the air ; and the soil receives no heat where so covered otherwise than circuitously through the medium of heated air. All these causes acting together, produce a vast dif- ference as respects the temperature of the air in regions of the globe covered by the ocean and those occupied by dry land. In the former, the fluctuations both diurnal and annual ai'e confined within very much narrower limits than in the latter ; and this con- trast which theory indicates, is contirmed by universal observation as the expression of the distinction between an insular and a continental climate, or that of a small island remote from all other land and of the central regions of an extensive continent. If there be one general feature in meteorology more prominent than another it is the uniformity of temperature over large bodies of water, as compared to that under similar exposures to the sun on land." . I* M Terrestrial Radiation. " The theory of radiant heat promulgated by Prevost, which all experimental enquiry .into the subject, has tended to confirm, lays it down as a principle, that a mutual inter- change of heat is continually taking place between all bodies freely exposed to view of each other, the hotter radiating more than the colder, in the ratio of some function in- creasing with the temperature. The experiments of Dulong and Pefit on the radiation of bodies in vacuo have shown that this function, within the limits of their experiments is of the exponential form, or in other words, that the force of radiation in vacuo increases in geometrical progression as the excess of temperature of the radiant body above that of its envelope increases in arithmetical. Hence when a hot body is placed in presence of bodies, some colder, some hotter than itself, an equilibrium will rapidly be established, in which its momentary gains and losses of heat to and fro among them all will balance each other, and its temperature will thenceforward be unchanged. " The mean temperature of the earth remaining unchanged, it necessarily follows that it eijaits by radiation from and through the surface of its atmosphere, on an average, the exact amount of heat it receives from the sun ; i. e. as much as would melt 0.01093 inch thickness of ice per minute over one of its great circles, which is equivalent to l-40th inch of water per hour over its whole surface, condensed from its dewpoint. Taking this as the measure of the total average radiation, one-third of it, or 1-1 20th inch, may be taken as radiated off from the atmosphere without even reaching the earth, and the remaining two-thirds, (l-60th inch), may be considered as got rid of by radiation from the surface of the earth. Let us now consider the manner in which this takes place, supposing a clear sky to prevail : — " Conduction through the soil is a very slow process, radiation a very rapid one. So soon, then, as the sun has sunk so low as not to counteract the earth's radiation, the im- mediate surface begins to part with its heat, at first slowly, but as night advances more rapidly, and at length faster than it can percolate from the interior* to supply the waste. The surface therefore becomes greatly chilled, and a wave of cold is propagated down- wards, neutralizing and destroying the heat wave rising to meet it, a process which goes on leisurely, and takes its own time. Meanwhile the chilled surface now borrows heat from the air also, to supply its waste ; 1st, by contact communication ; 2nd, by down- ward radiation ; and 3rd, by condensation of vapour when the temperature of the surface air is reduced to the dewpoint, and thus attains that state of equilibrium which the circumstances admit of." We will now consider the facts adduced by Dr. Bryce, premising that although cor- rectly expressing the author's views as to facts and figures, it is (as is too often the case with newspaper reports), not nearly as well worded, and not as connected as the original paper. The only full copy, however, unfortunately wandered into that Slough of Despond, 86 the the Ottawa Dead Letter Office, and from that bourne few travellers return. I therefore give it as it appeared in the newspaper : — Forest and Rainfall. The following abridgment of the paper on this subject, read by Mr. P. H. Bryce, M. A., of the Ontario School of Agriculture, before the Canadian Institute, will be found interesting : — " That there is an estimate relation between forests and rainfall, and that the destruc- tion of forests produces aridity and finally sterility, seems to have been long understood, the Greeks recognizing the truth of it by considering it unpardonable to cut down the olive trees in an enemy's country. The opinion of Bernard Palissey and the prediction of Mirabeau, as regarded the destruction of forests in France were sustained, and in other countries the voice of warning has been heard against "this evil. "The remark of Governor Hant, of Denver, Colorado, " I am convinced that farming in Colorado resolves itself into a question of water, and its judicious application," the reader held to be largely true concerning various branches of farming in Ontario. In Canada, however, it was more a question of regulating the supply, or of obtaining it at the proper periods. That the Canadian climate has undergone great changes in the last forty years is looked upon largely as an inexplicable fact, while the scientist regards it as an effect dependant on physical causes known or hidden. "The whole area of Ontario is 121,260 square miles, while that of the lakes about it is 100,000 square miles ; a large portion of the Province must, therefore, be affected by this large body of water. In the autumn, when the earth's position causes a declination of the sun's rays, the surface of the treeless land becomes very rapidly cooled by radia- tion, and with this cooling vegetable growth largely ceases. The lake waters, however, which during the summer have been slowly storing up heat, do not radiate it thus rapidly, while experiment shows that in September the temp^erature of the water, at least in Lake Ontario, is higher than that of the land. In November, 1837, the water according to Professor Dewey, averaged forty-six and the land thirty-six degrees. The land begins to feel the influence of the growing sun by January, when the water has radiated most of its heat. During the whole of this period, however, the land has had sweeping over it, currents of air with their temperature elevated by contact with the warmer surface of the waters in the regions lying to the north and north-west. These, carrying moisture, come in contact with the cold land, and mists and rains are precipitated. " Not only does the cold land cause precipitation of this moisture, but the much higher level of much of the land over that of the lakes increases the cold at about the rate of one degree for every 430 feet, and, therefore, increases precipitation. Add to these causes the influence of the north-east winds, cooled by passing over great extents of land surface, and some idea is had of the principal causes which CDnduce to the great snow falls of the central plateaux of this Province, while the lower and more southern countries obtain the same amounts of moisture largely as rain. Another set of phenomena mark the progresa of spring, the advent of which is marked by the great prevalence of northerly winds, of which, on the whole, we seem to have more now than thirty years ago. The reasons for these northerly winds seems evident. By the 20th of March the sun's rays are beating powerfully upon the earth for twelve hours per diem, rapidly elevating its temperature. The atmosphere over the land, becoming heated, rises, and ita place is supplied by cold winds coming in from the lakes, especially from the ice-cold waters and ice-fields of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. Conditions the opposite of those of winter now exist. Instead of the moisture of the winds from the lakes becoming condensed as the winds blow over the land, the wind becomes drier, because warmer, and only when a cold north- east current meets these moist currents from the lakes will the moisture be precipitated. In the summer months we find long days, and also the perpendicular rays of the sun, elevating to an enormous extent the temperature of the treeless surface, while from the surrounding lakes currents of cooler air are continually rushing in to supply the place of the ascending heated column. These cooler lake breezes, while keeping our climate more •Mf T i 1 ii 36 i pleasant and moist than inland regions less favourably situated, are at the same time elfivated in temperature Vjy passing over the heated land, thus being enabled to retain the moisture which, passing over a cooler surface, they would precipitate. This condition of the air continuing throughout the whole summer season, the natural consequence would be that the summer would be drier than where the surface is protected by trees. With a bare, treeless surface, therefore, there would be : — 1. An autumn warm and moist. 2. A winter with much snow, falling irregularly and much cold wind from the north and north- west. 3. A spring raw and cold, with prevailing north-west winds, with necessarily a large precipitation of moisture. 4. A hot and comparatively dry summer. " Interposing among these phenomena the influence of trees, the relative rate of cooling between the water and the land greatly changes. With the sun's rays beating down on the ground it will frequently rise to ninety or ninety -five degrees ; but a tree intercepting the sun's itiys prevents the high temperature of the ground. Now, though the intercepting tree does become elevated, the rise is slower and never reaches the same height as that of the bare soil for several reasons: — 1. The green foilage is not so good an absorbent of heat as, say a dark soil. 2. Since the tissues of the trees are full of sap, and since the specific heat of water is about four times as great as that of the soil, the sap will not rise in temperature so rapidly as would the soil. 3. On account of the circulation of the sap, successive portions are being continually presented to the lifeating influences of the sun's rays, but as the rapidity of circulation is increased with heat, and as the sap, coming up from the deep portions of the earth surrounding the roots, must have a comparatively low temperature, the elevation in temperature of the whole volume of sap must necessarily be slow. 4. The much greater amount of evaporation taking place from the leaves and branches of the tree than does from the soil, produces a greater degree of cold than would be produced by less evaporation. 5. The greater amounts of moisture in the air surrounding trees will prevent a rapid rise in temperature. These causes combined prevent the tree from attaining to the maximum temperature till evening. Radiation from its surface then setting in will be much slower than in the case of the soil. Hence the temperature does not sink so low as that of the unprotected soil. " He proceeded to explain the effect over a whole country clothed with forests, con- tending that while the slower decrease of the trees temperature in autumn augured a higher temperature, the moderating influences of forests on the winter were beyond question. In spring, the sun's rays being intercepted cannot melt the snow so rapidly, and on this account spring floods are largely prevented, the winter grains and clover are protected for a longer period from the effects of thaws by day and frosts by night. Slower radiation prevents so many night thaws, and the baneful chilling influences of cold ' raw winds are much mitigated. Among other things, the trees, becoming elevated in temperature but slowly, act as condensers to the vapours swept over them from the surface of the lakes, thus supplying frequent showers to the growing plants, while at the same time, by preventing so rapid evaporation, they aid the rains in effecting their fructi- fying influences. " The reader then proceeded to consider at length Canada's present condition, and in doing so remarked that where settlement has existed for at least twenty-five years, three- quarters of the forest has been destroyed, while in few cases is the preserved wood dis- tributed over the surface with any regard to its protecting influences, so it may be said, that three-fourths of the influences that would be exerted in our climate under a treeless surface are at work. 1. A cold, raw spring, with high winds and frequently much dry weather during germination. 2. A hot summer, with but little rain, the dryness increas- ing regularly from May to August. 3. An irregular winter, with frequent high winds, irre '\ 48 n \M While again, the humidity of the climate is maintained from the simple fact that the green, moist foliage of the trees constituting the forests has the well-known tendency of preventing the increase of the sun's rays by radiation, and thus reducing the chances of evaporation. " The Count de Gasparin has found that soils covered with low vegetation or with woods, and in which the soil is composed of humus, mingled with sand and lime or clay, absorb more water than those which contain no humus, and consequently retain it longer than the latter. These effects vary, according to the proportions of the various elements of which the soils are composed. The infiltrations are greater in wooded lands than in those covered with sod. The roots penetrate deeper, and thus facilitate the passage of waters, which would be only stopped by an impervious stratum. " The branches of trees in leaf not only oppose the evaporation of the water in the soil, but the leaves themselves are constantly yielding a vapour from exhalation, and which tends to reduce the evaporation of waters, so far as the moisture exhaled goes to saturate the air, the infiltration at the same time going on into the soil. Herbaceous plants, not in masses, do not produce similar effects ; in fact, whoever has been in places partly wooded and partly sodded must have observed, after a rain and a rest of some duration, that the sodded grounds were dry, while the wooded soil was always damp. " We will now speak of the water absorbed by the roots, and that which is exhaled into the atmosphere. " The roots of trees, as shown by the experiments of Hales and others, absorb a large amount of water, charged with various elements constituting the sap. The surplus water is evaporated from the leaves, which are constantly surrounded by a humid atmos- phere. The water thus evaporated ir, drawn, not only from the upper strata, but likewise from the deeper layers of the soil into which the roots penetrate, and which supply little or no water to herbaceous vegetation. . These lower strata are fed by subterranean sheets of water that often come from a distance. Furthermore, this water remaining in these lower strata, being thus given to the atmosphere, fall again as fog, dew or rain, and thus increase the quantity of water that the surface of the soil receives from some distance away. " The amount of water absorbed by the roots is so great that it is practically difficult to make much of it remain near the trees, several reasons for preventing it occurring. The soil in contact with the roots, and for a little distance away, is in a certain state of desic- cation ; little by little it loses its nutritive properties, the lime, etc., and when these efements are gone, the soil contains little but sand and clay, which then becomes perme- able. It is, therefore, well demonstrated — "(1.) That a difference exists between the evaporation from a naked soil and a soil covered with sod. " (2.) That there is a like difference between a soil covered with sod and one that is wooded, with the further advantage of the latter in facilitating the infiltration of water. "(3.) That the amount of water absorbed by the roots does not produce drought in the soil, since it is returned after evaporation in the condition of fog, dew or rain. The drought does not take place till the soil is exhausted." The thermal influence of forests has been established by Humboldt as follows : — " They shelter the gi'ound against the sun's rays, they maintain it in a greater degree of humidity, and facilitate the decomposition of the leaves and litter, which they change into humus ; and they act as a cooling cause by producing active aqueous transpiration from the leaves and by multiplying in the expansion of their branches, the surfaces warmed by the solar heat, and the surfa* . s cooled by nocturnal radiation. In regard to the action last mentioned, positive expei-iments show that the layer of atmosphere in contact with a meadow or a field covered with herbage or vegetable leaves, becomes cooled by nocturnal radiation, other things being equal, several degrees below the temperature of the atmos- phere at some meters above, while nothing of this kind takes place over a naked soil, which becomes warm or cool according to the nature of its component parts. We will add, as we have demonstrated, that the leaves as well as the trunk and branches become warmed by solar heat, and retain into the night a portion of this acquired heat. This effect should counterbalance the cooling from nocturnal radiation. We have not thus far 40 of a soil bhat is i^ater. jht in The 7B : — Jree of Ke into from ^ed by action rith a turnal litmos- soil, will come This 18 far taken account of the fact that the warming of the trees by the sun has a considerable effect upon the temperature of the atmosphere outside the woods as well as within them." Influence of Woodlands upon Springs, Rivers, and Streams, and in Causinq Droughts. Professor Hough says : — " It is a matter of common remark that our streams diminish as the woodlands are cleared away, so as to materially injure the manufacturing interests depending upon hydraulic power, and to require now sources of supply for our State canals and for the use of cities and large towns. Many streams once navigable arc now entirely worthless for this use. " The mode in which this influence operates will be readily understood when we con- sider the effect of forests upon the humidity and temperature of the air. *' A deciduous tree during the season when in foliage is constantly drawing from the earth and giving off from its leaves a considerable amount of moisture, and in some cases this amount is very great. This change of state from a fluid to a gaseous condition is a cooling process, and the air near the surface, being screened from the sun and from tin- winds, becomes by this means so humid that a rank, succulent vegetation springs up and thrives, which in an open field would wither and perish in an hour. The air being thus charged with moisture and cooled, does not take up by evaporation the rains which fall, and the soil being more open readily allows the water from melting snows and from showers to sink into the earth, from whence a portion appears in springs and in the swamps, which give rise to rills and streams. " The air at all times holds more or less watery vapour in suspension, and its capa- city for doing so is increased as the temperature is raised, not by a steadily gaining rate, but more rapidly as the heat is increased. There can be no evaporation when the air in saturated with moisture, and no deposit of water in any form until the temperature is reduced to the point of saturation. It- is not yet determined as to how far the cooling and moistening influence of a grove may extend. It must depend upon many circumstances, and especially upon the slope of the surface and the direction of the 'vinds. The effect is often apparent to the eye from the freshness of the herbage in adjacent fields for many rods in width." He also says : — " Woodlands are well adapted to hinder the waters from running oti* and to favour their passage into the soil. This they do with better effect when they are more densely covered. It is, moreover, certain that the leaves of trees pump up and absorb a large amount of water, and although the soil on which they grow is uncultivated, it is much more susceptible of absorption of rains than bare and uncultivated land. " Forests contribute so effectually to the detention and preservation of the waters, that springs in some countries flowing through the year have entirely disappeared after the woods had been burned, nor did they reappear until after the verdure had been restored, their existence being closely dependent upon its presence." I will give a quotation on a very important subject, the amount of moisture evapo- rated by leaves of trees : — " Tlie leaves of plants impart by evaporation during the growing season a certain amount of watery vapour to the air. The amount of this evaporation differs, not only in the different kinds of plants, but it also depends in the same plants upon external conditions — the temperature of the air, the intensity of light, and on the amount of moisture in the air and in the soil. The greater the warmth of the air, the more intense the solar light, the drier the air, and the moister the soil, by so much more will plants give off" moisture from their leaves, the transpiration under these conditions being mon; active. In this respect light affects plants to such a degree that even passing clouds will lessen the evaporation. The result of all the observations thus far has been to show that under like circumstances the transpiration is greatest in the direct light of the sun ; that is, less in common daylight, still loss in the .shade, and least in the night. Risler found 4 4 M 00 u* hy his investigations that in the lucerne the amount of water evaporated in the sun is -four times greater than it is in the shade. The difference of evaporation in the two con- ditions is with this plant considerably greater than with corn. In some plants, as in the willow, it is, however, very slight. This is no doubt the reason why some plants will thrive better in the shade than others. Transpiration is also diminished by a fall of temperature and an increase in the humidity of the atmosphere. With the decrease of warmth and the lessened influence of light, the transpiration of plants becomes less in autumn, and finally stops entirely, causing the falling of the leaves. The evaporation of the leaves is very slight in a damp or foggy atmosphere, and when the leaves are wet by dew or i-ain. In the damp air of our hot-houses, and under glass vases, often placed over weakly plants, the amount of evaporation is very slight. It is correspondingly lessened in the shade of trees in the cool and damp air of dense forests and under arti- ficial coverings. " In order that the leaves of plants may remain fresh and plump, as much water must be taken up by the small fibres of the roots as is lost by transpiration. A constant 'Circulation of water is going on fcom the roots through the trunk to the branches, and through these and the stems into the leaves. The plants remain in a normal condition whenever the supply of water by the roots and loss by evaporation correspond. Under some circumstances it will occur that the supply of water received through the root is greater than the loss through the leaves, or that the loss is greater than the supply. Instances of the former case are presented in the plant which during the night evaporates less water than it receives from the ground through the roots. The surplus is deposited on the leaves in small drops, which, upon examination, may be found early in the morning even in the hot-houses, which precludes the idea that they are gatherings of dew. Another instance is shown in our deciduous trees in autumn after th^ fall of the leaves, when, from a relatively warm soil the roots maintain their activity, and continue to receive moisture from the soil, which will remain in the body of the tree, as the organs of evap- oration are gone. This explains the reason why there is a greater amount of water in the body of the tree in autumn than there is in summer. It is of tener the case, however, that the amount of water lost is greater than that received, which occasions in herbage and young plants a withering of the leaves. Larger trees are not materially affected by this interruption, as the body of the tree acts as a reservoir of water, from which the trees are supplied for some time. The withering and drying up of plants is not always the result of an insufficient amount of moisture in the soil, but it may occur when, in consequence of a lack of activity in the roots the absorption of water from soil is not proportioned to the loss by transpiration." W ! Here is a word from California. The Nevada Enterprise says : — " It will be but a very short time before we shall be able to observe the effect that stripping the fine forests irom the sides and summit of the Sierras will have on the climate of this State and Cali- fornia. In a very few years every accessible tree, even to such as are only of value as firewood, will be swept from the mountains. Even now this has been done in some places. It '.s to be hoped that a new growth of pines or timber trees of some kind may spring up on the ground that has been cleared, but we do not hear that any such growth has yet started. " Already one great change has occurred that is evident to the most ordinary observer, which is the speedy melting away of the snow on the mountains. It now goes off at once, in a flood, with the first warm weather of spring, whereas formerly, lying shaded and protected by the pines and other evergreen trees, it melted slowly, and all summer sent down to the valleys on both the eastern and western slopes of the Sierras constant and copious streams of water. Instead of a good stage of water in our streams throughout summer, as in former times, there is a flood in the spring, and when this is passed by our rivers speedily run down, and being no longer fed from the mountains, evaporation leaves their beds almost dry when the hot weather of summer comes on. " The mountains being stripped of their trees, there will be nothing to shade the rocks and earth, and both will absorb a sufficient amount of heat from the rays of the sun during the fall, and even until far into the winter, to melt any light snow that may occur. 51 but a 'orest8 Cali- alue as some id may [rowth server, once, ed and ir sent at and iighout Iby our leaves Lde the Ihe sun 1 occur. The result will be that our autumn weather will reach further into winter, until at last we shall have no winter worthy of the name. On the California side of the mountains the effect will be much the same. The hot weather of the valleys will extend over the foot-hills and gradually reach up into the mountains." The desolation of mountain regions by the clearing of forests and by pasturage of flocks is also strikingly illustrated in the Pyrenees. This region in the last century was almost entirely out of account in the agricultural and commercial reports of France. The slopes were timbered with forests of great extent, which, from wants of markets and ways for transportation, remained unproductive and to some extent unknown. On the top, where forest vegetation ceased, sufficient herbage was found for the pasturage of Hocks in summer. The plains were poorly cultivated and inundations were much less frequent and less destructive than now-a-days. As roads came to be opened the profit from sheep and cattle became greater, and the clearing of forests was begun to make room for pasturage, and to some extent for timber, until by degrees the slopes of the mountains were denuded, and the rains having nothing to hinder began to form eroding torrents, the south slopes suffering most because first cleared and directly exposed to the sun's heat. The extremes of flood and drought became excessive, and extensive tracts have been ruined for present occupation from this source. The Island of St. Helena, the well-known scene of Napoleon's banishment, furnishes a remarkable illustration of the connection that exists between forests and rainfall. When first discovered in 1502 it had heavy forests. The introduction of goats and other causes destroyed these woodlands until the island was almost denuded. The consequences were that in the records of the last century we find accounts of repeated and almost periodical visitations of very severe drought, occasioning various losses to cattle and crop efforts. Toward the end of the last century, however, the governor saw the need of strenuous efforts, gardeners were sent for, and trees from all parts of the world were planted, without regard to their character. The "Pinas Pinaster" was sown very extensively, and several plantations of this still exist. The consequences of this were discovered a few years since as follows : — " For many years past, since the general growth of our trees, we have been preserved from the scourge, and droughts such as were formerly recorded are now altogether unknown. We have no means, however, of otherwise comparing the rainfall •of the two periods, as no tables or even estimates of the rainfall can be had for the earlier dates. Our fall of rain now is equal to that of England, and is spread almost ■evenly over the year. The showers fall more heavily in two or three months of the year. But this period, though called on this account the rainy season, is in no way to be com- pared to what is understood by an inter-tropical rainy season." The Island of Ascension furnishes another remarkable instance. This island, some seven and a-half miles long and six wide, was entirely barren when first occupied in 181.3, and so destitute of water that supplies were brought from England and the Cape of Good Hope. Means hare since been taken to plant trees and introduce agriculture on the island, though not to any great extent, the effect has been most remarkable. The island grows forty kinds of trees, where but one tree grew in 1843, owing to want of water. The water supply is excellent, and the garrison and ships visiting the island are supplied in abundance with vegetables of various kinds. 61 i\ m .t . i rl In Ceylon the planting of tea and coffee a few yeani aince became an object of active and to some extent speculative enterprise, the soil and climate being alike adapted to both and with more profit to any other vegetable products previously grown. This led to tht) extensive cutting off of forests, to such extent that there was reason to fear that dis- tricts hastily cleared under these inducements might lie so changtul that there could not be a few years' cultivation. Dr. J. D. Hooker, of the Royal Kew Gardens, to whom reports had been sent, in a letter dated May 27, 1873, to the Earl of Kim))erley, calling special attention to the consequences likely to follow this improvidence, says : — " It is principally on climatic considerations that the cutting down of forests seems to require Oovernni<;nt supervision. There is good reason to think that in tropical coun- tries the removal of wood operates effectively in reducing the rainfall. There can at any rate be no doubt that the presence of forests plays a most important part in storing the rainfall and yielding up gradually to the stroums a continuous supply of water, a thing, I need hardly say, in a hot country, of primary importance. Moreover, the rain is retained by forests on the surface of the ground ; it gradually permeates to the subsoil, and so feeds the underground water-bearing strata upon which springs and wells must eventually depend. If the forest is indiscriminately removed the rain runs off as fast as it falls, and washes away the superficial and fertile soil with it. " The mischief already done in Mauritius and various West India islands is so widely spread (being in some, indeed, irreparable), and the feeling of the colonists against any interference on the part of the Government is apt to be so determined that I venture to press upon your lordship my own opinion a.s to the urgency of active steps being taken in the case of an island so beautiful and at prosont so fertile as Ceylon. I have lately received an account of the deterioration of the climate of some of the leeward islands, which affords a melancholy contirmation of what I have urged above. " The contrast between noighbouriug islands similarly situated is most striking. The sad change which has befallen the smaller ones is without any doubt to be ascribed to human agency alone. It is recorded of those that in former times they were clothed with dense forests, and their older inhabitants remembered when the rains were abundant and the hills and all uncultivated places were shaded by extensive groves. The removal of the trees was certainly the cause of the present evil. The opening of the soil to the vertical sun rapidly dries up the moisture and prevents the rain from sinkin,!;; to the roots of the plants. The rainy seasons in these climates are not continuous, cloudy days, but succes- sions of sudden showers, with the sun shining hot in the intervals. Without shade u}»on the surface, the water is rapidly exhaled, and springs and streams diminish. " It is not, however, simply to the restriction of the removal of existing forests that I would venture to direct your lordship's attP'.:ion, but also to the object, no less important, of making new plantations of forest trees i ^eful for timber and in the arts. Such planta- tions would serve the double object of retaining the de.sired humidity and of yielding a revenue to the island." The Khanate of Bucharia presents a striking example of the consequences brought upon a country by clearings. Within a period of thirty years this was one of the nv fertile regions of Central Asia, a country which when well wooded and watered v terrestrial paradise. But within the last twenty-five years a mania of clearing has sci upon the inhabitants, and all the great forests have been cut away, while the little thai remained was ravaged by fire during a civil war. The consequences were not long in following, and have transformed this country into a kind of arid desert. The water- courses are dried up and the irrigating canals empty. The moving sands of the desert being no longer restrained by barriers of forest are every day gaining upon the land, and will finish by transforming into a desert as desolate as the solitudes that separate it from Khiva. In of a coi having observa secured quotatic by the "B covered there cai surface, springs, from Ap cent.. 53 [•ought I ^^ jstn. le thai [ng in irater- iesert i, and from In the calcuIationH concerning the influence of furcHts on the rainfall and vegetation of a country, the world hoH auffered from a lack of scientific obaervations, no country having for a number of years in succession employe»nng season especially in the day '<', which passes ofi* into the air as an invisible vapour, and must be replenished from t soil through the agency of the roots, or they wilt and die. The tree is, in one sense i-eam of water, which, during the growing season is moving from the fibres of the ro vhrough the outer body of wood into the limbs and branches and into the leaves. Tl. 'rests thus withdraw a great amount of water from the soil and give it off as vapour, in winter the process is partially suspended, but still there is a '':« J t f| m 54 i'^ \ 't'W M certain degree of activity in the roots. They lay up a supply of aliment in the wood, which serves to keep them alive at a time when grass and herbs would die, and from the depth to which the roots penetrate, they are able to draw water from deeper strata which never become dry, and may thus be able to endure the driest seasons. The amount of water which plants and trees need to sustain life, depends mainly upon the growth and evaporation. The latter differs in the same plant according to age, size, and location, as well as conditions of soil, amount of light, and motion of the air. We have as yet no reliable results as to the amount of water which different forest plants and trees under various circumstances lose by evaporation. This is a subject which deserves our attention in the highest degree, and furnishes a rich subject for forest experimental stations. While linger found that water would evaporate three times the amount of a plant of the same surface, Schleiden concludes that a forest evaporates at least three times as much water as a water-surface of like area. According to Hartig, a forest evaporates less than free water or wet earth. In. hot summer days some plants will evaporate their own weight. In fact, forests afford, and some species of trees, more than others, a kind of vertical drainage of water from the soil. " With res}>ect to the relative amount of water falling in the fields and forests, it was found uniformly greater at the surface of the earth in the former than the latter, for the manifest reason that a part was intercepted by and evaporated from the foliage of the trees. The percentage in the woods as compared with the fields, varied in different years, by seasons, from forty to ninety, being on the genei'al average of all stations, and, for the whole period least in spring and most in winter. These results will be found to agree with those obtcvied at other stations, and the rule would doubtless apply to all countries and to every period of time. "The foregoing statements show how >'losely related in a country, are its wealth in forests and water (as shown by the great inHuence of the former), and the litter that covers the surface, to the evaporation and moisture. It therefore need not surprise us that springs and brooks dry up or flow only periodically, and that the mean height of water in rivers and large streams lessens when large surfaces are cleared up, or that springs flow more abundantly and regularly when, by replanting, the extent of forests is increased. The influence of forests, and of litter-covering on the moisture of the soil, founded upon these observations, may be expressed not only in percentages, J)ut we may be allowed to draw conclusions from small to great, as they aflbrd the means for estimating the loss of water in the soil, caused by large clearings and the taking off of litter from any given surface." As I am endeavouring to present in this compilation as good an idea as is available of what has been done in this matter of late years, in different countries, (for the world in general appears to be becoming aware of the loss of its timber), I will now give an opinion relative to the Indian forests from a source which should command attention. It is from a valuable work entitled "India in 1880," by Sir Richard Temple, Bart., G.C.S.I., C.I.E., D.C.L.. late Governor of Bombay, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and Finance Minister of India (a work with which, by the way, I was furnished by the kindness of Mr. Goldwin Smith) : — Of his qualifications for writing such a work, the author says : — *' If, in undertaking to give such a description from my own knowledge, I shall seem presumptuous, I may state that the demands of public duty have compelled me to visit every part of the Indian Empire, from Thibet to Ceylon, from the Khyber Pass to the frontier of Ava, from the valley of Asam to the city of Candahar. It has been my fate to serve in the three Presi- dencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and in every province of the empire with one exception, to be brought in contact with the Native States and the North-West frontier, and to be employed in some capacity or other under all the departments of the State. These circumstances are mentioned in order to show how the materials have Ijeen acquired upoii which this volume is founded. I have, with trifling e.xceptioneen done already, of which some parts are irreparable, or can be repaired only after the lapse of a long time, while others may be reintidied within one or two generations. Of the primeval forests there remains several, still intact, enough to constitute a national resource. " In the lower ranges of the Himalayan mountains, in central India, in the valleys of the Vindhya and Aravali ranges, in the northern and western portions of the Deccan, and in inany districts of the Madras Presidency, the forests have been for the most part so long destroyed that their restoration is hardly to be anticipated. But in the higher ranges of the Hinialaya.s, in the central tracts of the Punjab, in the Hatpura range, in that hilly region where the Vindhya and Satpura ranges join, in the Eastern and Western Ghat ranges, they are either preserved, or else but partially destroyed, and may still prove very productive. In some parts of the Bengal Presidency, and in many parts of the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, the remnant of them is still being invaded bit by bit. Many authorities apprehend that the western and southern provinces of India are, owing to the destruction of the forests, threatened with a danger which is feebly checked, and which, if not arrested, may seriously affect the best interests of the country. " The woods and forests of India from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin comprise, as \M 56 I .M > i might be expected, trees of European kinds ; the cedar, the pine, the fir, the mountain cypress, the juniper, the yew, the oak, the ilex, the elm, the ash, the maple, the plane, the holly, the laurel, the birch, the walnut, the alder. ^The Asiatic sorts are the acacia, the terminalia, the ebony ; the ficus order including the banyan and the india-rubber tree, the mango, the sandal-wood, the cane, the bamboo, the toon, the neem, the blackwood, the aal ; and greatest of all, the teak. To these should be added the palms, including the feathery date-palm, the palmyra with its fan-like leaves, and the betel-nut palm. The lesser products of the forests, such as myro-balans, and other articles, are also consi- derable. " Many believe that the rainfall is copious and seasonable or otherwise, according as the woods and forests, and the vegetation subsidiary to them, are preserved or destroyed, while others disbelieve this view, which at all events must admit of much qualification. But, after all due abatements have been made, the view is generally held to comprise some truth. The total rainfall of the whole country cannot possibly be affected by the existence of forests. The average quantity of vapour must come from the ocean and must be condensed somewhere ; if it be not changed into rain as it passes across the plains, it will pass on to the mountains and be transformed there. This, indeed, is a matter of common experience ; moisture-laden clouds float over the Deccan, leaving it arid, and move on to the Satpura range, and, being condensed there, fill the torrent-beds with rain- water which rushes into the rivers and returns ultimately to the plain in the shape of inundations. Similarly, clouds sweep over the thirsty plains of Hindostan, and being condensed in the Himalayas, return in the form of floods in the great rivers. The hope is that, if forest tracts were distributed over the plains, there would be cool surfaces to attract the clouds and to arrest them, as it were, on their way. There are many tracts where forests, if preserved, would grow up in a short time. Thus it is anticipated by many that the climate would be improved, and that the early and the later rains would descend more seasonably than at present. It is i-emembered that, throughout the world, those regions which possess rich vegetation receive abundant rains, while those which are denuded of vegetation are rainless. It is remarked, too, that those regions ill India, which ordinarily receive rain, but have been parched by a long drought, are plagued afterwards with immoderate rain. " At all events the forests, and their subsidiary vegetation, husband and store by a natural process the exceeding moisture of the rainy season, for the benefit of the country during the dry season. The streams become better filled and more available for the use of the people ; the spnngs are less likely to run dry, the wells less liable to failure. This consideration becomes peculiarly important in those regions where the canals for irrigation are drawn from rivers having their source in mountains which depend on the annual rain- fall for moisture. Near the springs and along the upper courses of these rivers the vegetation needs especially to be preserved for the sake of the canals. "The economic considerations relating to the forests are manifestly important, as wood is used largely in the construction of the houses and cottages in most parts of the country. In northern India, where trees are few, the earth, indurated by the sun, aflbnls good material, and the earthern walls are durable, but elsewhere the earth does not always possess a like degree of consistency. For these reasons it is essential that the ' timber markets should be well supplied. Without interposition by the State, the wood and timlter would become scarcer and dearer from time to time, as the forests became exhausted. As coal is not available, the people require wood for fuel ; if they cannot obtain wood they will use cow-dung cakes for burning. The practice of consuming for fuel that which ought to be used for manure in a country too, wiiere artificial manure is not available, extensively prevails, is most injurious, and tends to exhaustion of the soil. The only means of lessening this practice is by preserving the forests to provide a cheap and plentiful supply of wood for fuel. " Thus the policy of preserving the forests rests on two grounds, first the improve- ment of the climate and the retention of moisture ; secondly the husbanding of the national resources in timber and fuel for the use of the people. This policy is of much consequence to the well-being of the country and the nation." matte of vai ture evapo cal coi pendei Thele they affect the foi cesses and a peratu 57 Mr. Marsh says that, concerning the influence of the forest, considered as inorganic matter on temperature : — " The evaporation of fluids and the condensation and expansion of vapours and gases are attended with changes of temperature ; and the quantity of mois- ture which the air is capable of containing ; and of course, other things being equal, the evaporation rises and falls with the thermometer. The hygroscopical and the thermoscopi- cal conditions of the atmosphere are therefore inseparably connected as reciprocally de- pendent quantities, and neither can be fully discussed without taking notice of the other. The leaves of living trees exhale enormous quantities of gas and of aqueous vapour, and they largely absorb gases, and under certain conditions, probably also water. Hence they affect more or less powerfully the temperature as well as the humidity of the air. But the forest, regarded purely as inorganic matter, and without reference to its living pro- cesses of absorption and exhalation of gases and of water, has, as an absorbent, a radiator, and a conductor of heat, and as a mere covering of the ground, an influence on the tem- perature of the air and the earth, which may be considered by itself. " Balance of Conjiiotimj Injiii^nces of Forest on Atmosplieric Heat and Humidity. " We have shown that the forest, considered as dead matter, tends to diminish the moisture of the air, by preventing the sun's rays from reaching the ground and evapora- ting the water that falls upon the surface, and also by spreading over the earth a spongy mantle which sucks up and retains the humidity it receives from the atmosphere ; while, at the same time, this covering acts in the contrary direction by accumulating in a reser- voir not wholly inaccessible to vaporizing influences, the water of precipitation which Diight otherwise suddenly sink deep into the bowels of the earth, or flow by superficial channels to other climatic regions. We now see that, as a living organism, it tends, on the one hand, to diminish the humidity of the air, by sometimes absorbing moisture from it, and, on the other, to increase that humidity by pouring out into the atmosphere, in a vaporous form, the water it draws up through its roots. This last operation, at the same time, lowers the temperature of the air in contact with or proximity to the wood, Viy the same law as in other cases of the conversion of water into vapour. " As I have repeatedly said, we cannot measure the value of any one of these ele- ments of climatic disturbance, raising or lowering of temperature, increase or diminution of humidity ; nor can we say that in any one season, any one year, or any one rixed cycle, however long or short, they balance and compensate each other. They are sometimes, but certainly not always contemporaneous in their action, whether their tendency is in the same or in opposite directions, antl, therefore, their influence is sometimes cumulative, sometimes conflicting, but, upon the whole, their general effect is to mitigate extremes of atmospheric heat and cold, moisture and drought. They serve as equalizers of tempera- ture and humidity, and it is highly probable that in analogy with most other works and workings of nature, they, at certain or uncertain periods restore the equilibrium, which, whether as lifeless masses or as living organisms they may have temporarily disturbed. " When, therefore, man destroys these natural harmonizers of climatic discords, he sacrifices an important conservative power, though it is far from certain that he has thereby affected the mean, however much he may have exaggerated the extremes of at- mospheric temperature and humidity, or, in other words, may have increased the range and lengthened the scale of thermometric and hygrometric variations. " Speciil Influence of Woods on Precipitation. " With the question of the action of forests upon temperature and upon atmospheric humidity is intimately connected tliat of their influence upon precipitation, which they may affect by increasing or diminishing the warmth of the air and by absorbing or ex- haling uncombined gas and aqueous vapour. The forest being a natural arrangement, the presumption is that it exercises a conservative action, or at least a compensating one, and consequently that its destruction must tend to produce pluviometrical disturl>ances as well as thermometrical varintions. And this is the opinion of perhaps the greatest number of observers. Indeed, it is almost impossible to suppose that, under certain conditions of time and place, the quantity and the periods of rain should not depend, more or less, upon the presence or absence of forests ; and without insisting that the removal of forests has n 68 n diminished the sum-total of snow and rain, we may well admit that it has lessoned the quantity which annually falls within particular limits. Various theoretical considerations make this probable, the most obvious arguiAent, perhaps, being that drawn from the gen- erally admitted fact, that the summer and even mean temperature of the forest is below that of the open country in the same latitude. If the air in a wood is cooler than that around it, it must reduce the temperature of the atmospheric stratum immediately above it, and, of course, whenever a saturated current sweeps over it, it must produce precipi- tation which would fall upon it, or at a greater or less distance from it. " We must here take into the account a very impoi'tant consideration. It is not universally or even generally true that the atmosphere returns its condensed humidity to the local source from which it receives it. The air is constantly in motion — howling t«ini>estH scour amain From sea to laud, from lanil to sea ; *> and, therefore, it is always probable that the evaporation drawn up by the atmosphere from a given river, or sea, or forest, or meadow, will be discharged by precipitation, not at or near the point where it rose, but at a distance of miles, leagues, or even degrees. The currents of the upper air are invisible, and they leave behind them no landmark to record their track. We know not whence they come, or whither they go. We have a certain rapidly increasing acquaintance with the laws of general atmospheric motion, but of the origin and limits, the beginning and end of that motion, as it manifests itself at any particular time and place, we know nothing. We cannot say where or when the vapour, exhaled to-day from the lake on which we float, will be condensed and fall ; whether it will waste itself on a barren desert, refresh upland pastures, descend in snow on Alpine heights, or contribute to swell a distant torrent, which shall lay waste square miles of fertile corn-land ; nor do we know whether the rain which feeds our brooklets is due to the transpiration from a neighbouring forest or to the evaporation from a far-off sea. If, therefore, it were proved that the annual quantity of rain and dew is now as great on the plains of Castile, for example, as it was when they were covered with the native forest, it would by no means follow that those woods did not augment the amount of precipitation elsewhere. " The whole problem of the pluviometrical influence of the forest, general or local, is so exceedingly complex and ditficult that it cannot with our present means of know- ledge be decided upon (\ priari grounds. It must now be regiirded as a 'crs whose attention has l^een directed specially to the point — that though much snow is intercepted by the trees, and the quantity on the ground in the woods is consequently less than in the open land in the first part of the winter, yet most of what reaches the ground at that season remains under the protection of the wood until melted, and as it occasionally re- ceives new supplies, the depth of the snow in the forest in the latter half of the winter is considerably greater than in the cleared fields. Careful measurements in a snowy region in New England, in the month of February, gave a mean of thirty-eight inches in the open ground and forty-four inches in the woods. " The general efiect of the forest in cold climates is to assimilate the winter state of the ground to that of wooded regions under softer skies ; and it is a circumstance well worth noting, that in Southern Europe, where nature has denied to the earth a warm winter garment of flocculent snow, she has, by one of those compensations in which her empire is so rich, clothed the hill-sides with umbrella and other pines, ilexes, cork-oaks, bays, and other trees of persistent foliage, whose evergreen leaves afford to the soil a protection analogous to that which it tlerives from snow in more northern climates. " The water imbiljed by the soil in winter sinks until it m<;ets a more or less imper- meable or saturated stratum, and then, by unseen conduits, slowly finds its way to the channels of springs, or oozes out of the ground in drops which unite in rills, and so all is conveyed to the larger streams, and by them finally to the sea. The water, in percolating through the vegetable and mineral layers, acquires their temperature, and is chemically affected by their action, but it carries very little matter in mechanical suspension. " The process I have described is a slow one, and the supply of moisture derived from the snow, augmented by the rains of the following seasons, keeps the forest ground, where the surface is level or but moderately inclined, in a state of approximate saturation throughout almost the whole year. " It may l>e proper to observe here that in Italy, and in many parts of Spain and France, the Alps, the Appenines, and the Pyrenees, not to speak of less important moun- tains, perform the functions which provident nature has in other regions assigned to the forest — that is, they act as reservoirs wherein is accumulated in winter a supply of mois- ture to nourish the parched plains during the droughts of summer. Hence, however enormous may Ije the evils which have accrufd to the above-mentioned countries from the destruction of the woods, the absolute desolation which would otherwise have smitten them through the folly of man, has been partially prevented by those natural dispositions by means of which thfre are stored up in the tjlaciers, in the snow-fields, and in the basins of mountains and valleys, vast deposits of condensed moisture which are afterwards dis- tributed in a liquid form during the season in which the atmosphere furnishes a slender supply of the beneficent tluid so indispensal)le to vcgetal)le and animal life." .1 •♦ p An elegant French writer upon forest economy, Jules Clave, in a work entitled " Etudes sur I'Economie Forcstiere," thus clearly describes the processes of nature by which forests maintain and equalize the flow of waters : — •' Rains. — The first phenomenon that offers for our inquiry, in the study of the regu- lation of the watei-s, is min. It is this that gives rise to springs and rivers, and that in certain conditions of continuance occasions inundations. " Rain is caused by the precipitation of the vapour held by the atmosphere, and this precipitation is commonly caused by cold and humid winds. When these winds come to us (in France) from the ocean or the Mediterranean, and pass over a place where the temperature is too low to hold these vapours in suspension, they condense and fall as rains. «2 !l i bi i^*# ■I " It has been claimed that the presence of forests, like mountains, have the effect of lowering the temperature, and by this means of increasing the abundance of rains as well Hs of diminishing their violence. It cannot be doubted that forests have the offect of sheltering the surface from solar heat, and of causing a cutaneous exhalation from the leaves, while they multiply, by the spreading of their branches, the amount of surface cooled by this evaporation, and thus have a cooling effect ; but this, in fact, is far from being general, and especially in our climate it is ofteu marked, and even neutralized, by local circumstances, such as the physical properties of the soil, the topographical situation of the place, the direction of prevailing winds, etc. If it is certain that the mean tempe- rature of our country is higher than was in Gaul in the days of Otesar, when it was covered with forests, we must nevertheless admit that while a forest protects the surface from cold winds it does not tend to raise the temperature, a.td that if cut away a refri- gerator would not be thereby necessarily produced. Thus, for example, it has V)een proved that the department of VArdhhe, which is now without a single considerable piece of woods, has shown during the last thirty years a perturbation of climate, of which late spring frosts, formerly unknown in the country, are among the saddest effects. A similar remark may be made in the plains of Alsace, since the denudation of several of the crests of the Vosge&" *' Tropical Forests. — On the contrary, in countries within the tropics, where the nights are usually very serene, the radiating power of plants is sensibly increased, and the energy of other frigorific causes are developed in the same proportion, so that tlie presence of forests tends uniformly to reduce the temperature. This fact was proved by numerous observations given in M. Boussingault's work on the region included between the eleventh degree of north and fifth degree of south latitude, and it effectually explains the reason why America is not so hot as Africa within these latitudes. " The action of forests upon rainfall, through the influence which they exert upon the temperature, is therefore very difficult to determine in our country ; but it is dis- tinctly marked in warmer climates, as proved by numberless examples. M. Boussingault reports that in the region comprised between the Bay of Cupica and the Gulf of Guaya- quil — a district covered with immense forests — the rains are ahnost continual, and that the mean temperature of this humid country is scarcely above 79' F. !M. Blanqni, in his travels in Bulgaria, mentions that at Malta the rains have become so seldom, since the trees have been cut away to make room for cotton, that at the time of his visit in October, 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen during three years. The fearful dryness which has desolated the Cape Verde Islands may be, in like manner, attributed to the cutting off of forests. On the island of St. Helena, where the wooded surface has considerably increased within the last few years, they observe that the amount of rain increases in the same pro- portion, and it is now double that which fell annually at the time of Napoleon's sojourn there. Lastly, in Egypt, the recent plantations have brought rains where they were alniost unknown before. ''* " In the midst of this uncertainty in which our climate is left, by the study of mete- orology — for the hygrometrical operations made at different points in France have yielded results too diverse to serve as the foundation of any theory — we will come to limit our study of the action of forests to the regulation of the water courses in the single point of view which their mechanical and physical laws present." " RainSy how disposed of in Forests. — The rains which fall upon our continents are disposed of as follows : — A part runs from the surface into the streams that carry it back to the sea. Another part is evaporated soon after its fall and returns to the atmosphere, and another part is absorbed by the ground. The first and third of these exclusively go to feed the springs and rivers, while the second is wholly withdrawn from our calculation. This feeding of the water courses is more or less regular or constant, according as it finds a superficial or underground passage-way, and therefore depends not only on the physical properties and the topographical contours of the soil, but also upon the vegetation with which it is covered. " Under ordinary circumstances, the superficial flow produces no effect except upon soil where the slope is considerable and quite impervious to the water, such as denuded 63 •on ed rock or compact clay. It contributes, only in a very irregular manner, to the feeding of rivers and streams, as it delivers considerable volumes at certain times, and becomes no- thing as soon as the rain ceHHes. But, on the contrary, when the soil is permeable, it absorbs all the water that falls, and does not deliver it again at the surface until some days after the rain, if completely absorbed. It is then that the action of forests begins to be felt But if, in fact, the soil is uncovered, the liquid volume descends with a velo- city proportionate to the slope, and brings with it the materials of every kind that obstruct its course, at the same time increasing its volume and destructive power. If these form torrents of limited ravage when the rainfall is local, they become fearful inun- dations when it is more general in extent. But, on the contrary, if the soil is covered with woods the flow is more gentle. Being arrested at every point, broken by the trees, *their branches, and the mosses which it encounters on the way, the water arrives at the bottom of the valley much slower, without erosions, and without bringing with it any foreign substances. The forest, therefore, in hindering the delivery of the water, lessens the chances of engorgement." " Evaporation. — We know that evaporation is going on at all temperatures, with greater or less rapidity, whenever the surrounding air is not already saturated with moisture. All other things being equal, it is greater when the ground is cleared than when covered with forests, because the latter arrest the action of the winds and prevent the ma.'^HCs of air, when saturated, from being renewed, and keeps the temperature lower by shielding the surface from the sun's heat. In lesseningjthe amount of water evaporated, it by so much increases the quantity that is absorbed. It is, moreover, needless to insist upon a fact which everybody knows — for no one can be ignorant of the fact — that the soil in a forest after a rain remains wet much longer than where the surface has Vioen cleared. " Evaporation can only take place when, at a given temperature, the air is not satu- rated with moisture. But the rains themselves prove that there is an excess of satura- tion in the air at the time, and therefore there can bo no evaporation when it rains. They can, therefore, have no very serious influence upon inundations properly so-called, and in this regard cleared lands present no advantage over others." " Absorption. — A part of the water which falls is absorlied by the soil. Some of this is used by the vegetation, and serves to carry into the tissues of plants their soluble mineral elements, and is then returned in a certain degree to the atmosphere Ijy the exha- lations of the leaves. Another portion filtei*s slowly into the soil till it meets an imjier- vious stratum, and then flows along this beil, following its undulations, till it appears at the surface in the form of springs, unless it is drawn down into the depths of the earth's crust. It is this part alone, which is absorbed by the earth, that feeds the springs and furnishes the aliment of rivers. Every cause which tends to increase, to its detriment, the evaporation or pure loss of water, or to augment the superficial flow, has to this ex- tent an influence upon the regulation of the water flow, and in this regard forests exer- cise a most important influence. All soils are not equally permeable. Some, as in the oolitic formation, absorb nearly all the rain that falls upon their surface. Others, like the primary rocks and liasic soils, allow rain to penetrate only so far as they are covered with vegetable mould. It is implied, therefore, that these vegetable beds should be pre- served at the highest points, since they tend to increase the subterranean contingent of a part of the water, which, without its presence, would flow oH" upon its surface. But forests ser . e marvellously the functions of flxing the soil upon the steepest slopes. There will be no need of conviction upon this point to one who shall pass over the Alps or Pyrenees, where every peasant knows that to consolidate the banks of the brooks that cross his Helds, and to prevent the gullying of the slopes of the roads, he has only to plant a few trees. Who does not, moreover, know the cohesive power of grass turf in fostering the roots of plants ] The forests are turf upon a large scale, in which the blades of herbage are re- placed by trees, of which the roots strike two or three yards into the soil. They can, therefore, oppose an invincible resistance to this washing away of the soil. According to M. Brougniart, the roots of trees contribute to augment the permeability of certain soils by offering a kind of vertical drainage." 64 **Clay Soi/g. — Nor is this all. When the soil is carried away, it confines a certain proportion of clay, which, when moistened to a depth which, according to M. Beoquerel, does not exceed six times the depth of the sheet of falling water, it forms a natural cup, its pores ))eing obstructed mechanically by the rains which harden them. It is then im- permeable, and free to deliver, by superficial flow, all the liquid that has not been absorbed. But when, on the contrary, the surface is covered with forests, the dome of foliage breaks the force of the rains, which only reach the soil in a state of minute division, and this impervious condition cannot then take place to hinder effective absorption. Finally, by the humus which they produce, forests increase the absorVient (jualities of different soils, and consequently the amount of liquids with which they may be chivrged. This absorbent quality is about twenty-five per cent, in weight in sandy hoUh, and varies from fifty t<^ ninety per cent, for argillaceous soils, and in humus it rises to one hundred and ninHy per cent. •' We must admit," says M. Hun, " that the sheet of water produced by the heaviest rains scarcely exceeds 3.9 inches in depth. But the bed of soil in a well-stocked forest comprises a layer of humus over a great part of the surface of more than double this depth. In speaking of forests I do not refer to the thin and ruined woods to which this name has been improperly applied ; but to the timber lands like tiie forests belonging to the state, and to all the communal forests in the eastern departments, where the soil has a capacity for absorption greater than the volume of water yielded by the heaviest show- ers. From this we may explain the fact that after a deluging rain, the water-courses issuing from a well-stocked forest, show only a moderate increase in their volume, and that they keep this up for quite a time, their transparency being scarcely affecteil." I " General CoHcfusions : — Thus, to resume our subject, forests hinder the superficial flow, or delay its progress ; they hinder evaporation, and in a rain of given amount they tend to increase the portion that is absorbed by the soil, and to uiminish the surplus flow, which is lost without profit. " The data of the problem being stated, it is easy to adduce the conclusions. If we assume that the mean annual number of rainy days is 120 and of dry days '2H, it follows that, in order that the rivers shall always keep at a constant level, the time required for the flow of their waters should be nearly three times greater than that in which they fell as rain. It would be necessary, therefore, that they should be stored in a reservoir of which the outlet should only be one-third as great as the inlet, thus allowing the waters to escape in a time three times as long as that in which they are received. If the flow takes place more rapidly, the reservoir will be dry for a season, after having flowed in ex- cessive abundance, which might cause either a local or a general inundation. If, on the contrary, the flow is not so fast, it will not discharge in a proper time all the liquid mass, and there will be air engorgement producing marshes, and finally inundations. Thus, an undue excess of rapidity or of slowness in the discharge of rainwater will tause, as we shall hereafter see, either from an absence from an extreme abundance of forests, the same results. "Forests retard thejiow of waters: — Forests, by favouring absorption, allow only the minimum of waters to be liberated. Moreover, in prolonging the discharge of the liquid absorbed, they extend the time required for its flowing ott", and serve like a reservoir, of which tlie springs are the outlets, and thus insure the regular feeding of the water-couraes. Denuded soil, on the contrary, allows a part of this water to escape both by evaporation and by superficial flow, retaining only imperfectly what it absorbs, and allows the sun's rays to pump up the moisture from the lo/er beds. For these reasons the springs become dry in summer and the rivers engorged in winter. " Examples near at home : — But why should we seek so far away for the proofs of phenomena that are renewed daily under our eyes, and of which any Parisian may con- vince himself without venturing beyond the Bois de Boulogne or the forest of Meudon 1 Let him walk out, after some days of rain, along the Chevrence road, bordered on the right by the forest of Meudon, and on the left by cultivated fields. The amount of rain 65 that has fallen is the same on both sides, and yet tho ditches by the roadside along the edge of the forest will be still tilled with water, proving the intiltration going on from the wooded soil, while, already for some time, those on the other side, adjoining the cleared fields, will have boon dry, after having served their purpose by a sudden How. The ditch on the left will have emptied itself in a few hours of all the water, which the one on the right will take some days to convey to the bottom of the valley. *' Direct eject of Foreata Illiutrated : — To those examples we may add another which appears to us to be characteristic. It is due to the observations of Mr. Oantegril, sub- inspector of forests, and was communicated by him to the A mi dea Sciencea. "Upon the territory of the commune of Labrugnidre there is a forest of 1,834 hectares, (4,524 acres), known as the forest of Montant, and owned by tlio commune. It extends northward on the Montagne- Noire, and the soil is granitic with a maximum alti- tude of 1,243 meters, and a slope of from fifteen to sixty in one hundred. A little water- course, the Caunan brook, rises in this forest and drains the waters of two-thirds of its surface. At the entrance of tho forest, and along this iirook, will be found several fulling mills, each requiring eight horse-power, and moved by water-wheels which work the beaters of tho machines. "The commune of Labrugni6re had long been noted for it^ op]>08ition to the forest regulations, and the cutting of wood, together with the abuse of pasturage, had converted the forest into an immense waste, so that this great property would hardly pay the cost of guarding it, and atibrd a meagre supply of wood for its inhabitants. " While the forest was thus ruined and the soil denuded, the waters after each heavy rain swept down through the valley, bringing with them great (|uantities of gravel, the debris of which still encuml)ers the channel of this stream. The violence of these floods was sometimes so great that they were compelled to stop the machines for some time. But in the sunmier time another inconvenience made its appearance. Little by little the drought extended, the flow of waters became insignificant, the mills stood idle, or could be run only occasionally for a short time. "About 1840, the municipal authorities began to inform their populution relative to their true interests, and under tho protection of a better supervision, the work of re- planting has been well managed, and the forest is to-day in successful growth. " In proportion as the replanting progressed, tho precarious use of tho mills ceased, and the regulation of the water-courses was totally modified. They now no longer swelled into sudden and violent floods, compelling the machines to stop ; but tho rise did not >>«- gin until six or eight hours after the rains began. They rose steadily to their maximum, and then subsided in the same manner. In short, they were no longer obliged to stop work, and the waters were always enough to run two machines, and sometimes three. " This example is remarkable in this, that all the other circumstances had remained the same, and therefore we could only attribute to the reforesting the changes that oc- curred, namely, diminution of the flood at the time of rain, and an increase in its flow during common times. " Wo may readily from the preceding account for the part which forests act in heovy and long-continued rains as to tho floods then produced. Before reaching the soil and being completely absorbed, tho rain must pass through the dome of verdure formed by the leaves, which they wet, thus causing the first appropriation of the waters. Then we must add the results of great permeability of wooded soil, and the great absorption of which the humus of forests is capable, so that until these demamls are supplied no water can run from the surface. " The flow will be slower and with less destructive force than in cleared fields, on account of the obstacles of every kind which the liquid mass meets in its course, so that it will not reach the bottom of the valley until after tho rain which fell in the lower parts shall have been discharged." ** Review of M. Vallea' Book: — In a very remarkable work entitled, ** Etude sur lea inondationa, leura cmtaea el leura effecta" published in 1857, M. Vallfe an engineer of ponU et chaitaaeea contradicts the efficacy of reforesting as a means of preventing inundations. 6 f w ■ \\ ,! i M In giving an account of thin work in the Annunht fore$lier^», M. A. F. d' H^ricourt coin- buts thoHO amortions in a victoriouR niannnr, and provnti concluHively that the rnforeBting of a portion of the up|Mir basin of the Loire would have prevented the inundation of 1846. " Accepting," 8ay» ho, "the data of M. Vallos, who has analyzed with much care the varibUH phenomena which characterized tlie Hood of October, 1S46, in the upp<*r basin of the Luiro, I will admit with him, that if wo could have hold back 175,000,000 cubic ineterH of water, the inundation whii-h proved ho Had a calamity to France would not have presented bo painful an event. The upp<'r basin of the Loire, au far an lloanne, compriHes an area of (540,000 hectarcH, {158,0S0,000 acres) of which at least a third say 213,000 hectares (52,693,000 acres) might be profitably reforested. This inundation was caused by a rain which lasted sixty hours, and poured upon the soil a sheet of water 153 uiillimeters (about six inches) in depth. This portion of tlm basin of the Loire, therefore, received 979,200,000 cubic meters of water. On the hypothesis of .NL Vallos, 2 44,800,000 cubic meters were absorbed. Tliere accordingly remained for superticial flow 734,400,000 cubic meters. •'But, lot us su[)poHo that in 184fi, tho 213,000 hectaries above mentioned to have been covered with massive woods, and then let us calculate what would have liappened. These 213,000 meters would have receired as their share 290,000 cubic meters. The ab- sorVient cjualities of the noil are increascMl forty per cent, by reforestinj^, and Ijus operation would have withdrawn 130,110,000 cubic nutters from the Huperflcial flow, which would have reduced the amount upon the retimbored portions to IDr),! 74,000 cubic meters. But this li(iuid niass would have been hindia-ed in its course gr<'«>, a coiii|uo8t over the doininion of thu tlooila, and a reduction of tho ravageH tliat thoy nmy coiiiniit. ** ForestH in Emush : — But, eariiwl to too gn-at an exU>nt, thin operation will work prociHely agaiiiHt tho end whicli we deHire to olitain. If the fnreHts cover too great an extent of country, wo nmy fear that the HpringH or Huhterranean water-coumeH may not he able to (l*>liver all the ruin that fallH in a given time tieforu other niinn fall, which will cover the country with Htagnant water. Thin was the condition of (Jaul at tho time when it waH covered with foreHtH, and sueh in Htill the condition of certain pnrtn of America, which are wooded in this exceHHive degree. By this means we explain the apparent con- tradictionu of which the partisaiiH of reforesting are accused. " Rf/i>r>!sfin(/ n'fii^ri: Nf'i/ml : — It will he ni'i-essaiy, l>efore coming to the desirahio conclusion as to where the true pmportion lien, and which cannot now lie known with precision, that wo should he ahle to show for each river-lwisin how much of a reservoir a forest should furnish that shall discharge, freely and with regularity, the rains that it re- ceives only at intervals. However the ca.se may Is', it is evident that the reforesting should he carried on upon the mountainous parts of the ditlen nt hasins. It is there, practically, that the humiy reforesting entirely allay these evils, we may, peradventure, coiisiderahly reduce* their magnitude, and enhance the etlicacy of other means of defence which have until now heen held as quil*! illusory. " Dikes anil ot/iP)' Sf met nr>!s : — At the present time most of the works con.structed for the preventing of these evils, in fact, oidy increase them. It is held hy a great num- her of engineers, that transverse dikes, in order to h»> of .service, should he l>uilt in tho lower parts of the valli;ys and near the mouths af atHuents ; hut the first result of this would he to cause inundations in the.se parts which an- usually fertile and well-cultivated, and where, if they had not hoen huilt, they might not have heen felt. NV'e might have to pay damages for the jiroperty injured, and the sums, although considerahle, would not always he tioiiipen.sated for hy the atlvantages claimed. This .>syst«'m, moreover, amounts only to transferring the evil to another place, without escapinj; it, and it is at l)est hut a secondary, not a radical, remedy. As for longitu highland districts of the greatest practical service. On grazings much exposed to withering winds the large num- ber of lambs deserted by their mothers in late seasons, in consequence of a scarcity of milk, is sometimes a severe loss to the flock-master. But it is well known that on the hill farms partially sheltered by growing timlxir, the percentage of deaths from this cause is concjderably rodui'"!. The pasturage, when sheltered even in a very partial manner, is both earlier an ' jre nutritive than if exposed to the full ettects of unchecked winds, and in their haun locks rarely fail to indicate the situations which are really benefited by plantations, l ' near at hand or at a considerable distanc/.>. It is a well-known principle of anim : .utrition that the radiation of heat from the system is greater in a cold than in a warm temperature, and that more food is m^cessary in the former situation than in the latter to maintain vital heat. If it is practicable, thercfon;, in the formation of plantations to elevate the mean temperature of any particular district two or three degrees, it follows that its grazing will not only be improved, but thiit, in proportion con- sumed, fattening animals will make greater progress than under less favourable circum- stances. -' It appears conclusive, therefore, that the relation that exists between forestry and agriculture is a very intimate one ; and yet while great exertions are being made to de- velop the agricultural resources of the country, the inactivity which has long prevailed in respect to the management of timber continues the same, and presents, in some respects, an aspect hopeless enough." 69 *^ Enlmnced Value of Farms from Tree-planting: — In almost every instance in which a farm is to be let on lease the offerers are influenced, in a greater degree than they them- selves are aware of, by the tirst general appearance which it preHents. If tiie exposed parts are partially under thriving, well-enclosed wood, the whole fields, within the range of vision, have such a look of warmth and fertility that, as if by intuition, a few shillings more per acre are put upon the land than would otherwise have been given. The amenity and value of landed property are so linked together, that in ordinary cases the one cannot be increased without a greater or less addition being made to the other also. It has been proved by experience that in proportion as well-laid-out plantations are extendi^d on an estate, up to but not beyond a certain point, the yearly value of its farms advance. I know property, which, eighty years ago, did not yield more than half the rentjil derived from it now. It was then, according to the testimony of old men in the district, little more than an open waste ; but the proprietor began about then to plant extensively, and as the plantations increased in nuinbcT and age, the rental of the estauo advanced with them, though the farm was anything but good. With right management the same result may be expected on every exposed property." The following article upon the forests of Europe and America is from J. (x. Lefebvre (du Hav le) who has long been intimately ac(iuainted with the practical details of the timber trade in France ; — " One of the most important questions that presents itself to the attention of the principal producing and consuming countries in the article of wood, is beyond doubt that which relates to forests. " It is uu unfortunate fact, and becoming more and more true, that the clearing of woodlands is encouraged, and we may say, stimulated by the formidable and continually- increasing general consumption, which leads to proportions vastly excelling the normal annual production, as we shall presently show. Tliere evidently results a most threaten- ing danger, which has already been often pointed out with energy, and against which the general welfare requires us to adopi on every side the most effectual and decisive mea- sures, which should be executed with activity and perseverance, if we would seasonably avoid the consequence of a lamentable crisis. "Taking a general review of the immensis areas of ground, which various statistical works admit to be still covered with forests, it might at tirst sight appear that our fears were taxed by groundless apprehensions of exnggerattid evils ; but we feel assured that, considering the innumerable quantities of trees cut every year, the number \. maturely des- troyed, and the number wasted, it must be admitted that we should lose no \.iuie in trying to remedy, as speedily as possible, a condition of alFairs so much to be deplond. " We ought not to forget that in addition to the economical value of the forests, taken as a part of the wealth of the country, and in the welfare of its inhabitants, their protection in a climatic relation Ixicouuis a necessity of the tirst importance. No one is so ignorant as not to know that the iucoiisiilerate destruction of trees reduces the water-courses, and causes disastrous inundations. Wo bi lieve that the multiplied i)ene- lits derived from the presence of forests are not enough a|>preciat(!d, such as tlie sanitary iujprovement of marshy places, the moderation of the tempt^rature, the protection of open plains against violent wiiitls which have tli"ir ff.rce broken and their curnsnts divided by the trees ; and, tinally, the prevention of prolonged dioughts, which too oftt^n desolate regions of country where the wood has been taken otl', as has Imm'u frequently proved liy examples down to the present time. •' We should also not fail to remark that we often tind tracts of land masked by a thick coveiing of vei.iun*, that are in reality nothing but immense wastes occasioned by tires or storms, and which contain little but the wrecks and remnants of trees, and are sometimeh overrun with wood instscts, some species of which in a little while imiy destroy whole forests, as was lately stien in tiohemia, where a million of cubic toises of wood were entirely destroyed. " If we now approach th(^ question of production and consumption in the principal countries of Europe that are now occupying our attention, we shall tind conditions of a 70 h I i '" nature to convince the moHt incredulous as to the duty of the state foresters to seek without further delay for such remedies as the situation deuiaitds, so great is the actual peril." A most valuable paper bearing on this point was read at the Cincinnati Congress, by the Hon. V. Colvin, Superintendent N. Y. S. Adirondack Survey. I wrote to Washington for this paper, but it was not in print. I can therefore only give my readers the abstract given by the Forestry Congress Commissioners sent from Ontario : — " The influence of forests upon the water supply of any given drainage area is directly proportional to the rainfall, and it is from the standpoint of evaporation and rainfall that the etl'ect of forests must be considered. " The data for the investigation must be searched for in the east, where the des- truction of forests has been great. Here, rather than on the frontiers of civilization, we should look for traces of climatic change, if the destruction of forests lead to any change. " The records of the United States Signal Service of the mean monthly precipitation in this country for many years had been searched by the lecturer for statistical informa- tion on this subject, and he had based upon these records a series of computations which showed where tlie greatest irregularities in the monthly rainfall occurred. "These differences were presented in tabular form, and showetl a favourable uniform monthly precipittition of rain in the middle Eastern States. Here it is known that the approximate limit of safety uf forest-cutting litis been reached, as torrential action began to show itself in sections where much timber had been cut awity. " The topography of the country was shown to have a most important bearing upon the quantity etiect of forests upon th(^ rainfall ; the mountain ranges, when forest-covered and extending across the path of the south winds, acting as powerful condensers of moisture. The way in whioli linil'S of trees entaiifjie anil kill th«' wind, to which a house or block of houses forms hardly any obstacle, was explained in an interesting manner, and was shown to be dep«!ndent on the angle of incidence. "The true relationship of atniospheric elfitriiity to rainfall was traced through the reactions of the correlated force, >»o ot'tm incorrectly ternifil " Intent heat." The liinb.s, boughs and leaves of the forest were (when i-oiixulfred nicLlianically) natural machinery most wonderfully adapted to the purpose of xriiMping upon tin- atmosphere, and thus causing those i!ynaiuic changes which induct; prccij^itation of inoistur*- " The forests were, in fact, uiDst singularly loiiiplictttfd i-ondeni* rs, imd performed their peculiar office in the iitniosplierc far l>etter tluwi the inoKt .skilfully contrived alembic of the chemist. " Forests were shown to he essential to a uniform rainfall when existing in the proper localities, as ileterniined by the great local nieteorologicul laws. " A knowledge of the path of storms in any locality, .md of the topography — the elevations and depressions, the rivers, marshes and lakes — was shown to l)e essential to any exact estimate of the limit of safety of the cutting of forests. The only way in which the wide-spread knowledge neci^.ssary could be obtained would b«; by a general system of observation by farmers and others throughout the whole country, of the great facts of the local rainfall, direction of wiiul.i, etc., which could !»e easily done with little trouble. " With these ol>servations, and an accurate system of topographical and forest maps (which every State should have made), it would be possililr- to make close estimates as to where forests must be preserved, where replanted and where they might Ik' safely <'ut. The lecturer told of his personal experiences on the mountain p«aks of the Adirondacks and the Rocky Mountains, traced tin origin of rain from its evaporation by the sun's rays from the sea to its condensation to clouil and showed how liny lijllot's law rea- dilv enal)led meteorologist"? knowing the path of storms, from a mere knowledge of the present direction of the wind and the area of the last high or low pressure, to determine the probable maximum or nimimum liable to follow, and probable change in the direction of the winds ; but that the location of forests greatly modified the exact application of mak^ the nine I I car count Capt descr then, point 71 this law, and rendered imperative that we should study the path of storms on exact topo- graphical maps giving the location of forasts, and that then only should we be able to make exact predictions." we THE FORESTS AND THEIR MANAGEMENT IN OTHER COUNTRIES. • To obtain knowledge on this head, no bttter source of instruction is available than the extensive report made on the subject by Captain Walker, a gentleman who passed nine months on the continent, by direction of the European Government, for that purpose. I cannot copy his voluminous report, but will give a short review of what refers to each country visited, and anything likely to be useful for our purposes here in Canada. The Captain first visits Hanover, deacribing the system in which territory to some extent describes all, for he tells us that the system there may be considered as typical. He gives then, the administration there, and a brief statistical record of the others, except in those points where they decidedly differ. Now, as to Hanover. Hanover. Its forests under State raanagemt^nt amount to 900,000 acres. Some are Govern- ment, some Church, some belong to municipalities or communes. Government manages the forests by officers appointed, while the community pay four cents per acre towards the pay of the otficers. The method appears to be that of giving the ownera as much wood, pasture, or litter for manuro, as their original right to the forest entitled them to ; but to give it at the hands of government officials. If the forest is of sufficient extent to employ a special officer, the commune, instead of the four cents, are charged his pay and allowances, as well as other working charges. The governinent forests are about G00,000 acres of the above, and the cost of working and all expenses is about .S6.'30,000 annually, the receipts >)eing $1,, '500,000, and the profit therefore $850,0' , or, taking the actual figures, altout $1,50 per acre per annum. This, of course, takes uo account of the value of the land, or what it might rent or sell for if cleared. Hanover is a province of Prussia. The liead office is therefo-o in Berlin. Tlie Forest establishment of Hanover consist of one forest director and ovei-forest master, who is also a councillor ; twenty forest masters in charge of circles or divisions, forming also a board of management in all fori'st matters; one hundred and twelve over- foresters in charge of forest districts (rfvii'r ) averaging seven or eight thousand acres each ; four hundred and three foresters who assist the over-forestiTS, and ha\e charge! of portions of a district ; three hundred and forty-three overseers, under-foresters, etc., emphiyed in watching and protecting the forest, and supervising the work which is executed by hired weekly or daily labour, or on contract under supervision of the fixed estiiblishments. A cash-keeper is attached to (>ach over-fi "Cster, who receives and disburses nil moneys out of the forest cash chest, with which the over-forester has nothing to do, although his accounts should, of course, tally with those of the cash-keeper. For [>aynient of labourers etc., he gives orders on the cash-keeper, whose books arc examined by the forest-master f 72 III u ^ in oharge of the division, and accounts rendered to the head office in Hanover, and thence to Berlin. All the forests have been surveyed, valued, and divided into blocks in this manner : — Besides those already enumerated, there is, for the sole purpose of measuring, raluing, and framing working plans for the forest, a superintendent, draughtsmen, and clerks, generally practical foresters, and a staff of surveyors and forest valuatoft, who are generally candidates for the position of over-forester. When a forest was about to bo taken in hand and worked systematically, a sur- veyor and vahmtor were despatched to the spot, the former working under the directions of the latter, who placed himself in communication with the local forest officer and the inhabitants interested, and obtained from them all the information in his power. The surveyor first surveyed the whole district, then the different divisions, as pointed out by the valuator, who defined them according to the description of the timber standing, and any conditions affecting the nature of the trees to be grown in future. While the sur- veyor did this, the valuator valued the trees, formed a register of rights with a view to commutation, considered the best plan of working the forest, the roads, in fact, all which enabled him to form a plan for the head office, and a subordinate plan to be handed over to the executive officer as his " standing orders." The valuator and surveyor return to head-quavters, and prepare the maps and plans, which are submitted to the board of forest-masters, the forest-director and other council- lors of the Finance Department, who are thus prepared to listen to any objections made by communities or individuals, which are very rarely made now, as the people have learned that the action of the officers is not adverse to their interests, and are willing to allow them to settle matters. The executive officer has thus in his hands maps showing each division of the forest tract in his charge, and instructions — the quantity to be felled yearly, the extent to be planted, the state in which the forest should be ten, twenty or a hundred years after the plans were -made, all calculated — so that the over-forester has only to carry out the instructions given him, allowance being made for unavoidable difficulties — failure of seeours of the Forest Department. In many such places, where even the few handfuls of soil placed round the young tree had to be carried some distance, it is not contended that the first plantations will yield a pecuniary profit, but the improvement in climate by the retention of the moisture, and reclamation of , large tracts formerly barren and unproductive, is taken into account ; besides which the dropping of leaves and needles from the trees will ere long create a soil and vegetation, and insure the success of plantations in future years, and conKe({U(-nt surplus. I I students can see at a glance the nature of the damage, and connect it with the animal which causes it. Thus we have squirrels, rats, beavers, mice, set up gnawitig the liarks, grubbing at the roots, etc. InstHts are shown in the several stages of their existence — lurvie, chrysalis, caterpillar, moth, with their rami- fications in the stem or branches of the tree. These, with speoiinr>n Vilorks of almost ail descriptions of timber, form a most instructive collection. There is a forest district 78 attached, remarkable for the growth of Scotch iir and spruce on a poor sandy boil, and in spite of repeated attacks by insects. Nothing is more remarkable than the extent of study required from forest candi- dates, and the number of years thoy are content to spend in studying or waiting an appointment. The would-be over-forester, which is the lowest of the gazetted appoint- ments, must pass certain terms at a Government school, a year in a district with an ovcr- foreater, an examination as forest-pupil, two years at a forest academy, an examination in Acientitic forestry and land surveying. He is then a forest-candidate. Then two years practical study, nine months of it doing duty as an actual forester ; then another examination. He is now an over-forester candidate. The first examination tests his theory ; the second his practice. Then he will be occasionally employed in the academies, or in charge of a district, only then getting allowances. After live years of this he may look for steady employn\^nt. Thus five years without pay are given in study; five in probation with but meagre pay when employed, and the time is often longer, before regularly installed. Yet so great is the desire for Government — especially forest — service, that there are numerous candidates. The qualifications for admission into the subordinate grades — forester, sub- forester, overseer — have a military tendency. Candidates, after two years in the forest, enter a jager battalion, and bind themselves for twelve years' service. After three years they ol)tain leave, and are employed in the forest as huntsmen or giimekeepers. After eight years they musl have passed the forester's test, which consists in six months' charge of a district, and an examination. At the end of twelve years they are discharjjed with a certificate entitling tlwim to employment in the forest establishments. The appointments are much sought after, and in 1867 there were two hundred tind twenty-one applicants for one hundred and forty-five vacancies; but many are absorbed by communal and private forests. In some provinces the Prussian Government has certain rights concerning the uian- ngement of even private forests — in others none. While on the subject of PruHsiu, it may be well here to insert some extracts from u letter received from Baron Von Hteuben, a Prussian noblemim, now Royal (-liief Forester of the German Empire, by the Forestry Congress, at Cincinnati, in April of last year. He remarks : — i''i' I i«- ' " There can lie no doubt that every country rciiuires a certain rjiiantity of well-stocked woods, not only to supply the demands for liuilding materiiil ami fuel, but more especially to secure suitable met<'orological conditions, to pn-serve the fertility of the soil, and out of sanitary considerations. The ratio of tli»^ niininuini quantity and judicious local distri- bution of the indispensable forest to the aggregiite anu cannot be expressed by a uni\frsal rule, but the same can only be approximated by .soientitic investitjation. Above all things, it is essi'iitial to prevent forest destruction where such would injur'ously atl'ect the fertility of the soil. It is important, then, to preserve and to cultivate judiciotisly those Nirests which stand at the head-waters and on the banks of the larger strt^ams, bei ause, liirough their indiscriminate destruction, fluctuations in the stage of water, sarfd-bars, and inundations of arable lands are occasioned. It appears also necessary to preserve and properly to cultivate woods in quicksands, or the sunnmts and ridges, as well as on the steep sides of mountains, along the sea coasts, and other exposed localities. 76 ill i " In 6«rmany, and especially in my more narrow-bounded Fatherland, Prussia, it is regarded as of the greatest importance, not only to preserve the forests already there, but to extend them as much as possible. " In the National Appropriation Bill large sums are set apart for the purchase of such lands us are unfit for cultivation, and for utilizing the same by planting trees. " With reference to forests owned by private individuals, they are not restrained in the use of their forests, and may, according to their own judgment, clear the same and till the soil, in short, do what they like, and yet there may bu curtain restrictions placed on the free use of the same as suori as danger to the common welfare is feared ; these restrictions are prescribed by the law of July 5, 1876, relative to forest protection. " This law is applicable in cases : "1. Where, by reason of the sandy nature of the soil, adjoining lands, or public grounds, natural or artificial courses, are in danger of being covered with sand. " 2. Where, through the washing away of the soil, or through the formation of cascades in open places on the ridges of hill and on hillsides, the arable lauds, streets, or buildings living below are in danger of being covered with earth or stone, or of being Hooded ; or the lands or public grounds, or buildings lying above are in danger of nliding. "3. Where, through the destruction of the forests along the banks of canals or natural streams, riparian lands are in danger of caving, or buildiugs hitherto prot«cted by the woods are in danger of iceflows. "4. Where, through the destruction of forests, rivers are in danger of a diminution of the stage of the water. "5. Where, through the destruction of forests in open places and near the lakes, neighbouring fields are seriously exposed to the detrimental influences of winds. " In the cases above mentioneil, which have been copied verbatim from the statute book, the manner of use as well as the culture of fon;sts may bu legally ordered, in order to prevent those dangers where the dangers to be averted are considerably in excess of the damages which would result to the owner by reason of the restrictions." Sa.\ony. The state forests are nearly 400,000 acres, worked at an expense of 8'')00,000, receiv- ing $1,750,000, leaving a clear rental of $3 per acre. The expenditure is planting, drain- ing, roads, improvement of inferior woods, felling, transport, killing iiisects, etc. About 5,000 acres are planted yearly, at an average cost of $7.50 per acre. The fixed establishment is one inspector, fifteen over-forest-masters, one hundred and twenty district foresters, sixteen cash-keepers, thirteen engineers, twenty-seven foresters, and eighty-three sub-foresters. There is a forest academy at Tharandt, with a separate staff of professors. The system of planting now principally experimented on is much the same as that previously described, the young tretis being several feet high before the old trees are all removed. One operation is noticeable. It was decideil to convert a mixed hardwood forest, patchy and irregular, with impoverished soil, in 1820, into a coniferous forest, and maps were drawn showing what it would be in eighty years. Private intersecting lands have been bought up, a!:d by 1900 the ideal chart will be actual. Already, in place of a straggling wood, irregularly covered with timber trees of inferior growth, we have now a compact close forest, regularly wooded in sections of different nges, principally spruce and Scotch fir, but containing also fine oak, ash and beech, with straight and clean stems. In many cases the young oaks have been lett where pines were planted, and the introduction of the latter has had a wonderfully good effect on the oaks. All private rights were abolished and compensated in these forests by a Bill passed in 1832. 77 Bavaria. The state foreHts arc 3,000,000 acren. They return, after paying all expenses, about 91.50 per acre pftr iinnuin. About 30,000 acres are planted or sown annually, taking 35,000,000 plants and 1,000,000 \\m. seed. Persons found guilty of breach of forest rules have been punished by enforced labour in the woods. Private forest rights are being bought up by the Government. The system of management is much the same as that previously described. There is a forest academy at Aschatfenburg, with one hundred and sixty-five students. It will be interesting to notice the injury and process of repair in the fine forents of the Spessart in Bevaria The deterioration was caused by foiling the forest trees as soon as, or before, they were mature, the impoverishment of the soil by the removal of leaves and litter, and the allowing donso underwood to grow unchecked. Inferior trees got the upper hand and prevential the growth of good, while they drained the already impover- ished soil and gave nothing in return. Early in the present century the matter attracted attention, and every means have since been adopted to grow oaks, beech, and conifcriu. The result is, though not yet ecjual the uniformity of other forests, nowhere can one find finer clumps and individual trees. Inferior trees will soon be rare in the whole forest. In remote portions where the humus had not been destroyed, the growth of beech and oak is truly magniticent, tracts of 120-year old beech and 300-yoar old oaks being common, the latter with clear trunks running up to ii hundred feet high. When we compare these with other portions where the crippled and stuiited appearance of the trees shows the effect of unregulated grazing and loss of litter, burning of the decayed wood, and forest theft and mischief, or the soil and vegetation, the result is marked. The cir- cumstances, says the Indian Commissioner, are analogous with what has gone on in India for centuries, and is still nioru or less permitted. The vast extent of forests, which once clothed the hill sides and extended far out on the plains, and the luxuriant growth of the tropics, have hitherto, or until the last two years, prevented the gradual deterioration of our forests being marked or felt, but the subject has now attracted attention, and none too soon. If any have doubts in the matter, let them visit the Spessart, study the history of its forests and judge for themselves. The forests are sharply pi-oteetinl by law, the average number of pros(icutions annu- ally being thirty per thousand acres. The crime.s are mischief to wood, pasture, grass, straw, and miscellaneous. AUSTUIA. ■i§t ^ passed Scientific forestry is not so far advanced as in Germany, but officials are busily intro- ducing a reorganization, by means of which, there is no doubt, it will soon be on a par with other states. The state forests have been largely sold to meet state necessities, but there still remain nearly 2,000,000 productive acres, which yield, however, after expenses are paid, little over twenty-five cents per acre. The existing establishments of forestry are not uniform, but there are about twelve hundred employ6es, of whom tweuty-two are forest- masters. Some of these have almost 78 \\'t r* Hinecures, while othera have hIx timod too much to do, and it is the same with those in the Bubordinate ranks. The forest academy is at Mariabrunn, near Vienna. There are about thirty-five students. The collections are fine, posseHsing specimens of all instruments and appliances made use of in felling, squaring, sawing, carting, and preparing timber, models of sawmills and machinery of all descriptions, plans of rivor beds improved and embanked for floating, sluicoH of all sorts, dams and piers for directing rafts in their course and catching tire- wood, motlels of rafts, and specimens of home and foreign timber of all kinds. The dam- ago done by animals and insects is also exhibited here comprehensively. There is also a forest garden attacheen neglected ; they are patchy with a low and decreasing yield per acre. There has been till now no attempt at rotation of blocks, or working in periods. As is found in India, a glance ut the outskirts of the forests would lead one to suppose it fairly stocked with timber, but a more careful inspection proves that this is not the case, and that only in the valleys and more remote portions, whore the soil is particularly good and the axe has not been so frequent in its inroads, is there a fair and regular crop. Herr Schuppitch, the present director, is trying hard to change matters, and is changing the hardwood crop, which has exhausted the soil for that class, with pine growths, which besides grow quicker and pay better. Ho is also dividing into blocks and periods, and planting up many l)are or ill-covered tracts, where natural reproduction is impossible owing to the absence of standard trees. Grand Duchy op Badex. We shall now notice a private forest, that of the Prince of Furstenburgh, in the Black Forest. The receipts and expenditure are not obtainable, as are the public ones, but we are informfnl that the forests are economically worke('; and that tlio liberal sums expended on road-making, fitting rive, j for floating, housing foresters, »bc., were well repaid by the facilities secured, and contentment and zeal of the omj)loy6es. In the case of this, as of other private forests, it is evident that a private individual is not burdened with consi- derations of policy and public good as in a State. The forests are, therefore, worked with the best profit compatible with their retention as capital. 79 There are about 72,000 acrea, in charge of eighteen foreaterH and ovnr-for«Htni-8, who of course have many RuhortlinateH. The method employed in the slow felling and conti- nual reproduction before mentioned, a block being after forty yearn in clearing liefore all the old are replaced by new trees. Attention and intelligence are necessary, for the sinnl will not grow nor the semllings flourish without enough light, and the fonmt otHoer must watch that they get it ; and again much greater care is needed in felling and hauling away when the trees are surrounded by lofty saplings and young trees than whi'u the seedlings of the next crop are not more than a foot or two high. In this the axtf-men of the Black Forest are adepta, and the damage very slight to what it would Ihs in other bands. It may be useful to describe their manner of bringing timber down the rivers. It cannot hero be done when the stream is in flood : in fact, the \om water in it tha better so long as sutKcient is stored up above to float thi* rafts. Reservoirs are made, and the water poured into the river btul when the raft is reotly. The streams iire often small, of only fifteen or twenty feet in width, and have to l)e prepared for lloiiting, by being cleared of any large rocks or boulders, antl " sleep«'red," if we may use tlu^ <'xpres- sion, by pieces of wooil firmly fixed in the bed of the stream every few yiinls. These prevent the formaticm of holes in the bod, and serve for the raft to sliile on if it touches the bottom. The first impression of the Indian commissioiuT, when he saw the float, composed of stems from twenty to sixty feet in length tietl together with withf's at the ends, and lying zigzag in tlie))ed of a mountain streiim, up and down which they extended sixteen hundred feet, was that it was simply impossible they ever could be floated down the stream, with all its windings, and over the locks an8 rocks which occurnMl pretty frequently. It contained 880 stems, eight or ten of which abreiwt formed as it wtsre a link in the raft. There were thirty links, not fastened laterally, but only at both ends to the next link. The breadth is greatest at about two-thirds from the prow, which is narrow, and consist of only throe stems abreast, with in front of all a piece formed of old wood and raised out of water like the bow of a whale-boat, so as to lead the raft, and the largest and heaviest stems placed in the broadest part and towards the stern or hinder part, which does not taper at all. There are two or three breaks, by which the speed is slacked or the raft stopped if needed. When all is ready, the water trom above* is let loose, and the raft, perhaps not now lying in more than a foot of water, beyiiis to float a little, but is not let go till two-thirds of tiu; water is passed, us it is a curious fact that when let go, if there is much descent, it travels faster than the water, and has to \>i' stopped to let the water got ahead again. Th(»raffc has^ ^ ^, '/ Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. MS80 (716) 872-4503 '% 80 'If t Remarks on Germany. The Indian commissioner proceeds to remark on the German system of forestry. Perhaps it will be here admissible that I make one myself. Let me say that, when we consider the immense extent and rapid growth of forests in India, the vast amount in Government hands, and yet find that they are so rapidly deteriorating as to necessitate the despatch of commissioners to Europe to learn the methods of preserving the forest, it is likely that Canada has just as much reason to bestir herself in the matter. Let us notice also, by some of the valuable tables Capt. Walker has furnished, that in Germany and Prussia alone there are nearly two hundred and fifty millions of acres of forests. We will well have already understood, by the foregoing pages, how different the great mass of these forests, with their great reserves of growing and well cared for trees, planned and prepared for many years, so that the forest can be depended on to give its regular arid annual yield of valuable timber in perpetuity, are from our Canadian reserves, which are cut without regard to the future, and are fast disappearing before the combined assault of the settler and the lumberman. On asking, where are we to look for a model or precedent on which to work, he replies " To Germany, where the management of forests by the State has been carried on for hundreds of years. Not the mere planting of a few hundred acres here, or reserving a few thousaud acres there, but a general system of fdest management, com- mencing by a careful survey, stock-taking, definition and commutation of all rights and servitudes, careful experiments in the rate of growth, the best soil for each description of tree ; in fact, in every branch of the subject, and resulting in what we find to-day, hundreds of thousands of acres mapped, divided into periods and blocks, and worked to the best advantage both with regard to present and future, and the scnnual yield of which now, and for many years to come, is known and fixed to within a few hundred cubic feet." "The great difference," says the commissioner, "in climate and local conditions between India and Germany would, doubtless, necessitate important modifications, but I can see no reason why the broad principles of organization and forest management should not be applied with success to our Indian forests, that is, gradually feeling our way as regards the best mode for the forest, and the wishes and interests of the people and the State." I would here remark that this is still more applicable to Canada, as our climate presents no difference of moment. "I do 'not think," he continues, "that we have much to learn from the Germans with regard to the planting and rearing of young trees ; but it is with regard to the best method of managing groups or plantations that I consider we may, with advantage, take a leaf out of their book. For instance, I would certainly introduce, in an experi- mental manner, and on a very small scale, their system of rotation, clearing, and periods, and endeavour to bring forward a second crop before the first is off the ground, encourage the growth of the better descriptions, and keep down the least valuable, so as gradually to arrive at groups of trees of the same age, description, and class, and eventually at blocks worked in rotation, and containing always a sufficient stock of crop coming on to meet the requirements of future years. To arrive at all this the most careful observations and experiments will have to be made as to the rate of growth and yield per acre of each description of forest, the conditions under which trees grow best and form the most timber, some requiring close and some open planting, some nurses and some not ; some, like the oak, requiring a great deal of light, while some, like the beech, do best for many years in the shade. All these points, and many more, demand attention, and till they are 81 " aditiona but I should settled we shall be merely groping in the dark. In fact, I think it may be taken for granted that all we will do in the way of forestry in the Madras Presidency, during the present century at least, will, after all, be but experimentalizing, which fact, however, need in no way delay the demarkation, survey, and settlement of the forests." It may be said here that, if it be necessary to commence at once, in India, it is probably more necessary in Canada, where the process of growth is so much less rapid. Concerning the capabilities of German foresters, the Captain says : — " An over- forester, and even many of the foresters and overseers, can tell the name, local and botanical, of any tree, shrub, and plant, classify it, and state its uses ; name and classify every beetle and insect in the forest, and know whether they are harmless or destructive to trees, in what shape they do damage, and what are the best known preventive measures ; inform you of the nature of the soil, and to what period the formation belongs ; what trees will grow best, and why. All this is known thoroughly, theoretically and practically. "Then as to the districti the exact yield, rate of growth, and annual increase in value of each block is thoroughly known and can be put down in figures at each moment by the over-forester, who can tell at the commencement of each year how much timber he is going to cut and sell, and from what parts of the forest it is to come, how mauy acres have to be partially cleared for natural reproduction, how many to be planted, sown, thinned, or planted up. The mere details of all this are left, as a rule, entirely to the subordinates, who thoroughly understand them. " The forest-masters in charge of divisions possess not only the theoretical and scientific knowledge acquired in the forest academy, and the practical experience gained while they were over-foresters in charge of a district, but the more extended knowledge and wider views from their larger field for observation and comparison of causes and results. They are then qualified to decide most points, revise working plans, and super- vise operations generally, whilst settling complaints and complications in connection with the forest administration, advising the local head of the department, and compiling valuable reports and statistical information." The British Isles. There are many forests, both Crown and private, in the British Islands, concerning which, as they appear to be managed on different .systems, I shall merely state such points as seem to have some bearing on possible operations in Canada, or may show the progress made in late years in planting and foresting operations. In the New Forest, Hampshire, containing 91,000 acres, much has been planted with Scotch fir and larch in 1853, and with oak in 1857. What is noticeable is that the first, planted as nurses, are planted here so much before the others (both are elsewhere frequently planted at once). It is done to establish the nurses, and give shelter from the cutting winds prevalent here. They transplant here from the first nursery to another — the last one near the ultimate destination of the trees. The Dean Forest, in Gloucestershire, has 22,000 acres, in all. The commissioner visited twelve plantations here, ranging from 1844 to the present year. Nurses and hardwood are put out together. In Scotland, the nurseries of Lawson & Sons, neaf Edinburgh, are noticed. They contain 270 acres. There were thirty millions of coniferaj seedlings in the beds. The pintis pinaster is largely used for planting on light sandy soils near the sea. Before sowing or forming the nursery bed the land is trenched to fourteen inches, and a crop of potatoes taken off to clean it. In the following spring the seed beds are 6 i I i! «i;. 1 1 ■^, . ■i i^ ' f 82 laid out, and the upper soil carefully prepared to suit the nature of the trees which are to be sown. Most of the ooniferss prefer a light dry soil with a considerable proportion of sand, and this has the advantage that the seedlings are easily shaken out and freed from each other for transplanting. In the case of Scotch fir and larch, the seed is sown in May or June, and left in the seed bed for two seasons. The seedlings are then planted out in lines fourteen inches apart, and three inches between each plant, are left thus for sometimes two years, and then planted out for good. It is thought better, if the frost can be prevented from killing the seedlings, to sow in April, and transplant one year after, or even the same autumn, as soon as the leaf bud is hard. The spruce requires two years in the seed beds, as its growth is slower than that of larch. The piniu pinaster, auatriaca, and laricio are sown in May or June, and transplanted the same autumn into rows six inches apart, the plants close together. Hence they are transplanted the fol- lowing autumn, into rows fourteen inches apart, where they are left one or two years ' before being planted out. It is considered an object to shorten tap-roots and encourage laterals. (This last idea, it will be noticed, may assist the tree ; but not that main object of forest preservation, the connection between the upper and lower strata.) The Earl of Seafield's woods, in Strathspey, give an instance of the rapidity with which planting is going on in Scotland. There are 60,000 acres, of which half are in timber, yet so young, that the commissioner saw little large wood ready to cut, but plenty of thinnings. The overseer intends gradually to plant the whole, so that, in course of time, a thousand acres could be cut annually and a thousand planted out, which could not, it is said, fail to bring in a large revenue, without trenching on the capital of timber. Three lines of Scotch fir the commissioner saw lifted and tied in bundles for planting out. This was done expeditiously by the five-pronged fork, two men digging out the young trees, which are then lifted by women, the earth shaken off, and tied in bundles for planting. This list will give some idea of the progress on only one estate : — Duthil Hill, 700 acres, planted six years; Deshar, 1,100 acres, within seven years; Sluemore, 600 acres, five years ; Revock, 700 acres, four years j Bengalupin, 1,200 acres, six years ; Advie, 300 acres, one year. A point here presents itself which, though it seems vague, and not according with Canadian experience, it might be well to examine and find the meaning of. The Strathspey overseer considers that " in Strathspey, at least, the land should be left barren and untouched, after it is cleared of trees, until the natural herbage, whether heather, grass or moss, which existed before the trees grew, recovers ; and that if planted before this takes place, failure will result." It may be remarked that oak is now little planted here, its use for ship-building being much less than formerly ; while, even for backing for ironclads it is abandoned in favour of teak, which has not the injurious effect on the iron produced by the contact of oak. Scotch fir and larch are much planted, and are rapid in natural reproduction. Whenever the natural vegetation has sprung up in places formerly covered with coni- ferous trees, the seeds germinate. This is then protected by wire fences with great success. In a large tract of self' sown forest in the Grantown district, enclosed six years ago, the Scotch firs average six feet high, while individual trees run up to ten feet. Wire fence, tarred, three feet eight inches high, can be constructed for seventeen 88 cents per yard, posts and all, and is much used. After ten years, or when the trees have grown out of harm's way, pasture is sometimes let. Enclosed plantations for this pur- pose command 2<. 6eL per acre, while ordinary hill side pasture gets but 6d. The Earl of Mansfield's woods, in Perthshire. These are about 10,000 acres. Planting is going on constantly. There are nine district foresters, and a large staff of wood- men. A large plantation of Douglas pine is mentioned as doing remarkably well. They were planted in pits fifteen feet apart, fifteen inches square, and ten inches deep, with larch and Scotch fir nurses at four feet apart. The pines average twenty-five feet in height. The nurses are being removed. The overseer disagrees with the Strathspey statement as to leaving the land bare, and considers that it is only the insects (the beetle) which hinder the growth of seedlings on land cleared of conifers. He succeeds well by exclud- ing cattle for one year, letting the grass, etc., grow, then burning it when dry, and planting out. The Duke of Athol's woods, in Perthshire comprise 10,000 acres, and were com- menced in 1728, principally with larch, which has done well in places, but is now under- going the substitution of Scotch fir, which pays better. Oak coppice cut at intervals of twenty years yield $60 per acre. ■:] Forests of Luss and the Harz. Another gentleman, M. Gustav Mann, Conservator of Forests in Bengal, has pro- ceeded to Germany for the same purpose as Capt. Walker, and gives some further important information relative to the German forests. In the plain of North Germany the Scotch fir is the principal forest tree, and better suited for deep, loose, sandy, than for heavy loaming soil. The great " Luneberg Heath" is mentioned, as having been covered with wood, but the indifieronce of the inhabitants to the existence of forests, originating in the common belief that they will continue to exist, no matter how recklessly treated, the desire of the villagers to get grazing ground for their cattle by burning the forests, the indiscriminate usage of the wood and method of felling in vogue, have destroyed hundreds of miles of forest, and have left the greater part of the Luneberg Heath barren, covered almost exclusively with heather, and of little use to any one. Now the evils are seen, and with a view of restoring these forests large sums of money, and much skill and labour, are being expended. I will quote here a short description of the method used in planting the Scotch fir in such localities. The land is first ploughed, after which a man proceeds along the bed, making holes at distances three feet by five, with a wedge spade (one quite straight, made all of wood except the edge, which is shod some inches high with iron, and is two inches thick at the top of the blade). This he forces into the ground, withdraws it, and passes on, while two women follow him, who plant by holding the seedling against one side of the hole, while with their foot they press the opposite earth against the plant. The material for planting consists of one-year old seedlings of Scotch fir, and occasionally a two-year old seedling of spruce, which are raised in the ordinary way by sowing in fur- rows. The Scotch fir requires more light and air than any other, and does not thrive at 84 i St \m all in the shade of other forest trees. For the same reason natural reproduction (in forests) is very difficult, and not attempted here. As a tree affording some shade to other trees which require it, the Scotch fir is well suited. If sown or planted very close, early attention to thinning out also is necessary, as plants early stunted never fully recover their strength. The soil not being rich, the trees are not allowed to grow older than sixty to eighty years, this being the age at which the comparative yield of wood is best. Spruce is planted in small numbers with the Scotch fir, and even where the soil is not good enough for it to grow up into large trees with the fir, it becomes beneficial by the cover of its dense foliage, which facilitates decomposition of the soil, and keeps it moister and cooler than the fir alone could do. It will, perhaps, be as well here to give Mr. Mann's very lucid description of beech culture : — Seed beds for beech are prepared in the ordinary way, and the seed is sown in autumn as well as in spring. If the former time is preferred, care has to be taken that the seed does not germinate too early, so as to be exposed to spring frosts. This is pre- vented by covering over the beds after the surface gets slightly frozen, and by removing the covering in spring so late that the young seedlings have nothing more to fear from the frost. If sown in spring, the seed has to be carefully stored during the winter. Steaming, as well as excessive drying, must be guarded against. The first is avoided by turning over the seed or even keeping it spread out ; the second by slightly watering it and turning it over afterwards, so as to distribute the moisture equally. A cool, moist room on the ground floor is preferable to a warm and dry one. From the seed beds the plants are either removed at once into the forest, or into other nurseries for transplanting and keeping until they reach a height of three or four feet. If they are to be planted in open ground, without the protection of old trees, they are sometimes kept in the nursery until they reach a height of ten or twelve feet, which however is a very expensive measure. In this care is taken that the young shoots are not removed from the stem, as the bark of the beech is very easily burnt by the sun, and otherwise apt to be damaged by the weather. Unnecessary exposure of the roots of the young beech is carefully avoided, as they are very sensitive, and demand special care during the removal of the plants. Where it can be done some of the soil is left on the roots for the same reason. Ordinarily the beech forest trees get re-established by natural production, i. e., the shedding of seed from old trees. When the beech gets mixed with other ^inds, as in the coppice with standard, its regeneration is furthered or checked according to circum- stances, but planting is seldom resorted to. In the pure, high forests of beech the natural reproduction is brought about by gradual and well-considered fellings, which tend to effect this as completely as possible. In hilly or mountainous localities fellings are commenced at the top of the hill. These fellings take place when the trees have reached maturity, and are three to four in number, and distinguished according to the immediate effect they are intended to have on the forest. The first felling, called in Germany the preparatory cutting, is intended to facilitate the decomposition of the dry leaves and branches which cover the surface, and thus pre- 85 ' pare it for the reception of the seed, which latter, without this precaution, frequently germinates without being able to penetrate with its roots the comparatively hard and leathery leaves lying on the surface, and often dies in consequence, while- weeds and scrub easily get up in it, and cover the surface soon, thus adding to the difficulties to be over- come by the young plants. It is commenced several years before the intended regenera- tion, and carried out gradually ; but where the air and light thus admitted are not sufficient to render the surface fit for the reception of the seed, a timely permission to villagers to remove some of the dead leaves is resorted to. Besides the preparing of the soil, this opening out of the forest induces the tree to flower and bear seed more fre- quently than when standing very close. The second felling — the so-called seed-cutting — is carried out as soon as the bearing of seed becomes probable, which can be judged of beforehand by the appearance and shape of the buds during the preceding winter. An abundant seed-bearing season gene- ■ rally qccurs with the seed after longer or shorter intervals, but sufficient seed for the regeneration of the forest may be reckoned on every second or third year. Precaution is used not to remove too many trees at once, as in case of the flowers being destroyed by spring frosts or other causes, the restocking of the ground with young plants does not succeed. Too much light would dry up the surface of the soil, and induce the weeds to overrun the ground, both circumstances seriously interfering with the germination of the seed at a future season. Where at this time the suitability of the soil remains doubtful, a timely loosening and preparing of it in stripes and patches is resorted to to insure success. When the expected seeding of the trees turns out a failure, further clearing is care- fully avoided, to prevent the deterioration of the soil or overgrowing with weeds. If, however, the season is a favourable one, and produces sufficient seed, and the young plants germinate, this felling is soon extended to a greater number of trees to admit more light and dew to strengthen the young plants. For the purpose of getting the seed worked into the ground, herds of swine, cattle, etc., are often driven through the forest with good efiect, Seed beds are sometimes established in the neighbourhood of a forest at the same time, to furnish young plants for the filling up of vacancies, which, however, are also obtained nearly as good out of the forest itself from places where the plants stand thick enough. Altogether the aiding of the natural reproduction by artificial means, either sowing or planting, is at the present time generally resorted to at once, as such measures always lead to a more satisfactory accomplishment of the desired regeneration, and save time. The third felling is called cutting for light, as its chief purpose is to admit light and air in greater abundance as the young plants require it. This is generally commenced when the seedlings are two years old. It is also regulated very much by circumstances, and while in the one case the forest trees may be required longer on account of the spring frosts, so very injurious to the young beech, in others their early removal is necessary, even if an increase in size be sacrificed, for the establishment of the young trees. Neither do partial failures prevent the removal of the old trees, but are resorted to at once by 86 II if !.i i sowing or planting as the safest and quickest mode of securing the'establishment of the young forest. After the third or light felling follows the gradual removal of the old trees, or final clearing, which is regulated in the first instance also by the requirements of the young trees, and after this by the fixed yearly out-turn, as laid down in the working plan. As a general rule, all these fellings are car.ied out gradually, without causing sudden changes in the forest. The aiding of natural reproduction is either accomplished by sowing, if failures are perceptible early, such as non-germination of the seed or death of the seed- lings ; or by planting, if the seedlings get destroyed later by spring frosts, or are choked by weeds. The sowing is carried out in the forest in strips two feet wide, in furrows, or in patches two to three feet square, prepared by hoeing for the purpose, and by loosening and levelling of the soil ; while planting is done by seedlings two to three feet in height taken from adjoining nursery beds, or from spots in the forest where there are more than are necessary. " It is evident," says Mr. Mann, " that if, with all this care and attention to aid natural reproduction, still occasional failures occur, how unreasonable it is to expect forests in India to keep in an equally rich and thriving condition if left to themselves, or worked only with a view of extracting the timber from them." I would also apply the remark to Canada, and observe also that Captain Clarke respecting India, and Hon. M. Joly concerning Canada, make precisely the same statement, to the efiect that the forests in both countries, cut over and carelessly managed, are often, so far as any available supply of good timber is concerned, only forests in appearance. It may be noticed that the beech, of all other trees, is said to improve the land, forming a rich vegetable mould, to gain the benefit of which other trees — oak, ash, maple, larch, Scotch fir — are planted among the beeches, and do well. I may notice here that in Canada, while clearing the forest, this did uot appear to me. I generally found the maple on the richest land, and where beech were intermixed a lighter loam. One description of forest much used in Germany is called " Middle Forest." It contains a number of high trees cut at long intervals for timber, and below them a coppice (smaller trees growing from roots of previously existing trees, and which will themselves, when cut, be succeeded by similar ones) cut at much shorter periods for firewood. In cutting the coppice, young trees are left to replace the tall ones when cut. A method of planting used here should be noticed. A small spade of solid iron, about twenty pounds in weight, fourteen inches long, seven inches broad at top, five at bottom, with a handle four inches long, is driven into the ground, and bent to all sides, then drawn out. The plant, three to four years old, of beech, spruce, or oak, etc., is dipped into a thin mixture of loam and water, which adheres easily. In this state it is pushed with its roots into the hole as far as possible, and with continual shaking, by which the roots get straight down into the hole, drawn up to the level at which the plant should stand. Here it is held by one man, while another drives in the spade a second time, about three inches from the first hole and parallel with it, and first presses with its point towards the first hole, and then with the broader part, by which means the plant gets very firmly pressed into the soil. If necessary the spade is driven in a third time, to close up the second hole slightly. The soil is then beaten firm with a mallet all round 87 the plant, but not striking closer than three inches. This mode is very successful ; it is carried on without preparing the soil, and answers in stony ground, on account of the strength of the spade. On the Harz Mountains (the scene of many a supernatural legend) are vast forests of spruce, kept with much care. One remarkable point in the management is the Gov- ernment seed-drying kiln at Westerhof, for getting the spruce seed out of the cones and cleaning it of wings, which is carried on here extensively, the spruce, being plentiful, of excellent growth, and producing exceptionally good seed. The cones are collected by contract work, and varies according to the seasons, if plentiful or otherwise, and generally enables the workman to earn 50 cents to 75 cents per day. After all the Government stores are filled, private persons are allowed to collect, for which the person has to pay a small sum per season. In the cones the seed remains good from seven to eight years. The Government kiln turns out about 180 cwts. per season, while private parties in good seasons have turned out as much as 1,600 cwts. besides. The cones, when first brought in, are stored in large rooms, with perforated walls, so as to admit a free current of air through them. The kiln itself consists of three rooms, the centre one of which is heated by means of a large oven, from which large iron pipes, six inches in diameter, pass twice through the room before they enter the chimney. This room is separated by walls, in which there are holes of nine inches, from the two outer rooms, in which the cones are being dried. By means of these holes, which can be closed at pleasure, the temperature in the drying room is regulated, and kept between 122 and 128 Fahrenheit. The drying is done in large wire drums, out of which the seed falls on the floor of the room. There are twelve in each room, and are turned from the outside of the room, where it is cooler. They are filled in the evening, the temperature got up, and so left for the night. The next morn- ing the fire is lit again, and the drums being turned every half hour, by night the cones are empty. Half the cones are used to heat the kiln ; the rest sold for fuel. It costs Government about six cents per pound. What is not needed is sold at nine. It is noticeable that the spruce wood, among other uses, is ground into pulp for paper manufacture, several mills in the Harz Mountains being employed in this manner. It might be worth consideration whether, under an improved system of forestry, the waste wood left in snch quantities in hewing and scoi%-hacking could be, in our great Canadian spruce forests, so employed. It will be well to give an account of the method of reproducing and caring for spruce forests, both because our own forests will soon need replanting, and to give some idea of the care taken in maintaining woodland property in foreign lands. Natural reproduction of the spruce is seldom attempted, as too slow and uncertain ; but if there are thriving naturally some clumps of any extent, they are kept up. Almost all spruce forests are regulated high forests, with complete clearings, either re-sown, which is still preferred by some, or planted, which is by far the most general mode of establishing or re-establishing spruce forests. If sown, lines about two feet in width are prepared by clearing the weeds, etc., off the ground, and placing this at the edge of the lines to prevent the wind blowing among the seed, or rain washing them off. The soil on these strips is sometimes loosened and left as it is if the seed is to be sown broadcast. If (* 88 ■ :V' the seed is sown in rows, small furrows are made. Between the strips, ground twice as wide is left. For plantations, the seed is sown in seed-beds, which are good, even, and sheltered pieces of land, about half an acre in size, and well dug up, afterwards levelled and occasionally slightly manured by the ashes of the weeds, remains of wood, etc., col- lected on the surface, brought together and burned, and afterwards mixed with the soil. These seed-beds are usually in the immediate neighbourhood of the ground to be planted, and have to be fenced in. If the seedlings, after they are three or four years old, have to be removed from here at once to the spot where they are to remain, the seed-beds have to be larger, especially if the young plants are to be planted out in numbers, i. e., three or four in one hole. In the latter case the seed is sown generally in furrows, one foot apart, as being more convenient, and requiring here in the hills about seventy-five pounds of seed for half an acre, which is sufficient to plant fifty acres of forest. The better plan, how- ever, is to have the plants from seed-beds, after they are two years old, transplanted singly into a nursery at about soven inches distance, where they remain until they are four or five years old ; this, however, requires as much space again for the nursery as for the seed camp. Not unfrequently four to six year old seedlings are taken from the adjoining forest, where they are generally so close as to permit of the removal of many of them ; and this is the most inexpensive way of procuring seedlings in limited numbers. Where there is a demand for thinnings, the planting of three or four plants in one hole recommends itself. If it is likely that the ground get run over rapidly with weeds, or the soil dried up by the sun, the replanting is done as soon after the removal of the old forest as possible, whilst where the danger from insects, especially the small beetle, is great, the ground is let lie two or three years first. Planting is done in autumn as well as in spring, but the latter is preferred. Spruce is planted four or five feet apart. To protect the spruce forest against damage from insects the forester has to be con- stantly on the alert, as they are many, and if not checked in time, great damage is done by them. The most destructive noticed was the ordinary spruce bark beetle, which attacks the bark of living trees, and had, in some of the localities visited by the commis- sioner, destroyed so many trees that, when the diseased were removed, the forest had become so open that the wind would soon have removed the rest had they not been felled. Experienced men are told off to guard against this danger, by going' through the forest to search for the trees attacked by the beetle, and fell and bark them to prevent the spread- ing of the insects. In most cases, they are quite able to hold the insects in check. These generally attack trees loosened in the roots by wind, known after the beetle gets in by their foliage turning yellow. In spring, when they are worst, healthy living trees are felled at the southern margin of the forest in sunny spots, for the purpose of attract- ing the beetle. Such trees are often full of them three or four days after being felled. The trees attacked are barked, which destroys the larvje if not too far advanced ; if so, the bark is burned. To prevent any escaping while barking, a cloth is spread under the stem. The timber beetle, which attacks new felled trees, going deep into the wood, is also common there, and is watched for closely. For the young plantation of spruce the first mentioned is the most dangerous, as it eats off the bark above the roots, and kills the tree. Fresh pieces of bark a foot square, inner side down, are laid around before or after planting. The beetles go under, and are caught and killed. The bark is examined every morning. 89 f ^ Silver Fir and Spruck in the Black Forest. The Black Forest mountains are the home of the silver fir. The winters are severe — five to eight feet of snow on the hills from November till April ; three feet in the valleys from December till March. They are partly regulated forest, in which, however, a gradual felling for their reproduction is carried on over one-third or one-fourth of the whole area at once, from which every year during thirty or forty years the largest trees are removed, while the rest are allowed to grow larger during the remaining years. This is done, as the price those large trees fetch is much higher in proportion than that of the smaller ones, and all are felled and removed in one piece if possible. Natural reproduction is chiefly resorted to in these forests, which, in consequence of the young plant growing well in the shade of the old trees, is very easily accomplished, even though it is extended over such a long period as thirty or forty years. To be able to keep as many trees as possible growing on the lands on which the regeneration of the forest is going on, the branches up to one or two-thirds of the height of the tree are sawn off to admit air and light to the young plants below, which does no harm to the silver fir, but, on the contrary, is said to aid the more rapid increase of the trunk, while the branches are used for litter. This sawing oS of the branches is commenced from above by men who earn about forty-five cents a day. Regular seed-bearing seasons occur at longer or shorter intervals, but nearly every year there ia sufficient seed to increase the number of young plants where it is wanted. Moss cover is very favourable for the germination of the seed, whilst in such places as get covered with grass or weeds, or where for other reasons the seed does not germinate freely, the soil is at once prepared, by clearing and slightly loosening it in strips and patches, for the reception of the seed, the germination of which is thus facilitated. If the open space in the forest is so large that the seed from the old trees does not reach the whole of it, sowing by hand is resorted to early, so as to let the young plants be as nearly as possible of the same age. If, by the time the old trees are nearly all removed, there are still some parts not covered with young trees, planting is resorted to. For the better growth of such planted trees the existing groups are somewhat rounded off, to avoid the young trees planted having to struggle with the others, perhaps already twenty to thirty years old ; and where, on incompletely stocked spaces, which have to be filled up by planting, there are single trees of some twenty or thirty years, they are cut down altogether ; or, if they are standing in numbers, and are not quite so large, some of the lower branches are lopped off the outer ones, so as not to interfere with those planted. These plants are either taken from nurseries or out of the forest, if the latter have not grown in too deep shade, which would render them liable to suffer on being removed to open places. The seed ia collected with some risk from the trees in October, before the cones open and it falls out. As the seeds are very oily, they are best kept in the cones or sown at once. The sowing is done in prepared beds in rows four inches apart, and after germina- tion the ground is covered with moss to keep in the moisture. The seedlings one year old are transplanted into rows six or seven inches apart, and three inches between the plants in the rows, after which the soil between them is also covered with moss. Here they have to remain for two or three years before they are fit for transplanting. Shade 00 II 'ri ' , ■) B' 1,1: W from the side is very benefioial for the seed beds as well as for the nursery. Plants for the nursery are preferable to those out of the forest ; and the latter, when used, are as a rule removed with some of the soil adhering to the roots. Planting is better done in spring than in autumn, and in the usual way, the roots of the young plants being out as may be necessary. They have to be sheltered as far as possible against sun, dryness, or spring frosts, and the plants as a rule thrive better on the oool northerly and easterly slopes of the mountains than anywhere else. The silver fir grows very slowly at first, and does not get much higher than six inches iuithe first four or five years. At the age of twenty-five years it begins to grow very fast, and increases most between the ages of eighty and a hundred and twenty years. It likes best a deep, cool, moist and loamy soil with a covering of moss, and sends its roots deeper than the spruce, in consequence of which it sufi'ers less from wind and storm than the latter. There are many spruce inter- mixed, used when natural reproduction of the silver fir fails. Thinnings are necessary in the thirtieth year, and have then to be repeated every tenth year, till the gradual telling of the largest trees commences. These fellings are regulated by the needs of the young seedlings, and are carried out only sufficiently to admit light to the young plants, leaving as many of the old trees to stand as can be permitted. Moorpan, — In Hanover and elsewhere, where the Government are bringing up thou- sands of acres of heath for the purpose of planting forests, great difficulty is found in penetrating and converting into good soil a hard layer called " moorpan." This is broken by plough and pickaxe, and Scotch firs planted, whose deep tap-root passes down into the layer of better soil below. The Oovernment pay about $1 1 an acre for the land. Fbanor. The administration of forests in France is entrusted to the Ministry of Finance, and the head of the Department is the Director-General, assisted by two administrators, one charged with the management of the forests and the sale of the products, the other with the police of the forests and the forest laws. In the departments there are thirty-two conservators, each in charge of one or more departments, according to the extent of forests in each. The immediate supervision is entrusted to inspectors, who are assisted by sub-inspectors and gardea-generaux, who live near, and personally superintend all ope- rations and work of the forest guards. The brigadiers and forest guards live in houses in the forest and serve as a police over a certain range. They are required to be present at all operations, and to go round their ranges at least once a day to report any violations of forest law that may take place. The saw-mills in the forests are usually owned by the Government and hired at a certain rate to the wood merchants, who buy the cuttings. The timber is allowed to be sawn up before it is inspected and marked by the forest guard under the superintendence of an inspector. The forests under the management of the bureau are (State and Commune) about 7,500,000 acres. There were nearly a million more, which went with Alsace and Lor- raine to Germany. Also, there are in France 15,000,000 acres of private forests. Of schools of forestry, the French have, at Nancy, one of the best in the world, 91 where pupils are instraoted both experimentally and theoretically in all forest learning, the collegiate home studies being constantly varied by excursions of parties of pupils, under charge of professors, to those forests where, at the time, most can be learned. Proficiency in these schools forms, of course, a strong recommendation to future advance- ment in the Government or private forest bervice. For admission to the school candi- dates must bring a letter of authorization from the Director-Ooneral of Forests, which can only be obtained by those from nineteen to twenty-two, without infirmities, and having a diploma of Bachelor of Letters, or attainments in classical studies to warrant such diploma. They must also have an income of $300 per annum, or a pledge from friends to provide it, and 01 20 afterwards till employed as garde-general on active duty. In the difiiculties which have hindered the efforts being made, especially in America, to preserve a due amount of forest, one of the most formidable has been the disinclination to interfere with private rights. It will be of service in Canada in this matter to notice how summarily, in France, this matter has been managed. I will therefore quote the principles of law upon which the forest code of France is founded, as stated with great precision by Professor Macarel (a writer deservedly of the highest estimation) in his " Cov/ra de Droit Administratif." As they embrace views applicable in other countries under like necessities — being, in fact, an extension of the right of eminent domain, or that maxim of Roman law, aalua popvii tuprema est — they will be especially germane to our purpose. He says : — •• Keatrictiont Implied in the Free Enjoyment of the Soil, " As to the woods and forests : " The preservation of forests is one of the first interests of society, and consequently one of the first duties of Government. It is not alone from the wealth which they offer that we may judge. Their existence is of itself of incalculable benefit, as well in the pro- tection and feeding of the springs and rivers as in their prevention of the washing away of the soil from mountains, and in the beneficial influence which they exert upon the atmosphere. " Large forests deaden and break the force of heavy winds that beat out the seeds and injure the growth of plants ; they form reservoirs of moisture ; they shelter the growth of the fields ; and upon hill-sides, where the rainwaters, checked in their descent by the thousand obstacles they present by their roots and by the trunks of trees, have time to filter into the soil and only find their way by slow degrees to the rivers. They regulate, in a certain degree, the flow of the waters and the hygrometrical condition of the atmosphere, and their destruction accordingly increases the duration of droughts and give rise to the injuries of inundations, which denude the face of the mountains. " Penetrated with these truths, legislators have in all ages made the preservation of forests an object of sp(3cial solicitude. *' Unfortunately, private interests — that is to say, the action of those who do not directly feel the power of the Government — are often opposed to this great national inte- rest, and the laws framed for protection are often powerless. "In France, the ordinances prior to the revolution carried too far the restrictions imposed on private owners. The new regulations fell into the opposite extreme, and allowed the proprietors free and absolute liberty to dispose of tht>.i woods. " A large destruction followed this imprudent translation from excess of restraint to excess of liberty. The proprietors abused this unwonted freedom, and clearings multiplied indefinitely, without distinction as to the places where they were made, so that in many localities the rushing down of the denuded soil and the deforesting of mountains caused the soil needed for vegetation to disappear and left the rocks naked. The rise in the price of wood and the easy and certain resource offered to proprietors in the clearing of a 92 ii 9- planted tract, when compared with the remote and eventual advantages offered in their preservation ; the hope of compensation, and, beyond this, the advantages, in one way and another, of cultivation, may be recognized as among the causes which sufficiently ex- plain the Inducements offered to many of these proprietors, which led them to undertake these clearings." I would here notice that this is precisely what we have been doing in Canada, and that the ill effects which followed in France will surely in no long time be felt in Ontario. They are already felt ; we have not the climate we had, nor the favouring moisture when most needed. Yet we could get along as we are. But that is just what is impossible. "We must, while there is time, use some means of averting the evil, or we shall certainly become much worae off than we are. M. Macarel goes on : — " At length, this progressive deforesting of the soil of France, joined with the inces- sant need of firewood, and the demand for wood by manufactories and ships, have, during forty years, made sad havoc with our forest wealth. " A. renewal of the ancient prohibitions by the law of 9 Floreal, year XI., was deemed necessary to oppose this excessive clearing of woods by private owners. It was accordingly decreed that, during the twenty-five years dating from the date of the pro- mulgation, no wood should be cut or carried off unless six months' notice had been given by the proprietor to the forest conservator of the arrondiasement of the district in which the wood was located. Within this time the forest administration might object to the clearing off of the wood, and was charged to refer the question before the end of this time to the Minister of Finance, upon whose report the Government might definitely decide within the same time. It therefore resulted in this, that to make a clearing an authori- zation precedent by the administration was necessary, and that if the administration thought prop>r not to grant this, the proprietor was restrained against cutting. " Thus, according to this branch of agricultural industry, the general law of France is, that owners are free to vary, within certain limits, the cultivation and working of their lands ; but, as to woods and forests, the public interests demand that individuals shall not be free to clear them from the soil whenever they please. From hence it follows, that the administration has a right to pronounce its prohibition against clearing whenever it is deemed that the public interests require that this be done." The penalties for clearing when forbidden are, I may state, a fine of about $200 per acre, and compulsory replanting within three years. This law was, I conceive, in full force in 1874, as this quotation forms part of a report to the U. S. Congress of that year. ' It probably is in fore a still, and justly so. The voice of the people, not of solitary citi- zens, should decide in so important a matter as deforesting a country. The French Government have, at great expense, replanted vast and almost barren districts ; they have also established great forests along the sea-shore where formerly the sand threatened to destroy whole depart'^ents, and have averted the evil. But the chief means is the prohibition of clearing j for it is the interest of an owner who does not clear to plant and improve his forest, so as to receive an increased income from the trees arriv- ing at maturity in increased numbers yearly. Switzerland. In no country in Europe has the waste of forests been more rapid or destructive than in Switzerland, and in none, perb-aps, has this improvidence been followed by more disastrous results. The woods, being considered common property, were uprooted ; and the soil on the mountains being exposed to the wash of the rains, was rapidly carried 98 away, leaving broad areas of naked rock, from which the water would at once sweep dovm the valleys in sudden and destructive inundations. The autumn of 1868 is memor- able on account of thesb floods. Public attention has, however, been thoroughly awakened, and active measures are in progress to remedy, as far as may be, these evils. The cantons which have charge of these operations have for some time, at great expense, been constructing works to control the streams, and planting trees wherever practicable. I would here remark that this is a very difficult matter compared with what it might have been. It is easy to preserve a forest on a hill-side, but the soil once washed to the rock, it is another matter. I could point out places in Ontario where splendid forests stood, and yet might have stood, now for many miles "White rock and grey rock, Barren and bare." The matter is now in Switzerland taken into the hands of the national Government, and the following article gives the idea : — " Art. XXII. — The Federal Union of Switzerland has the right of supervising struc- tures for the protection of water courses, and of the forest police in mountain regions. It will assist in protective structures for water courses, and in the planting of forests at their sources. It will enact the requisite regulations for maintaining these works and the forests now existing." Italy. Soon after the present Kingdom of Italy was established, a central forest school was organized near Florence, under the direction of A. di Berenger, formerly in the Austrian forest service of Venezia, and author of an excellent work on the history of forest manage- ment in Italy. The school is located in the splendid silver fir forest of Vallombrosa. We all remember " Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks, In Vallombrosa." This is below the crest of the Appenines, on their western slope, about twenty miles east of Florence. In winter it is transferred to a lower station at Paterno, in the region of the olive. Italian forest literature of direct practical application is comparatively modern, but of late the publications of the Ministry of Agriculture, to which sylviculture is entrusted, contain much that is valuable. The two most important of these give the statistics of forests and the forest law of Italy. There are over five million acres of com- munal forests, over six million of private forests, and only half a million acres of State forests. One-fifth of the land is in forest. This is scant enough, apparently, or the nominal forests have been culled to depreciation, for we are told that — " Projects of a general forest law for the whole of Italy have been repeatedly sub- mitted to the Italian Parliament. The evil effects of denudation have been severely felt in many parts of the country, and the aim of these proposed legislative enactments has hitherto been to guard against further mischief by determining beforehand which lands shall, in the public interest, be clothed with forest or kept under forest, and then to place the whole of these lands under the supervision or control of the public forest officers without distinction, whether they belonged to state, village, commune, or private persons. From a report with which the Minister of Agriculture submitted the project of a general 94 1" I! ill forest law in 1870, it appears that the financial exigencies of the country had rendered imperative the alienation of the greater part of the forests at the disposal of the State, and that it was only intended to retain a limited area of State forests, mainly with the view of supplying the timber required by the navy, and the forests required for this pur- pose the bill proposed to declare inalienable. " Thus, with regard to forest matters," says Captain Walker, " it seems probable that Italy will pursue a policy different from that which has of late years been initiated in most provinces of India. In those provinces we acknowledge the necessity of main- taining certain areas under forest, or of clothing them with forest when they are bare ; but we do not expect any satisfactory success in those attempts, unless the forests to be thus maintained or created are under the entire control of the State, and we entertain no serious hopes of effecting any real good by the supervision of private forests, or by any general kind of control over communal forests, unless the administration or management of such communal forests can be vested entirely in the hands of the public forest officers. " In those provinces, therefore, of the Indian Empire, to which I now refer, our principal aim is, in the first place, to consolidate the State forests wherever this State has suitable forest lands at its disposal ; and we hope that eventually, when the majority of public forest officers shall have acquired that professional knowledge, skill, and experi- cence which is necessary for a satisfactory management of forest land, that they may be found competent not only to manage the State forests entrusted to their charge, but also to induce large landed proprietors to follow their example in the management of their own estates, and, if such should ever be found necessary and expedient, to exercise an efficient supervision over private and communal forest lands ; but we think that any at- tempt to exercise supervision and control over private and communal forest lands through the agency of forest officers who have not actually charge of public forests entirely under their own control, and who cannot point to the management of their own forests as an example to be followed in the management of the private or communal forests, would lead to unsatisfactory results. The further development of the general forest policy in Italy will doubtless be followed with great interest by Indian foresters, and on this account it appeared to me right to add the present remarks." It may be valuable here to notice that in this, as in other points, the practical ideas of the Indian commissioner might well be applied in Canada. There is good reason to fear over-denudation here ; there is also reason to believe that we shall have an interval in which to take measures for avoiding the evil. In that interval the course stated by the commissioner as likely to be followed in India might, it appears to me, profitably be pursued here, namely, the taking in hand by Government of any amount of forest fit for the purpose, and which could be spared from the operation of the system at present pur- sued, and preserving them on the European plan. This will further on be more fully treated. Russia. In this vast empire, where, as in the United States, we have been accustomed to believe the forest is interminable, and ^where, in fact, the amount of woodland in the northern two-thirds is more than twice as great in proportion to its area as in the United States, the Government has turned its attention energetically to the subject of forestry, and has undertaken to establish by regulation conservative measures. As yet, private persons and establishments owning forests enjoy the absolute right to cut and clear at wilL But these do not own nearly so much as the Government, which has about three hundred and thirty million acres of woods ; the others holding about one hundred and fifty. About forty per cent, of the country (Russia in Europe) is timbered. I must re- mark that this amount, after so long an occupation, shows that the timber has been taken 96 some care of already. For the immense Government woods, they have been placed under the care of the Minister of Public Domains, who has a director of the Forest Department, and the organization of the service is very complete. For the purpose of fitting young men for the duties of forest agents and agriculturists, either for the Government service or upon private estates, two special schools of agriculture and forestry have been estab- lished — one at St. Petersburg, and one near MoifCow. The course of instruction extends through three or four years, and the schools are placed near forests, where every detail is illustrated. There is also another forest school at Lissino, of the second grade, where the course is very practical Sweden. In 1859 a bureau of Forest Administration was created. Forest regulations, how- ever, extend back to 1647, and even before that, private owners were required to plant and protect from cattle two trees for each one cut. In 1868 a commission was appointed, under the direction of Mr. £. Y. Alinquist, to enquire into the need of further legislation, and in December, 1870, he submitted a re- port with a bill, making 392 pages, besides numerous tables. One clause in the reported bill is a compulsory feature, which, though less stringent, is in the spirit of the enactments now in force in most of the countries of continental Europe, namely, forbidding trees to be cut for sale smaller than eleven inches at the butt, or eight inches sixteen Swedish feet therefrom. India. The necessity of preserving tropical forests has fortunately attracted the attention of Government in British India, where the importance of maintaining an equilibrium of tem- perature and humidity is of much immediate consequence to the social welfare ; and the growing demands of railroad use, and the various applications of the arts, render it a sub- ject of direct practical utility. The matter has been agitated since 1850, and in 1864, Government laid the founda- tion of an improved general system of forest administration, for the whole Indian empire, having for its object the conservation of state forests, and the development of this source of national wealth. The experience acquired in the forest schools of France and Germany has been brought to apply in this great national undertaking. Among the more impor- tant general principles laid down for the execution of this measure is that all superior Government forests are reserved and made inalienable, and their boundaries marked out to distinguish them from waste lands available for the public. The Act of 1864, defining the nature of forest rules and penalties, has been adopted by most of the local govern- ments, and the executive arrangements are left to the local administrations. Various surveys have been made to obtain accurate data concerning the geographical and botani- cal characteristics of the reserved tracts, and the kind of timber best adapted for various localities has been carefully ascertained. In 1866, the Government resolved upon sending out five young men, duly qualified by education in the forest schools of France and Germany, for the forest department of India. An arrangement was made the same year by which forest officers in the India 96 m service, who might choose to come to Europe on furlough, would be able to increase their professional knowledge by studying forest management and other subjects connected with forests in Great Britain and on the continent. A number of officers have availed them- selves of these arrangements, and some of their reports have been published. Of these, that by Captain Walker, and that of M. Gustav Mann, I have largely used elsewhere, as the reader will have observed. " At the moment of our writings," says the author of a report from which I have obtained much, presented to the U. S. congress in 1874, "the public journals are giving most painful accounts of the distress in India from famine. From a careful study of this subject we cannot doubt that this calamity is due to the fact that the forests have, of late years, been swept off by demand for railroad and other uses much more rapidly than for- merly, and that the exposure to winds and sun, thus occasioned, may have largely con- tributed to these painful results. The remedies are to be sought in the restoration of that due proportion of forest-shade upon which agriculture depends for success. If the officers to whom the opportunities for European observation fall, improve them as well as some reported by Captain Walker, we may reasonably hope for a radical though not an imme- diate restoration of abundant harvests throughout the vast countries of India." Now, since this was written, we have Sir Richard Temple's valuable book, " India in 1880," which I have noticed before. This gives us some idea of what has been commenced by the gentlemen who have been writing the reports we have used. He says : — / " The Government of India has enacted a law regulating all matters connected with forest conservancy, and the provisions of this law are being carried into effect by the sev- eral local governments. The forests are divided into two categories ; first, those which are ' reserved,' being preserved and worked through state agency, in a most complete manner ; secondly, those which are ' protected,' being preserved less thoroughly. The best timber markets are mainly supplied from the • reserved ' forests. Care has been taken to determine what tracts shall be ' reserved ' and ' protected,' and to mark off their boun- daries. The area thus defined in the several provinces already, or likely to be defined ere long, will prove to be hardly less than eighty thousand square miles for the whole empire. The primary object of the administration is to preserve the forests for the sake of the country. Due attention is also given to the financial out-turn ; much income is already secured. The expenditure is over five hundred thousand pounds annually, but the receipts amount to nearly seven hundred thousand, and in time the forest department will have a prosperous revenue. " The superior officers of the department are for the most part British, trained in the forest schools of Prance and Germany. The Inspector General of Forests with the Gov- ernment of India is Dr. D. Brandis, whose services to the empire have been conspicuous in organizing a system of forestry which is sound and scientific, and is yet adapted to the circumstances of the country. Instn' ■* in forestry is afforded to natives also ; forest schools are established for them, and y they will take a large share of the adminis- trative work. " As might be expected, the system of forest conservancy, though generally accepted by the natives who dwell near the ' reserved ' and the ' protected ' tracts, is sometimes op- posed by them. There must alw; ys be some danger lest the foresters should, in their zeal for conservancy, infringe upon t ce prescriptive rights of the inhabitants. The local civil authorities are vigilant and proinpt in asserting and vindicating the rights of the people in this respect j for the recognition of which rights, indeed, ample provision is made by the law. They should, however, be careful to support the forest officers in the exeoution of duties which are of the utmost consequence to the welfare of the country. Many of the hill tribes habitually burn patches of valuable forest, in order that the ashes may so fertilize the virgin soil as to render it capable of producing a crop without tillage. Hav- ing reaped one harvest, they leave the spot marked by charred stumps of timber trees, and move on to repeat the same ravage elsewhere. This barbarous and wastefully des- 97 traotiTe practice is gradually and cautiously checked, by reclaiming these people from •griooltural savagery, and inducing them to plough lands, and raise yearly crops by ordinary husbandry. " According to the latest returns there appear to be 29,600 square miles of demar- cated reserve forests, 3,500 square miles of protected aresw, and 35,000 square miles of unreserved forests, or 68,000 square miles in all. This appears a comparatively small ttrea for so large an empire, especially when it is remembered that of this not more than one half is effectually preserved. Some extensive forest tracts exist, ho>7ever, in the Madras Presidency, of which a return remains to be rendered. There are, further, dl,000 •ores of plantations in various districts." These plantations, I may remark, are those commenced by the foresters under Dr. Brandis, and are being every year added to at the rate of some thousands of acres. It may be noticed that the forest officers trained in Europe for India, and at work there now, number forty-six out of a staff of ninety-three, who have, of course, an immense number of subordinates. Oonceming other countries, it may be generally remarked, that all the nations of continental Europe are moving in forestry matters, and that there are many schools besides those I have mentioned. South Australia. The colonies of Australia and New Zealand are working earnestly in the matter of tree culture. In South Australia there is, we are told, far too little woodland. The consequences are thr' arid is the country in parts that the reports state they can never expect to gr • ueat unless the rainfall can be, by the assistance of plantations or otherwise, increased. South Australia has moved vigorously in the matter. They have appointed a Conser- vator of Forests, Mr. J. E. Brown, F.L.S., who has written a valuable work on tree culture there. Reserves have been mapped out, of which one is about fifty thousand acres, another nine thousand, another twenty thousand, with smaller ones of six or seven hundred — ^the larger evidently intended to be improved into forests on the European plan — the smaller as nurseries and seed-bed for young plants. Houses have been built for nurserymen, and all suitable buildings erected, and forest rangers and police appointed. The Forest Board had been in existence three years in 1879, and from the report of opera- tions sent in by Mr. Brown in that year, giving full and admirably worded details con- cerning the soil, trees, and method of procedure adopted and to be adopted on all the reserves, there is little doubt that South Australia will, considering how rapid growth, when encouraged, is there, (twice as rapid as in Britain) soon possess large and valuable forests, fit to yield yearly a regular and large quantity of timber, without either clearing or injuring the woodland reserves. New Zealand. * To show the destruction of timber even where unnecessary for clearing, it may be observed that it is evident New Zealand possessed, when first colonized to any extent, in 1830, much land in a prairie or un wooded state, as her area wm sixty-six million acres, and her wooded area twenty million acres. However, by 1868 she had destroyed five 7 08 ■ijl m m million acres of woods ; and by 1873, she had lost eight, leaving her but twelve million acres. The destruction was principally caused, not by clearing, but by carelessness in allowing bush fires ; and it was evident the land would, at that rate, soon be deforested altogether. The well-known writer, Hochstetter, says: — "Individuals should not be suffered to turn the country into a desert to the detriuent of whole generations to come. The woods are ransacked and ravaged, in New Zealand, with fire and sword. During my stay in Auckland, I was able to observe from my windows, during an entire fortnight, dense clouds of smoke whirling up, which proceeded from an enormously destructive confla- gration near the town. When the fire had subsided, where had been a large beautiful tract of forest was now nothing but ashes." An official of the New Zealand Company had also pointed out the destructive propensities of the settlers in cutting down valuable wood. He says : — "A melancholy scene of waste and destruction presented itself to me when I went up to see the forest. Several square miles of it were burning, having been fired in order to make room for the conveyance of logs down the creek. Noble trees, which had required ages for their perfection, were thus ruthlessly destroyed in great numbers." In consequence of this state of affairs, public opinion in New Zealand was loudly expressed, and numerous reports were presented to the Legislature causing animated debates, and large and valuable compilations of these were published. By this time, there is every reason to believe, if these reports and plans have been properly attended to and carried out, New Zealand has made good progress in the matter, though we have not, as in South Australia, an actual Forest Literature, such as the conservator there has pub- lished. United States. The United States have for some years past established a bureau of forestry under the able superintendence of Dr. Hough, who has issued several valuable yearly reports, and whom I have to thank for copies of these as well as for other valuable publi- cations connected with the subject. Largely in consequence of Dr. Hough's labours, tree-planting is receiving a rapid impetus throughout the United States, especially in the prairie sections; while in many of those States which have been principally cleared of i)heir forest, great interest is being created in the subject, and important works being car- Tied out. EXPERIMENTS IN PLANTING IN THE STATES AND CANADA, AND DIRECTIONS FOUNDED THEREON. Tree Seeds. — Methods of Plamtiko. In a report of a committee upon forestry, made to the Iowa State Horticultural Society in 1875, by Prof. Henry H. McAfee, the following practical statements are made upton this subject : — " Seeds may be classified for purposes of treatment into three sorts, viz : nuts, hard seeds, and soft seeds. The nuts should always be planted where they are to remain per- manently, as the nut-trees do not usually transplant without considerable injury, and the nuts must be kept damp from the time when they are ripe till planted ; at least the kernel must not be allowed to become dry, or they will surely fail to grow. Thin, soft- 99 I shelled nuts, like the chestnut, will, if exposed to sun and air, dry in a few hours enough to prevent growth. So nuts must be kept in earth or on the earth under mulch, or in something that will prevent drying till used. Feat, moss, old straw, dust, etc., will do. A very good way is to spread them in a thin layer upon the ground, or in a trench so located that water cannot stand among them', and cover them thoroughly with mulch, planting them at corn-planting time, and about as deep as corn is planted. "The hard seeds are generally somewhat slow to germinate, and need to be in soak for a long time, to be frozen wet, or to be scalded before planting, or to be treated with some substance to hasten germination. This class embraces honey-locust, which is kept dry and planted in spring, will seldom ever grow the first year, and sometimes will not sprout till the third season ; also the stones of cherries and plums and even the seeds of apples and pears. If mixed with sand (two parts of sand to one seed by bulk) and dampened fully, and subjected to moderate freezing through the winter, all this class except honey -locust, coffee-nut, the hawthorns, and red cedar are likely to grow the season planted. For these exceptionally hard cases water, heated to boiling, is poured over them, and, standing upon them for an hour or two, some may swell, and can then be picked out and planted, and the more incorrigible treated to another scald, and thus till they all swell, or they are planted in fall and left to grow when they will ; or, in case of haws, they may be mixed into bran-mash and fed to sheep or cattle, and the droppings planted, when the seeds, softened by the digestion, are likely to grow. " The soft seeds, comprising all not named in the two other classes, may be still further divided into spring, fall, and winter seeds, each of which require or permits different treatment. The spring seeds are tho ^e which ripen in spring or early summer, as silver or red maples and red and white elm, all ripening from May 1 5th to June 5th, and the rock-elm a little later than the others. These seeds will not keep well and should be gathered from the trees before they fall, except where they are so situated that they may fall into still water, when, being light and floating, they may sometimes be scooped up in large quantities As soon as possible after gathering they should be planted, not covered deeply, say one-half inch, in good mellow soil ; and if a fine mulch, like damp chaff, can be obtained, it should be lightly spread over the ground, which sometimes takes place in June. " The winter soft seeds are ash-leaved maple, green and black ash, sycamore, bass- wood, etc., oV those seeds which have a tendency to hang all winter in sheltered localities. These seeds may be gathered sometimes as late as planting time and immediately planted ; but if gathered earlier, had better be spread thinly upon the ground, and covered till planting time. All others of the soft and winged seeds, not classed as spring or winter, are the soft fall seeds, and they should all be stored as directed for the nuts. Hackberry and cherry, though properly classed with the hard seed, should be freed from their pulp in fall and stored in earth to freeze, and planted in spring without scalding. All seeds, but nuts, which are large enough to pick up readily, and such as may be gathered floating on still water, as noted above, are best gathered from the trees and stored so as not to dry too much. They must not be kept in too large masses, as, so dealt with, they may heat and spoil. " If ground is not very weedy, it may be economy to plant all seeds in permanent plantation ; but in old or weedy ground it is generally best to grow them in seed-bed or nursery rows. If put in the permanent plantation, allowance should be made for poor seeds, and more planted than you want of trees. The question of check-row or drill planting is to be decided by the planter, and the same reasons which determine the man- ner of planting com have weight in forestry, though, generally speaking, forestry is more satisfactory in drills than is an annual crop like com. If check-rows are used, several seeds per hill are desirable; and if drills, generally twice or three times as many seeds as you need trees should go in. It is not worth while to put tree seeds into any but mel- low, moist soil, and to secure good results with them, thorough culture the first year is necessary. A rule of depth sometimes given is to cover with soil as deep as the seed is thick, and that is of course very thin for small seeds. But seeds of trees often get covered too deep, and any seeds but the nuts ought to grow with half an inch of fine earth lightly packed above the seed. Nuts may be planted a little deept.r, but not much. 100 i'. \ "beed-beds and nursery rows are, all in all, to be advised, and they are generally used for seedling trees. Seed-beds are usually four feet wide and of any convenient length, and four inches above the surrounding level. For evergreen and larch seeds, which, by the way, ought not to be attempted by any one not trained in the nursery busi- ness, shades are used in the form of lath hurdles, with openings of less width tluui the strips, and generally, in addition to the hurdles, windscreens around the beds, while some nurserymen build arbors over their seed-beds, and such seed is generally put in broadcast, covering by sifting on sandy earth. But for any of our native tree-seeds, shading will hardly be necessary. *' Drills across the beds one foot apart may be planted, or drills, twenty to twenty- eight inches apart, may be made of any length, aud on the general level, and the seeds planted at the rate of twenty to forty to the foot. Culture, while plants are young, should be by hand, running a hand wheel-hoe, and hand-weeding in the drill, if necessary; but when the trees have attained some growth, a steady horse may be used, and if the nursery is made of long rows, of course horse labour is better employed than if it is in short row& Most of the native trees will be fit at one year old to remove to permanent plantation, and if to be so used, should be dug in the fall, and stored by burying, or in cellar, ready for early planting the next spring." Evergreen Planting in Nebraska. \i As to the proper season for planting evergreens, the author of an article in the Fourth Report of the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, remarks : — " The exact time when evergreens should be moved has excited much discussion, and there is a wide difference of opinion as to the proper season. My experience after repeated trials, is that just when the buds first begin to swell in the spring is the time ; while those removed after they have grown an inch were mostly failures. While a de- ciduous tree, when planted, is without leaves, an evergreen has an abundance of foliage to give off evaporation. Just at the time mentioned, the spongioles have commenced vigor- ous action ; the resinous sap is thinned, and what is needed to secure a new growth is care- ful handling ; see that the earth, which should be in close contact with the roots, is finely pulverized, and avoid by all means giving too much water. To insure the growth of any tree a certain amount of warmth in the soil is necessary. This cannot be found when the planting is done early in the spring, and in consequence the fibres lose their vitality and are unable to draw the required nourishment. Advantage should be tbken of cloudy days, when both roots and tops are not exposed to the hot sun or drying winds, and, ii the ground is moist, sufficient water only is needed to settle the earth about the roots, find then mulching to some distance round the tree will retain the moisture and keep down the weeds." RpLBs OF E. Ferrand on Evergreen Culture (Nebraska). Suggested by Ten Years' Experience as an Evergreen-tree JRaiser, and Ten Years as an Evergreen-forest Planter. " 1st. Never plant your evergreens in the fall of the year, but do it in the spring as early as you can obtain the trees. " 2nd. Do not set your trees in the ground deeper by an inch than they stood in the nursery. Use no manure of any Kind in planting evergreens or larch, but let the soil be mellow and friable, without lumps in contact with the roots. " 3rd. Do not plant trees under two years' old even for stocking a nursery, and for the garden and lawn give the preference to trees one to three feet high. " 4th. Never dig deep among the roots of your trees, but keep the soil mellow and moist at the surface by a high mulching 'of bruised straw or hay, that will prevent the weeds from growing. " 5th. Last, but not least, get your trees direct from a nursery, carefully avoiding 101 I ^■. trees that are hauled in by peddlers in the fall, because such are always killed at the root, notwithstanding their green appearance ; and here allow me a little digression. Give Tour preference to home nurseries. You have men here engaged in the business, who have spent their life-time judging what varieties of trees you could better plant, for your profit and success." Method of Oultivatiok bt a Winnkr of a Prize. A statement made by Hiram 0. Minick, of Nemaha County, Nebraska, to whom a premium was awarded for the cultiuation of a grove of not less than 1,000 trees, gives the following account of his method of cultivation : — " The ground was ploughed in the spring, the same as for a crop of com, and crossed out at distances of five feet by seven. The cotton wood yearling trees were procured on a sand-bar in the Missouri River, in the fall previous, and hauled in during winter. By selecting a spot on the sand-bar where the surface of the sand is but little above the water in the river, the yearling trees can be pulled out with great rapidity, probably at the rate of a thousand in twenty minutes, the operation being similar to pulling flax, and the trees can thus be taken up preserving their rootlets entire, thus securing them in the best possible condition for transplanting ; and taken at this age they receive but little check in their growth by the operation. Part of my grove was planted with the spade, the operation being the same as for a hedge. Another part of the grove was planted by drawing a deep furrow with the plough, and dropping the trees at the crossings of the furrows, the roots in the furrow and the^ops projecting out, and then cover by throwing another furrow-slice upon the roots and base of the stock with a plough. This left the trees leaning at an angle, say of forty-five degrees, and fearing this position' would he in- jurious to the trees, I took the pains to place some of them carefully erect ; but upon an examination of the trees, after one year's growth, no difference was perceptible in those left leaning and those straightened up, as they invariably start their growth from a bud near the base of the stock and grow erect. The portion of my grove, composed of cotton- wood, contains about 3,000 trees, and was the work of two men, a boy and team, one day planting. This required one hand and horse, two days each year, to five acres of ground, The maple portion of my grove was planted by preparing the ground the same as above and dropping the seed (which had been procured from trees on the Nemaha River), in the furrow, and covering with the harrow, and cultivating as above. The seed ripens about the middle of May, and is generally very abundant. The following may be con- [^dered as a fair estimate of the cost of the grove : — Hand and team one day procuring trees, $3 ; two men, boy and team employed in planting, $5 ; ploughing ground, $5 ; two years' cultivation of trees, $9. Total, $22." TIMBER GROWING IN NEBRASKA. (From an Article by J. W. Davidson). ' < The best method of stocking our prairies with timber, is to prepare the soil precisely as you would if you were going to raise a large crop of corn. The quickest way to raise a grove is with cuttings of cottonwood or willow. I plough, drag and mark the same as for com, four feet each way, which will contain 2,722 hills to the acre. I should plant one-half to trees, four feet one way and eight the other, making 1,631 trees, and the other in com for two years, to pay for cultivation, and that is all the cultivation needed. I should adopt the same plan in planting acorns, hickory-nuts, white and black walnuts, soft maple, elm and ash, where the sprouts are one year old. White pine, arbor- vitse, red cedar, European and American larch, when large enough to transplant, require more 102 I I: cultivation. I estimate the cost of preparing an acre, and getting the cuttings of soft maple or ash (they can be had by the thouHand along our streams) at $3 per acre. A man can plant two and a-half acres per day. That is all the cost for ten years, except interest and taxes on land. I have 1,361 trees per acre ; seven years from planting, I will cut one-fourth, or 340 trees, equal to fifteen cordH of wood ; the eighth year fifteen cords more ; the ninth the same ; the tenth year you see my profits. I should cut what is left, 456 tree& Allow four trees to the cord, so as not to overestimate it. I have several trees only ten years old, which are fourteen inches in diameter and fifty feet high ; four, T think, would make a cord. Allowing six trees to the cord, we have seventy six cords, and with forty-five cords cut before, 1 21 cords. At $3 per cord, allowing $1 for cutting, I have $242. I contend that five acres planted to cottonwood, after a growth of seven years, will furnish one family with fuel for one stove a life-time, and sell enough to pay for the use of the land besides. I claim, after fifteen years' experience in tree-planting on this plan, which I adopted last spring, on Arbor Day, on my new farm in Otoe County, Nebraska, that the white willow is equal to soft maple for wind-breaks and fuel, and superior to all trees for rapidity of growth, as well as good for timber. Chestnut, too, is super-excellent. The climatic influence of timber is discernible in the regular attrac- tion of rain and tempering the chilly winds of winter." PLANTING IN NEBRASKA. (From an Article by James Morris.) " What shall we plant in Nebraska that will most quickly and fully meet our require- ments V Shelter and shade are our immediate and imperative necessity. To provide these we unhesitatingly recommend, first of all, our native trees, in the following order ; soft maple, willow, cottonwood, buckeye, ash. The maple is raised from the seed as easily as corn ; makes a good shelter when strictly planted in rows, and a grateful shade where room is given to its lateral branches. It furnishes a fuel, which, though it does not consume as slowly as oak and hickory, makes a good hot fire. The willow, objected to by many as a harbour for insects, yet offers a complete break to the keen winds, grows rapidly to a good size, and some varieties, as the white and the weeping willow, furnish good timber for fuel and manufacturing purposes. The common osier, planted upon wet spots, will pay as well as any other crop on the farm. Cuttings of all varieties are easily and cheaply secured. " As a source of profit the raising of trees in Nebraska ranks next to the raising of stock. A quarter section planted with chestnut, spruce, larch, maple, mammoth aspen, or even inferior trees, would, in ten years, yield a satisfactory return for the investment." the Close Planting of Cottonwood. "Judge Whiting, of Monona County, Iowa, remarked in 1869, that he had at first planted cottonwood eight feet apart each way, giving each tree sixty-four square feet of ground. They grew well, but too many branches in proportion totheamount of bodyof wood. He had adopted the rule of planting three feet each way, giving nine square feet to a tree, and in this order they grew tall and straight, soon shaded the ground, and in three years needed no further cultivation than thinning as became necessary, by removing alternate rows and drawing out the poles with one horse and a chain." 108 SUGGESTIONS ON PLANTING— (Iowa Experiknce.) Mr. SuhI Foster, of Muscatine, Iowa, in a prize essay on forest-tree planting, offers the following suggestions as applicable in his State : — " The larch is of tolerably rapid growth ; growing half-an inch or more in diameter each year for the first ten years, and the next ten years fully equal to one inch. This is in size equal to our black walnut, and it grows much better and straighter. The little trees should be bought of nurserymen, for it is a nice and particular thing to raise the larch or evergreens from seed. I would recommend to the farmers of Iowa to buy European larch at two years old at $10 to $15 per thousand. They should be set in nursery rows, four and a-half feet apart, and one foot in the row, so that when one row is taken out it will make a waggon-road through the grove. Larch must be moved very early in the spring, for they are among the very earliest trees to start to grow. The ground should be ploughed very deep in the fall, then ploughed in the spring, as soon as possible ; harrowed and pulver- ized very finely by turning the harrow bottom up the last time. Then stretch a line and set with a spade. Have a mud-hole to dabble the roots all in. While the man uses the spado, a boy can handle plants. About 2,000 will be a day's work, and will cover about a quarter of an acre. They must be carefully ploughed and hoed for two years, and if the weeds start too quick in May and June, the third and fourth years they should be ploughed. " Cost — 8,000 plants for an acre, $80 ; setting out, $8 ; ploughing and hoeing the first year, $8 ; ploughing and harrowing the land before setting, $4 ; second year, $4 ; two years after, $4; interest on the land at $50; eight years, at 8 per cent. =$3 2. Total cost of an acre of European larch, at eight years, $140. ^ Planting op the Ash, " Mr. J. L. Budd, now of Ames, Iowa, in a paper published in the Transactions of the Northern Illinois Horticultural Society (1867-'68), advises keeping the seeds of the ash through the winter in kegs or boxes, mixed with clean moist sand, taking care that they become neither too wet or too dry. Freezing will do no harm. The ground should be marked and prepared as for corn, and planted at the intersections, placing four to six seeds in a hill. They should be carefully cultivated, and the next spring thinned to one plant in each hill, the vacancies being supplied. By planting thus thickly, the young trees get a straight growth. At the end of six years, every alternate row north and south should be thinned out, and at the end of ten years every alternate three in each row. When twelve years old, on good soil and with proper culture the first four years, the grove would have 12,000 trees on 10 acres, averaging eight inches in diameter. By cutting the stump close to the ground, and covering with a light furrow on each side, a second growth is obtained in eight or ten years more valuable than the first," Professor C. S. Sargent, in speaking of this timber, says : — "To develop its best qualities the white ash should be planted in a cool, deep, moist, but well-drained soil, where it will make a rapid growth. That the plantation may be as early profitable as possible, the young trees should be inserted in rows three feet apart, the plants being two feet apart in the rows. This would give 7,260 plants to the acre, which should be gradually thinned until 108 trees are left standing, twenty feet apart each way. The first thinning, which might be made at the end of ten years, would give 4,000 hoop poles, which at present price would be worth $400. " The remaining thinnings, made at. different periods up to twenty-five or thirty years, would produce some three thousand trees more, worth at least three times as much as the first thinnings. Such cuttings would pay all the expenses of planting, the care of plantation, and the interest on the capital invested, and would leave the land covered with trees capable of being turned into money at a moment's notice, or whose value would increase for a hundred years making no mean inheritance for the descendants of a 104 MaiaachuaettH farmer. The planting of the white ash as a shade and road-side tree ia especially recommended, and for that purpose it ranks, among our native trees, next to the sugar-maple." shot! twei] repal ii ; m ih CALCULATIONS OP COST OF QROWINO PINE TIMBER. " Mr. Sonson, a highly intelligent Norwegian gentleman, who has made a large for- tune in the timber trade, informed mo some time ago that, according to a calculation which he had made, pine and spruce timber actually costs and is worth much more than the price at which it is sold. His theory is, that an acre of grown timber is worth the sum that the lowest or nominal price of wild land — say 91 an acre — would amount to as an invested capital, drawing interest at the expiration ot the period required for timber to develop. In the report on Swedish forest culture, it was shown that in the northerly parts of Sweden, two hundred years, — and on poorer soils three hundred years, are required for the pine to grow to good timber. In the south part of the country one hun- dred years are sufficient It may b ) assumed that one hundred and eighty years are required for the growth of pine timber in the north-west part of the United States. Now, $1 invested at 6 per cent, interest per annum, will double say, in twenty years. In forty years it will be $4 ; in sixty years, $8 ; in eighty years, $16 ; in one hundred years, 932 ; in one hundred and twenty years, $64 ; in one hundred and forty years, 9128 and in one hundred and sixty years, 9256. If a thing is worth what, under favour- able circumstances, it costs to produce it, then this last mentioned sum of 9256 repre- sents the value of an acre of land originally bought at 91, at the time pine timber will have come to maturity upon it, and this without including the charges of taxes on the land. These figures would seem to show that the pine forests of the United States are being or have been sold and consumed at a prico very much below their actual value. " In years past vast quantities of pine timber in the north-west part of the United States have been stolen from the Government, and at the very time the latter was em- ploying agents to guard it. In very many instances, after the timber has been stolen, innocont parties, supposing from the official maps that the land was timbered land, have purchased it from the United States at private entry, at 91-25 per acre. Interest on the purchase money, and taxes have in the course of twenty years, made such lands cost the owners from $3 to 94 per acre, and yet the land would not bring fifty cents per acre. Many a man has been kept poor paying taxes on such lands. Again timber-lands have been sold off in such large quantities and so rapidly as to glut the timber market. " But a more important fact still is that no means have been taken to promote re- growth. Where hardwood timber is cut there is always a chance for regrowth by sprouts from the stumps and roots, but with pine and spruce it is otherwise ; and where closely growing forests of pine and spruce are cleared without leaving seed-trees, the land may remain for ever a waste, growing every yeu more bari'en. '* In the report above referred to, it was shown that the practice in Sweden whe^ cutting pine timber is to leave six or seven seed-trees to about each quarter of an acre. After five or six years the seed trees may be cut." Profitable Method of Cutting. A suggestion of management in some degree comparable with European methods, was made by Peter Guillet, in a work on timber-measurement published in 1823. He says: — " Individuals wishing to make the most of their woodlands will find it very profit- able to cut their timber by sections, sparing to every acre ten or twelve of the most pro- mising size white oaks or pines, whichsoever the soil will produce best ; range the order of their land so as to cut a section every year. For example, sa,y a man has 200 acres of woodland divided into sections of ten acres each, then, by cutting one section every year, he would have young timber twenty years old which makes excellent firewood, and I 105 ■bould My that in common lands, wood of twenty years' growth would yield fifteen or twenty cords of firewood per acre, besides fencing timber sufficient to always keep in repair an indosure of two hundred acres. Then the ten or twelve trees growing in reserve, will, at the end of eighty or one hundred years, furnish timber fit for shipping or staves. Where land has become useless from long cultivation, a little trouble only is necessary to make it productive and profitable to the owner. By end that, considering the posi- tion of his place, exposed on the north-west to the violent winds of winter sweeping across Buzzard's Bay, and in summer to the strong breezes from the south-west, bringing salt spray from Vineyard Sound, the vigorous growth and promising appearance of his forest plantation is very encouraging to those more favourably placed. Not only may the de- struction of our forests be partially remedied at a cheap cost, but the waste and sterility of our land by long cultivating and pasturing, be removed and replaced with fertility by 107 V but all of the simple process of nature. It is much also, to restore shade in summer and shelter ia Mrinter, by the renewal of our forests." Mr. Morrill Allen, of Pembroke, Mass., says : " A man in Bristol County, about fifty years ago, planted a field somewhat exhausted, with acorns ; when the young trees were two or three inches high he ploughed and hoed as in a field of Indian corn ; the trees grew, to the astonishment of the whole neighbourhood, and in less than forty years, were ripe for the axe. About a century since there was an experiment in this town in planting the white oak for ship-timber, the success of which ought to have encouraged frequent repetition. The grove was in cutting for timber thirty years since, and a man between seventy and eighty years old told me that in his boyhood he assisted in planting those trees. It is not to the existing generation so helpless an undertaking as some would represent it, to plant forest-trees, even those of slow growth. I recollect measure- ing the circumference of an oak tree in West Newbury, the acorn of which was planted by Benjamin Poore, who is yet comparatively a young man, and I think it measured twenty-seven inches. It is a well-propoi'tioned, handsome tree. Had he planted at the same time fifteen acres of similar soil it would have become before now an inexhaustible wood-lot for the use of one family. " Another gentleman, also of the name of Fay, of Essex County, commenced, in 1846, planting on his estate near Lynn, in Essex County, and in that and the two suc- ceeding years planted 200,000 imported trees, to which were afterwards added nearly as many more, raised directly from the seed, nearly 200 acres being covered in all. The sites of these plantations were stony hill-sides, fully exposed to the wind, destitute of loam, their only covering a few straggling barberry bushes and junipers, with an abund- ant undergrowth of woodwax, always a certain indication, in Essex County, of sterile soil. He employed in his plantations oaks, ashes, maples, Norway spruce, Scotch and Austrian pines ; but the principal tree planted was the European larch. No labour was expended on the land previous to planting, the trees, about one foot high, being simply inserted with a spade ; and no protection has at any time been given them, save against fire and browsing animals. I recently visited these plantations, twenty-nine years after their formation, and took occasion to measure several of the trees, but more especially the larches. Some of these are now over fifty feet in height, and fifteen inches in diam- eter three feet from the ground, and the average of many trees examined is over forty feet in height and twelve inches in diameter. The broad leaved trees have also made a most satisfactory growth, and many of them on the margins of the plantations are fully forty feet high. During the past ten years about 700 cords of firewood have been cut from these plantations, besides all the fencing required for a large estate. Firewood, fence-podts, and railroad sleepers, to the value of thousands of dollars, could be cut to-day, to the great advantage of the remaining trees. The profit of such an operation is appar- ent, especially when we consider that the land used for these plantations did not cost more than $10 an acre, and probably not half that amount." Mr. Henry Ives, of Batavia, Genesee County, New York, in a communication to the New York Farmers' Club in the spring of 1876, states the result of experience in tree-planting as follows : — " Five or six years ago I planted two acres with four-year-old seedlings of white elm and soft maple into forest rows, sixteen feet apart and three feet apart in the row. Now the best of them are twenty feet high and twelve inches in circumference, and for thin- ning out the rows I sell trees for more money than wheat would have brought, grown for these years, and I can continue to sell so until they are so large that I can take them for fire-wood, and I am growing a good crop of orchard grass between the rows. So that these- acres in forest timber are paying as well, and are likely to pay for years to come, as any other acres on tlie farm. I am cutting now the second crop of wood, where the first or original timber was taken off about twenty-five years ago, aud last winter 1,000 rails, were taken by a neighbour from one-third of an acre of growth, besides a quantity of wood from the top, and timber not making rails. Another neighbour used nice black liii 108 walnut lumber in building a fine farm house, sawed from the trees he had helped to plant when a boy." The late Horace Greeley, in speaking of the available opportunity for timber culture in West Chester County, remarked : — " I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest, with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming country, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New World ; hence one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else. Yet I am satisfied that half its value may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. Nay, I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land — ^that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which will not, as yet, pay to blast — is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet of its surface. The time will doubtless arrive in which many fields would pay for clearing of stone, that would not to-day. These, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the steiwly progress of both the surface and the subsoil plough. " Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of our country bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable ; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit ; we should have vastly more birds to delight us with their melody, and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects ; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, and the remorseless devastations of our visible and insect enemies, have all but annihilated ; and we shall keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. And what is true of West Chester is measurably true of every rural county in the Union." The advantages of wind-breaks are set forth by Judge C. E. Whiting, of Iowa, from his own experience as follows : — " I have, in belts around my fields, varying from single to twenty rows of trees, mostly planted 4,356 to the acre, about forty acres of timber. The trees in these belts vary as to the time of planting ; some are eighteen years old and some only one year planted ; the greater portion are, however, from five to twelve years of age. The needed thinning of these belts furnishes all the wood that is wanted on the farm, including stakes and rails to keep the fences in repair, posts for all repairs needed, and many for new fences I annually build in extending my farm. When my walnuts get a little larger I will have all I need and many for sale. There is not a stick of needed timber on the farm, from a pea-brush, a grape-vine stake, or a binding-pole, up to a fair-sized saw- log, that cannot be had from my groves, without cutting a single tree that does not need thinning out from the groves. " About five miles of my timber-belts are so planted that I have commenced using the standing trees for fence-posts. Where a light fence is not needed, with the use of the barbed wire, and a little change in the staple, the use of these live posts is a perfect success. Strongly and urgently as I have heretofore advocated the planting of thick belts of timber round our fields, each year but confirms me in the opinions then expressed. The land that remains will, year after year, produce larger and more certain crops than the whole field would produce without such protection. I also repeat that, in spite of all the learned discussions and scientific theorizing in regard to the cause o^ our timberless prairies, our cultivated forest trees, year after year, grow right along with immense rapidity, in blissful ignorance of all the reasons why they should not grow." Hon. J. Sterling Morton, of eastern Nebraska, lays down his rules, and mentions his results, as follows — When plank, manage elm wil never f culture heard lies in d to plant er culture to forest, ;-growing, the New 'here else, to timber 1 — that is, ;heir beds, itil it shall a two feet ir clearing now, and lent to the ly wooded ir springs ess bitter, ielight us isects; we ces of our ,ve all but f the land is true of owa, from ) of trees, lese belts one year le needed including many for a little timber on ized saw- not need ced using he use of a perfect of thick ons then re certain t that, in se ojE our ong with 910." mentions 109 " First, the original sod should be broken and turned over in thin, evenly-laid strips. When completed, a good breaking will appear, like a vast floor of well-laid two-inch plank, painted with lamp-black. Then plant and cultivate, not to see how much yuu can manage, but how well. Then come trees ; walnuts, cottonwoods, willows, mulberries, and elm will make the home seem civilized. Tree-planting is an avocation that barbarians never follow. Indians never adorn their wigwams with orchards, nor indulge in flori- culture. There is no record of an aboriginal horticulturist in any book I have read or heard of anywhere. It may seem a long time to raise a saw-log from the walnut which lies in the palm of your hand, but the rain and frost of winter and the sunshine of summer, together with the fertile and forcing soil of Nebraska, crowd a walnut into the dimensions of a respectable saw-log in less than twenty-five years. Upon a farm where I have lived, in Otoe County, for more than twenty years, one may see black walnut trees which will make good railroad ties, and some which will do to saw up, which I planted with my own hands. . . . And again there may be found cottonwood sawlogs growing there which are more than six feet in girth, and when I first saw them they were only wandering germs, floating in the air, like down from a bird's breast. But they are adult sawlogs in 1876. These remarks, somewhat egotistical though they may be, are made for the purpose merely of impressing you, and through you the farming people, with the tree-possibilities of this State, and I only preach in this regard what I have faithfully put in practice, and the witnesses of the truth of my theories stand majestically verifying me all over the farm whence this is written to you, in the form of beautiful, thrifty, and valuable fruit and forest trees. Come down and see them, and in the hot summer days, while you rest in their shade, even their foliage will tell you in whispering with the wind how pleasant and profitable a thing it is to plant the prairie with trees." The following shows in how short a time firewood may be procured from the planting of trees : — " Twenty years ago cordwood sold in Nebraska city for seven or eight and sometimes ten dollars a cord, and that, too, when her population was not one-fifth what it is now ; and notwithstanding the demand for fuel is at least ten times greater now than in 1857, it is a fact that good merchantable wood can be bought in our streets for from $3.50 to four dollars per cord. The reason of this is simply from the fact that the natural groves have been protected from fire, and the artificial groves are turning out an abundance of good wood, such as the necessities of the country demand for fuel. It will agreeably sur- prise any one not acquainted with the fact to know the amount of timber one acre of land will produce in the course of ten years. Mr. Richard Justice, who came here (Otoe County) in 1857, and planted about ten acres of cottonwood in 1859, has one or two out- houses built from hewed logs taken from that grove, and the family have all the fuel they need. Hundreds of such cases might be mentioned throughout the eastern portion of the State, did space permit." Mr. George Stanton, of Simcoe, Ont., writing to the Hon. H. G. Joly, says : — " You know that this Long Point country was a great black walnut district, and on the Lake Shore there are still quite a few tr.^es left, I have measured to-day, some five trees, and got their ages as near as I can, relying on what the owners have told rae. The first tree that I saw, measured five feet eight inches, four feet from the ground, and is twenty-four years old ; it is growing on very rich black sandy loam. •'The second measures five feet four inches, three feet from the ground, is thirty years old, on very light sand. The third and fourth measure twenty-three and one-half and twenty-four and one-half inches respectively, three feet from the ground, and both are eleven years old, on good clay ground, but were transplanted when young. The age of these trees the gentleman told me he was sure uf. " Number five measures seven feet eight inches, five feet above the ground, is fifty- five years old ; this tree is on very light sandy soil. I mean in all the measurements, the circwmfere'nce of the trees. 110 Y\ li " You see from this that the soil has everything to do with the growth of a tree ; the richer the soil the more rapid the advance, and, therefore, I hope that by putting my trees on rich virgin clay soil, I shall have a return in about twenty-five years." Mr. James T. Allan, of Omaha, Nebraska, writing to the last American Forestry Congress, says that there is a very rapid increase of forests in this comparatively new State, and that to-day there are forty-three millions of forest trees growing where, but a very few years ago not a tree could be seen on her wide prairies. There are thousands of stock farms in Nebraska, the owners of which are practical tree-planters. The value of groves and belts of the fast-growing poplars and white willow is well understood, and this protection for animals against driving storms, in a country where lumber is not cheap or plenty, seems to have been ordained to meet the want. But this want of lum- ber for all the needs of the farm will not*long exist. Hundreds of groves of the earliest planted can now furnish work for the portable saw-mill, and these too, are the once des- pised soft woods, those of the most rapid growth which are now prepared to equal pine in durability. The commencement of tree-planting by the Union Pacific Railway, which has yet been confined to deciduous trees of some ten varieties, and mountain evergreens about their stations, so far is successful, and will soon make these grounds objects of pleasant attraction to the thousands who are daily moving across the continent. The intention of the railway is to plant tracts of considerable extent at difierent points for a future tree supply, and by example induce others to plant the seeds for a crop of railway sleepers, which must be early harvested. Mr. "W. M. Pennel, of Russel, Kansas, says : — " At least one-half of my 6,000 black walnut trees are bearing fruit this season. 3,500 box alder (ash-leaved maple) transplanted this spring, are all living ; and notwith- standing the severe drought which is now parching our section of the country, my trees are making a fine growth." Mr. John Dougall, Editor of the New York " Witness," contributed to the American Forestry Congress, such a concise and complete resume of the whole subject that I insert it here : — " The greater part of the North American continent was covered with forests when first invaded by Europeans. These forests had stood for many ages undisturbed, except by the slow decay of one generation of trees, if we may so speak, and the slow growth of another. These operations had been going on simultaneously since the creation, or since the last great convulsion of nature, and the annual falling of 'leaves and the gradual de- cay of branches and trunks had covered the earth with a vegetable mould of considerable depth. " A Universal Mine of Wealth. — This mould, possessing all the elements of fertility, was an immense treasure, everywhere abounding, and tempting the settler to clear away the trees, and reap the benefit of the virgin soil. When trees were cut down, a crop, which had probably required several hundred years to grow, was reaped in a few weeks or years, thereby leaving the earth bare, and the vegetable mould was used up in a few years by continued cropping in wheat, corn and potatoes. The writer knew an excellent bush lot which produced great crops at first to be reduced in ten years to mere rocks and stones. And this process of exhausting the vegetable soil went on everywhere as fast as ^ settlements advanced. Of course where the subsoil was good, and was turned up in part to mix with the vegetable mould, fertility continued much longer, but, in course of time, Ill of a tree ; )utting my a Forestry .tively new bare, but a thousands The value stood, and aber is not nt of lura- :he earliest B once des- equal pine 2h. has yet 3ens about )£ pleasant itention of future tree y sleepers, lis season. notwith- , my trees American at I insert ests when ed, except growth of or since ■adual de- isiderable ' fertility, lear away n, a crop, ew weeks in a few excellent 'ocks and as fast as ^ ip in part e of time, all except prairie lands were reduced so much in fertility as to require the application of fertilizers at great expense. Had the soil at first required these fertilizers the progress of settlement would have been exceedingly slow or more probably there would have been no progress at all. " War against Trees and its Effects. — The labour of cutting down great trees, cutting them into short logs, and piling them into log heaps to burn, was, however, so great that a feeling of dislike to trees as the settlers' natural enemy became general and the ven- geance against them was so great that in extensive regions the land was completely bared, and thus rendered not only unsightly but unsheltered. Bleak winds had full play and droughts parched the earth. What was even worse, the clearing away of trees on the hills and mountains by the settlers, the lumbermen and forest fires, left the snow of winter exposed to the spring sun ; and the sudden melting and running off of this accumulation of frozen water made dangerous floods in the streams in early summer and left those streams i^early dry in the hot season. " Callirig a Halt. — At length the evil results of the indiscriminate cutting down of trees began to be perceived. The improvidence of previous generations was lamented, and efforts to conserve what forests were left and to plant trees gradually became popu- lar. The first class of efforts was directed to preserving a few acres of the original forest in each farm where that still could be done, and merely thinning the trees for firewood, fencing, etc., thus leaving the smaller trees room to grow more rapidly. The grove thus preserved became one of the most necessary and valuable portions of the farm, and that without any labour of ploughing, sowing, or cultivating. It also afforded a delightful shade in hot weather for man and beast. " Forests in the Territories. — The preservation of the vast forests in the territories belonging to the nation attracted attention also, and laws were enacted to protect them from wanton waste. Secretary of the Interior Schurz distinguished himself for endea- vouring to enforce these laws, which are very difficult of execution on account of the op- portunities lumbermen have in an almost uninhabited region of cutting tr«es on Govern- ment land, and the frequency of forest fires kindled by careless Indians, hunters, trappers, lumbermen and settlers. These fires often do more damage to a forest in a few days than lumbermen could do in as many years, and how to prevent them is as yet an unsolved problem. " Forestry Laws. — The only remedy, and that only a partial one that can be sug- gested, for the wanton destruction of forests, is a national system of forestry laws, somewhat similar to those A France, Germany, Austria, Norway, and other European countries, which prohibit under severe penalties the injury or destruction of trees by un- authorized persons, and also the kindling of fires, or even smoking in the woods. A forest police was created to see to the execution of these laws, and at the same time providing for the utilizing of forests by gradual thinning out and selling the larger trees, so as to leave more room for the smaller ones. In this way the public forests are an annual source of revenue, and after centuries of such management they are in as good condition as they were at first." I will here insert, also from the Forestry Congress, the statement of a gentleman of great practical knowledge, concerning the first steps to be taken by any who may wish to make plantations from seed for themselves. Mr. D. W. Beadle, of St. Catharines, said : — " It has occurred to me that there may be farmers who are obliged to go to nursery- men for young trees when they want to plant them either for useful purposes or for orna: mentation, and if they want to plant largely they may find it impossible to get them in sufficient quantity from nurserymen, who generally confine the planting to fruit trees, and they have not grown, to any large extent, forest trees for the sake of timber. But these parties can form a nursery of these trees themselves by procuring a small piece of ground, and have it especially prepared and well manured, so that there will be strength in the soil for a few years, and then they can raise whatever kind of tree they want. The seeds of elms, maples, ashes, and of the walnut and butternut can be found in almost 112 any part of the Province. The important point in planting by seeds is that they should be pUnted as soon as perfectly ripe. Some of our trees ripen their seeds quite early. The soft maples, the dasycarpum and rubrum, and the elma, ripen their seeds in June. These maples ripen their seeds in June, and it should be gathered and sown at once so that you can get a tree of considerable growth before the winter season. The seed of the elms should also be sown at once ; it should be sown in drills not deeply, but very lightly. These small seeds require to be covered with only sufficient earth to keep them moist, and they will produce plants in a very short time, and gain sufficient strength to tide- over the cold season. If, however, you are not in a position to sow the seed at once, and wish to keep them till the next spring, they should be mixed with sandy soil and kept damp, yet not so damp as to cause them to germinate, and not be allowed to get dry. In this way you may preserve them with safety. If kept dry in papers some of them will have vitality in the spring, but very many of them will not germinate the next season, and the proper way to preserve them is to mix them with moist earth. But it is not true of all the maples that they ripen their seeds so early in the season. The sugar maple ripens its seeds late in the autumn, as well as the ash-leaved maple, and unless you wish to sow them in the autumn, you have to preserve them and sow them in the spring. Now come to the butternuts, chestnuts and walnuts ; these all ripen in the late autumn, and, in suitable soils, may be planted as socn as gathered, and allowed to /reeze and thaw with impunity, as they will not suffer therefrom, but will generate freely in the spring. But in soils which lie under the effect of alternate freezing and thawing, it will be better to mix the seed with soil in sufficient quantity to keep the seeds moist, and prevent them from moulding, and keep them until spring before planting, or they may be spread out very thin upon the ground, and covered with a sod, in which manner they will keep fre^. It is not necessary that the nuts will be subjected to frost, that is a matter of perfect indifference ; the important thing is not to permit them to become dry. These trees can be grown in nursery fashion, until they attain sufficient size to be planted where they are to remain, especially the elms, maples, and ashes. The nut-bearing trees will make better growth if they be planted in the nut where they are to remain. The bass- wood ripens its seeds about September or October, generally late in the fall ; those of the cedar also ripen in the fall. White cedar is propagated from seed, and when the seeds are to be preserved, they should be mixed with nearly dry earth, moist, but not wet." I*' I- Senator Allan gives some statistics, for the accuracy of which he vouches, concerning certain trees : — *' Elm trees taken from the woods as young trees of about six inches round the stem, and between eight and nine feet high, have attained in forty-five years a height and girth round the stem at three feet from the bottom, in several instances, as follows : — One sixty feet high, eight feet in circumference, at three feet from the ground ; one sixty-five feet h\fh, eiglkt feet two inches in circumference at three feet from the ground ; one sixty feet high, seven feet nine inches in circumference at three feet from the ground. Another elm planted about fifty years ago, a small tree from the nursery gardens, has now grown to a height of seventy feet, with a girth at three feet from the ground of eight feet six inches. " A red oak, planted as a sapling about forty-eight years ago, is now nearly fifty feet ld tires is not the only advantage that would accrue to the settlers from the adoption of this mode of clearing wood lands. Take them as a whole, for the sake of comparing them, and this mode does not give more work than that now in use. True, you have got to convey the stufi you intend burning a little further, because one single fire, continued and replenished for some hours, will dispose of as much stuff as would have made one or two dozen average piles, but then, think of the advantage of having got all that rubbish out of the way at once, instead of having it to cumber the ground until next year, when perhaps the season will be too rainy for burning, or so dry that you will run the risk of setting fire to your own farm and the whole surrounding country. As the work is now done, even in a small clearing, no settler can keep all his fires under absolute control ; he is obliged to wait for dry weather, and then he has got twenty, thirty and more fires going on at once. A sudden gust of wind, which is often produced by the intensity of the tire itself in the stillest weather, and otT the tire goes, reaches the tire close by, and meets there with such encouragement as to get very soon beyond human control. " As a further precaution against the danger to the forest arising from the clearing of lands by tire, I would recommend that the Government should confine the settlements, as much as possible, to the hardwood lands, of which there are large tracts still available. * As a general rule (to quote the words of Mr. Allan Gilmour in answer to questions of a Committee of the House of Assembly of Quebec) it is well known that they are of much better quality for farming purposes, than those covered to any great extent with pine, while they are at the same time much more easily cleared, and will give, as a first crop, a good return, in the shape of pot or pearl ashes from the burnt timber, should the parties clearing the land choose to make them — a benefit which cannot be had from pine burnt in tho process of clearing.' Mr. Joly recommends also, "Such a study of our unsettled lands as would enable them to be classified under two distinct heads — lands fit for agriculture, to which the settlers ought to be sent, and lands unfit for agriculture, from which the settlers ought to be kept away, for their own sake as well as for the public good." I should rathe) underbrush in the way Mr. Joly proposes than in any other, as I am certain that it wjuld injure the humus of the soil far less than the ordinary way. In my clearing days, 1 frequently thought of trying the plan for this reason, but never actually made the experiment. It may be remarked that the reason why the settler lik'sto leave hia brush piles lying everywhere till his chopping is done is, that he may then, after it dries in the spring, set fire to all together, which often burns up many of the logs and saves him much logging. Mr. Joly's plan, however, offers many advantages, and I do not know whether, so great is the danger of fire under the old system, it -would not be well to render his plan of clearing compulsory. Speaking of the danger of fire from lumbermen and others, Mr. Joly says : — " Lumbermen cannot set fire to the forests in winter, while carrying on all the ope- rations necessary for the cutting, squaring, and hauling of the timber ; the danger only exi litt wa vut as t the 119 oxists when they drive it down HtroaiiiH, in the Hpring an> of those inrtammable materials, within a radius of four feet from the tire to U^ u»ade, and th" total extinguishing of the fire before quitti ig the place. Any honest, wnseicntiims mMi, with a head on his shoulders, ought to take those precautions, and bo as car«>ful of fclkt> property of others as ho would be of his own. There are times in the long (troujfhba <^' summer, when a man is just as guilty who throws down a lighted matoh in the wooibv "^ if lis threw it in a barn full of hai/. " The enforcement of i '.iiulations made for diminishing the danger of tire during tlS* fishing season would not entail such expenditure as might tv exjxvted. The >k'oo>l rangers and fishery inspectors would not have to watch oxer every square acre o< forest, an army could not do that. An otfioer, well up to his work, would 80ey are too small 9 130 and too i8olati;d, and far too certain to vanish, to maintain the proportion of shaded land necessary for climatic purposes. But these districts, it is said, give fair crops now. They do not yield so easily as once, nor is the sky so propitious now, as the careful investiga- tions of Dr. Bryce and Prof. Dewey, some pages back, show. But the great point is this, — they soon will, in all human calculations, suffer severely. Now, if the matter be commenced in time, we have yet space, before it be too late, to carry out what all civi- lized countries have acknowledged the necessity of and are to-day engaged in, — the work of making provision for a continuous forest area, and constant supply of merchantable timber. Something can be done, and no doubt should be done, in certain parts of Ontario towards replanting our destroyed forests — destroyed in localities where forest, to improve climate and subserve agriculture, should especially have been allowed to remain. But the great opportunity which yet remains is that of preservation. This is found to be the case in India. The Government of that great country, expending yearly its hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling for preservation and replanting, has not yet planted a hundred thousand acres, while it has improved, is improving, and has to a very great extent already changed for the better, the character of many millions of acres of forest land. If we pass through much of the forest which Ontario still I'etains in governmental hands, we shall find, here and there, many a large expanse desolated by fire and growing up again, a brushwood choking itself to usclessness, covering a burnt and impoverished soil. We shall find great areas of forest the lumbermen have called of pine and spruce, of ash and oak. Every here and there are the relics of their operations — the close hewn stump, and, a goodly distance therefrom, the great pile of decaying branches where the head of the tree had fallen ; while the whole distance between, if round timber had been got out, shows nothing but a few scattered side limbs, but if square it is paved with immense pine fragments — short thick slabs whose deep clean cut show the force of the score- hacker's arm, and long lengths of those peculiar chips, slightly connected, thin and broad, smooth on one side, the depth and straightness of which show how deftly the handler of the broad-axe has plied his unwieldy tool, ; and if you come near the stump, and it has been heavy timber squared for the English market, you will find in great masses, hewn off, thrown away and rotting, as much clear timber as, sold at Toronto prices, would go far towards the whole sum the lumberman will ever get for the log. The piles of debris are everywhere, and form a most inilammable portion of the touchwood of a forest. Then before the strong oxen could drag the great log to the river down which it had to be floated an avenue of smaller trees had sometimes to be cleared from the way, and these likewise piled in desicating heaps, their skeleton branches protruding among the green undergrowth, like the ghastly relics of mortality on a forgotten battle-field, cumber the forest floor. You will find many places where trees are choking one another for want of air and light, until in lapse of years some stronger one shall tower above his fellows. You will find places where hurricanes have cut their way through the forest, and the trees lie for miles, as the ranks mown down by the mitrailleuse. You will pass the solitary bu^h road, the trees which once grew therein chopped right and left into the forest by tin,' makers of the track, where they lie in dry hea|>8 for miles on miles, forming as pretty a tiro-track as one could wish to see. And everywhere you will find millions of young 131 trees giving full promise, if spared axe and lire, of becoming trees as sturdy as any the lumberman has carried away, but nevertheless, the impression produced on you by the whole pilgrimage will be that, if no preventive measures be used, the tire which has taken 80 much already will sooner or later take the rest. When one compares the state of our forests with that of those in some parts of Europe, and thinks of the long avenues of fire- breaks, the forest-rangers on the watch, the careful management, the incessant thinning and replanting, the long succession of goodly trees yearly ready for the axe, and the cer- tainty, with e({ual care, of such a succession for all time to come, one is apt to think it full time that some such system were introduced here. The PossniLE Pkopits. It is to be remembered that (whether in tlie case of planting, or that of forest preservation), what is proposed will not be an unrcmunerative work. Putting alto- gether to one side the vast benefits to be expected in climate and in crop, there are direct returns of no small amount. For instance, most of the European reports give, after all expenses are paid, a large aggregate annual income, as does the East Indian also. Taking the opinions of scientific men, Mr. Galusha's estimate is that ten acres planted in ash and walnut will within twenty-five years produce sixteen thousand dollars in profit over expenses. Other estimates, by men who have practically experimented, give even more, especially in the case of pines. Let us take the figures of the gentleman named. He allows 820 per acre for cultivation. Let us increase it, and say cultivation costs $50, and that five thousand instead of ten acres are tried. The amount spent would be $.")0,000 a year for five years. The return at the end of twenty-five years would be eight millions of dollars. And, all this while, the plantation would be a valuable asset upon which money could, if expedient, be borrowed. And it is to be noticed that more profit may well be expected than has been gained, for the valuable descriptions of wood will grow scarcer and dearer while, during the experiments stated (such of them as were practically carried out), these woods were purchasable at low rates. In fine, it is a work in which great climatic and agricultural advantages are sure to be gained, while, as for the money advantages arising from the sale of timber, the only reason why Canada will not immedi- ately profit as other nations do is'that she has yet much timber for use and sale with- out having to grow it. But the time to commence what will l)e a work of time, is while there is yet no actual scarcity of the article to be produced ; our existing forests will give us time to grow others ; and aliove all, there is the necessity for action to preserve from tire and waste those which now stand. The means and system used to procure fresh forests will largely tend to preserve the old in efficiency. I will give here a few additional statements of profits from the Congress Reports : Mr. David Nicol, Cataraqui, Ont., says of the European Larch : — " Experienced planters have long ago decided that the larch should be planted entirely by itself, because of its quick growth, it soon outgrows all other trees, and when scattered thinly throughout the forest, the tender top shoots are apt to be damaged by high winds ; they do best when planted thickly, because they shelter one another ; thev are often planted as near as three feet, and sometimes as near as two feet, but I would prefer the former distance ; planted at this distance, they rapidly shoot up straight, clean, 132 and healthy. At three feet apart, an acre contains about 4,900 ; in this state, they should be allowed to remain six or seven years, when they will have attained the height of twenty feet, if they have been well cultivated the first three or four years ; they should then be thinned for the first time by taking out every alternate row ; the thinnings make the best quality of hop-poles, worth at present about five cents apiece — 2,460 poles, at five cents, brings $122.50. Then being allowed to remain in this state about three years longer, they should have the second thinning. By taking out every alternate tree in the row, this would leave them six feet apart each way ; the thinnings are now five to six inches through, and are worth ten cents apiece for boat masts and yards, supports in mines, etc. — 1,225 spars, at ten cents, brings $122.50. After growing five years at this distance, they should be finally thinned out to twelve feet apart ; the trees will now be seven to ten inches through and over thirty feet high, can be sawed into rafters, fencing, flooring, etc. ; and are worth at least twenty-five cents apiece — 612 spars, at twenty-five cents, brings $153. Now, if we suppose that the sale of poles and spars would be sufficient to defray the expense of making and upholding the plantation, and that each tree still remaining on an acre, say fifteen years after planting, is worth only twenty-five cents, the value of 612 trees is $153, there would be a handsome profit after allowing $2 a year for rent, which, for fifteen years, would be $30, and a great deal of land suitable for growing larch would not rent for more than half that amount. Now, the expenses cease, because the forest can be pastured with sheep without danger of injury to the trees ; the increase of value is now much more rapid, the annual increase of the circum- ference of the trees will average one and one-half inches until they nearly reach maturity, which is in about fifty years after planting. The trees will then average thirty to forty inches in diameter, three feet from the butt. Each tree will produce about 450 feet of lumber, at $25 per thousand, $11.25, less expenses for drawing and sawing $2.25. It would surely not be considered extravagant to value each tree at $9 — 612 trees at $9, $5,508, less thirty-five years' rent, at $2 per acre ; $70 from $5,508 leaves a net profit of $5,438. Be it observed that plantations of larch do not impoverish the land but rather improve it. The annual deposit of leaves gives more nutriment to the soil than is taken from it by the trees." Mr. Hicks, of Roslyn, L. I., says of the yellow locust : — " Hough's Report on Forestry mentions its lasting fifteen to twenty years as railroad ties, while oak lasts only five to ten years, and chestnut six to eight years. The timber is used very extensively by carriage builders, and in some instances in preference to hickory. Brewster ik Co., ot Broom St , New York City, using it and paying higher prices for it than for hickory. " On Long Island, near New York City, this tree is the most valuable grown. After thirty years' growth the tree will make posts eight, ten, and twelve feet long, three to five inches in diameter, at the small end. In New York City the posts are worth, for eight feet in length, four inches in diameter, forty-eight cents ; ten feet, four and a-half inches in diameter, seventy-seven cents ; twelve feet, four and three-quarters inches in di- ameter, ninety-five cents ; six and a-half feet fencing posts, four inches diameter, twenty- -eight cents. The trees will often cut one piece or stick twelve feet, one ten feet, one eight feet, one six and a-half feet, making $2.48 per tree ; these are the wholesale prices. In the most famed localities, and with five or ten years' more growth, the tree will make, say one stick sixteen feet, thirty-six inches girth ; one twelve feet, thirty inches girth, and one ten feet, twenty-five inches girth, this making the tree worth many times as much, as it sells for from sixty cents to $1.25 per cubic foot. As to value in other localities. Dr. Warder states that he is cutting trees, having a growth of twenty-four years, averaging twelve inches diameter, and sixty feet high, trees making eight to ten good fence posts, seven feet in length, six to eight inches face at the top end, trees stand- ing 400 to the acre. " Ezra Sherman, of Preston, Ohio, states that locust seed was sown in 1830 ; throe years afterwards, the trees were planted in a grove of fifteen acres, also an avenue of 20 rods. In 1870, two-thirds of these last were cut, 180 trees making 1,500 posts, worth thirty-five cents each, or $525 ; and Mr. Sherman says, that the fifteen acres will furnish 133 fence for the farm of 1,500 acres for all time, and that the pasture, together with stakes and poles for fencing, furnished from time to time, will pay as good interest as the open land would." Mr. A. Furniss, of Indiana, speaks of the catalpa and locust : — " Much of the cost of timber grown by cultivation depands on the price of land on which it is produced. Assuming the average price of land away from the neighbourhood of cities and villages to be fifty dollars per acre, which would be a high estimate for us in Indiana, and the cost of catalpa plants set four feet apart each way, making 2,722 per acre, at a cost of five dollars per thousand — (I grow my plants and they did not actually cost half that figure) — we have thirteen dollars and sixty-one cents for plants. But the ground must be prepared for the plants, and the transplanting is rather tedious work, hence we will allow $11.39 for preparation of land and transplanting, making investment in plants and labour, twenty-five dollars per acre. Total investment, seventy-five dollars per acre. In Indiana lawful interest is six per cent. Now, let us compound this amount for ten years, and we have principal and interest in round numbers, $134.30. To this we will add five dollars annually for four years for cultivation. With us the renter never pays taxes, but we will add that which would be about five dollars. To this add five dollars annually for keeping up fences, and contingencies, and we are debtor : To cost of land and plants cojipoanded for ten years $134 30 ** cultivation four years 20 00 " fence, and contingencies, tax, etc 50 00 Total $204 30 "At the expiration of ten years we propose to remove one-fourth of the trees, which, if all are standing, will be 680, for which we may claim credit. Many of these by this time will make from one to two good fence posts, and at the lowest wholesale price in car loads would be worth twenty cents each. At an average of twenty cents per tree, we have $136, to say nothing of the tops for fence stakes and fuel, all of which will be con- sumed on the farm. This retluces our debt to $68.30. This we will compound for two yeai'S more and we are debtor to $76.73. At this time, twelve years from setting, we propose to remove one-half of the whole original number, which gives us 1,360 trees. These at the very lowest estimate are worth twenty-five cents per troo, or $340 for the lot; from this amount deduct our indebtedness, and we have a credit of $263.27. We will now compound this for four years more, and our credit is $332.35. Now we propose to close the account and sell the one-fourth yet remaining — 680 trees. These are worth a dollar a tree ; from this, however, I must deduct the interest on the land for the last four years, which is $13.12. That leaves a net profit of $1,049.23. But, suppose, I am told that my last lot of trees are not worth a dollar apiece. To this I reply that I know of quite a number of catalpa speciosa about that age, and for all such trees well grown and within twenty miles of my farm I will give a dollar each and go after them. The catalpa in University Square, Indianapoli.s, have been set about sixteen years, and aver- age one foot from the ground about one inch in diameter for every year of growth, and notwithstanding they have not been crowded .so as to give them the most desimble shape, yet, if the city authorities wish to dispose of them, I will take them at the above figure and be glad of the chance. Of course twenty-five dollars would not move one of them, but as this is not their commercial value, it cannot be used as a basis of calculation. ♦* Forty years of experience as a tree-planter has taught me tlmt trees do not always grow where they are set precisely as desired or indicated ; but, as the catalpa transplants with a remarkable degree of certainty — even growing without roots — I believe on good ground it is within the scope of practical demonstration to realize three-fourths of the result above indicated ; but should one half be attained, we have $524.61 as the return from one acre of land for sixteen years, and all this with very little labour or expense after the setting and three or four years' cultivation at the beginning, after which they require no further care." 134 Mr. Budd, of Iowa, who has grown trees largely, says : — " A grovo of ton acres of white ash, thinned to six feet apart, containing twelve tliousand trees, at twelve years were eight inches in diameter and thirty-five feet high, the previous thinning paying all expenses of planting and cultivation. Ten feet of the bodies of these trees wore worth, for making bent stuff, etc., forty cents each, and the remaining top ten cants, making a total of six thousand dollars as the profits on ton acres in twelve years, or a yearly profit of fifty dollars per acre. Mr. Everett is said to have sold twenty- three acres of black walnut, of twonty-three years growth, for twenty-seven thousand dollars, of fifty, dollars per acre for each year's growth. By the way, it is well to remem- ber that ash will grow where many trees will not. " But tile great point noticeable is that the money is secured, or rather secures itself, without labour after the first ten years. Any plantation, men of experience say, in which the trees are six feet high, and the ground sj shaded that weeds and grasses cannot grow, needs no m jro caf-e till the time comos to thin it for post's. As Mr. Dumbiedikes observed, the trees grow while w ) sleep. It may bo of interest to remark how diligently Scott practised his maxim. For planting, wo are told ' he had always, no doubt, entertained a strong partiality. Even in childhood,' he says, ' his sympathies were stirred by reading tiie account of Shenstones ' Leasowes,' and in after life there was nothing which seemed Jto artbrd him so much pride and pleasure as in watching the naked hill-sides gradually sprouting with the saplings he had planted. " You can have no idea," said Soott to Captain Basil Hall, " of the exquisite delight of a planter ; he is like a painter laying on his colonrs ; at every moment he sees his etfects coming out. There is no art or occupation comparable to this. It is full of past, present and future enjoyment. I look back to the time when there was not a tree here, only bare heath ; I look around and see thousands of trees growing up, all of which, I may say almost each of which, have received my personal attention. I remember five years ago, looking forward with the most delighted expectation, to this very hour, and, as each year has passed, the expectation has gone on increasing. I do the same now ; I anticipate what this plantation and that one will presently be, if only taken care of, and there is not a spot of which T do not watch the progre.ss. Unlike building, or even painting, or in- deed any other pursuit, this has no end, and is never interrupted, but goes on from day to day, and from year to year, with a perpetually augmenting interest." RAVAGES OF FIRE. To show what loss is being incurred by the fires which run through our forests, let us take up the report of the Commissioner of Crown Lands for 1882. There are nine reports of surveys. L-^t us see what they say in succession : — " Timber Berths North of French River. — The greater part of my line passed through a burnt country, the fire having gone over som« parts a second time. Over this burnt country all the timber has been killed." " Township oj Dwnn"A. — Over one-half of this township has been burnt." " Township of Hugel. — The greater portion of this township has been overrun by fire and the timber destroyed." " Towiship of R'llter. — About one-sixth of the township has been burnt over, all the timber being utterly dc troyed." " Township of Kirkpatrick. — Nearly the whole of the township has been burnt over." " Township oj Ilagnr. — Bush fires have destroyed nearly all the timber." " Township of Fijld. — No mention of fire." " Township of Dryden. — The greater portion of the timber has been destroyed by fire." " Township of Wxlkea. — Not injured by lire." 135 In last year's report, out of tif teen surveyor's atatetuents eleven speak of the ravages of Are. THE PINE LUMBER REMAINING. The latest opinions of value procurable on this head are perhaps tliosf given hy Messrs. Druinmond, Little, and others who have studied this subject, at the last year's Forestry Convention. Maine and Michigan were mentioned. At Bangor, long famed for vast lumber mills, only fourteen million foet were procurable in 1877, against over a hundred million in 1856. The whole Baginaw valley, Michigan, the very home of the lumber trade, is nearly culled. What this means may be imagined when we loam that it has boert cutting with mills of six hundred million feet capacity. Their lumber journals declare that in all Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — the western pine States, there is not ten years' supply with the pre.sent demand. Wo may, 1 think, consider that the demand is likely to increase, perhaps to double. With this, and especially if they have a recurrence of their terrible fires, there may not be five years' supply. Concerning Ontario, we are told that Mr. Little has consulted the best authorities, and is persuaded that in Canada (5,000, Quebec; 3,500 Ontario; N.B. and N.S. 1,500) we have but ten thousand million feet of pine, while we are at present cutting a thousand million feet yearly, leaving ten years' supply. Consider this in the same light, and look at some Canadian fire statistics further on, and we may well doubt whether we have live years' supply. In Newfoundland there is little good pine left. It must be noted that a well- known lumberman, Mr. J. K. Wood, puts the amount manufactured yearly in Canada at nearly two thou.sand million feet, adding to pine spruce and other woods. If we count the pine timber remaining in the States, wo shall find that, after Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are exhausted, say in seven years, there will probably be twice as much, say fourteen years supply, in the other States, such as the large and slowly decreasing forests still standing in Arkansas, Louisiana, and California. In view of the.se facts, lot us observe what will, in a very few years, be our position in Ontario, or even in Canada. We have but between five and ten years' supply. The Americans have their Southern and Pacific States as a reserve, where, though at great cost of carriage, they may obtain pine. But Ontario has no such reserve. In a few years we shall have but some districts of woodland to our north and north-eivst, culled of their best pine, and alternated with great sections over which the fire has swept, while the rest but wait for it to arrive, that the destruction may be complete. At one of the late forestry conventions Mr. Thistle, a lumberman and surveyor, gave it as his decided opinion that ten times sis much lurabjr was destroyed by fire as by the axe. Let us carry this to its conclusion. We have been exparting perhaps twenty million of dollars worth yearly. What if we have been losing two hundred millions 1 Is it not time^ would it not have paid fifty-fold — would it not still pay — to give the care to preserve our forests that Europeans give theirs? It was thought that this was a wooden country, and that there was no such danger. I would ask my readers to study the descriptions of European forestry in other of these pages. They will not be able to avoid the conclusion that, in a few years, Germany, Prussia, and other £!uropeau countries will be better 136 wooded than Canada. We will glance a moment at what is told ua of the forest when the lumbermen have culled it. Here is one description hy Mr, Ward, a Canadian lumberman: — "To the uninitiated traveller through the woods, after the shantymen have taken all they think worth taking, he would hardly notice that the chopper had been there, except for seeing an occasional stum|), a few chips, or the top of a tree." Now we will take another, Mr. Smith, in the " Flora of Michigan" : — "The valuable trees were felled years ago, and the lumberman moved on to fresh spoils, leaving behind an inextri- cably confused mass of treetops, broken logs, and uprooted trunks. Blackberry canes sprang up everywhere, forming a tangled thicket, and a few scattering poplar, birch, and cherry trees serve for arboreal life, above which tower the dead pinea, bleached in the weather and blackened by fire, destitute of limbs, and looking at a distance not unlike the masts of some great harbour. Thousands of such acres, repellant alike to botanist and to settler, can be found in any of our northern counties." What we had better conclude, I fancy, concerning the difference between the two, is that the second had undergone a second and yet sharper and more reckless culling, after it had passed the stage described by Mr. Ward. It is evident that the time has passed when it was a matter of choice to attend to forest preservation in Ontario. If we are to retain any, it is now an affair of immediate necessity. In tine, if we wait longer, our forests will be gone, and can then not be i-enewed, except at the vast expense of time and money required in planting. If we move energetically now, we can preserve great forests, the maintenance of which is most necessary to our prosperity, and shall also have time to plant, where no other means exist. FOREST EXISTING IN ONTARIO COUNTIES. (From Agricultural Commission.) Prescott and Russell : — About forty-seven and a-half per cent, of the entire area is under timber, consisting of hemlock, cedar, tamarack, beech, birch, elm, basswood, ash, balsam, pine, spruce, walnut, butternut, whitewood, dogwood, soft maple, and red and black cherry ; used principally for lumber, fencing, firewood, railway ties and saw logs. Glengarry, Stormont and Dundas : — Probably aljout thirty per cent, of the entire area of these counties is still timbered with hard and soft maple, beech, birch, ash, tama- rack, elm, basswood, hemlock, spruce, balsam, and some pine ; used for fuel, lumber, railway ties, telegraph posts and shingles. Carleton: — About 287,000 acres of land in this county are still uncleared. Leeds and Grenville : — In all the townships, except South Burgess and North Crosby, which have suffered from the ravages of bush fires, there is a large amount of standing timber, consisting mainly of hard and soft woods ; used for firewood, fencing, lumber, buckets and pails. Lanark: — About twenty-four per cent, of the uncleared land is covered with timber or bush. The timber is chiefly pine, beech, maple, basswood, ash, birch, cedar and tama- rack. A considerable export trade in hardwood is carried on, and tliero is a large local consumption for railway ties, fencing, fuel, etc. A great destruction of pine took place from the great fire in 1870. Renfrew : — About forty-six per cent, of the entire area is still timbered. Red and white pine exist in large quantities. There is also an abundant supply of ash, elm, maple, basswood, spruce, cedar, tamarack, balsam, poplar, beech and hemlock. Lumbering T 'orest when El Canadian shantymen er had been ' Now we trees were an inextri- )erry canes birch, and :hed in the not unlike botanist lad bettor econd had passed the 1 it was a lin any, it ! renewed, enance of where no •e area is ood, ash, red and y logs. le entire ih, tania- lumber, Crosby, standing lumber, timber d tama- ge local >k place led and h, elm, nbering SHAD£D IN EACH COUNTY SHOWS W OF FOREST STANDING IN THAT WHITE SPACE THE AMOUNT OF CLEARED OF COURSE, TO BE UNDERSTOOD nON OF THE COUNTY SHADED HERE \RILY THE PART IN FOREST MUjuLntuMtm t utit.uri ird in if Hr- ,K |>le Id. fed Md Die 5n- tck r ler nd es. I till in- I >n- th, )er of led ler nd er, 8S- ra- id 1 of t; t PROPORTION OF Forests wr Sotdibg THR0U6H0UT ONTARIO. > MuuuimnuMm * UBU.un. 7v«ewi» ifW5^//c ;=&^ig§^?>" gjg:^^ RENFREW ^^^^^^^^ ). \eLENGARRY" LANARK \ J!%tUNOAS WiSTINGS i^^^'^ L4Ke' ?SlMCOtj Wm^Ac mmoi :£DS. r*=;:'^ .ONTARIO, '^^^ c?; DURHAM ^NORTHUMBEfiLANl mcE amM EEL ULTOK' YORK j^KE OKTAI^IO- r/Zf AMOUNT SHADED IN EACH COUNTY SHOWS THE PROPORTION OF FOREST STANDING IN THAT COUNTY; THE WHITE SPACE THE AMOUNT OF CLEARED LAND. IT IS, OF COURSE, TO BE UNDERSTOOD THAT WE PORTION OF THE COUNTY SHADED HERE IS NOT NECESSARILY THE PART IN FOREST. is extensiv wootls are ^ Frontt Frontenac c-edar and i Lenno: inaccurate, fifths of De boech and quantity of Prince with tiinbe for lumber, Hcutii townships \ Halibt sisting prii and cedar; logs, etc. Petorbi timber, con ash; used f Bush fires 1 Northt timbered w cipally for 1 Victon sisting of ( balsam, tan Ontari (excepting i pine, maple mainly for York :- timber, con birch ; used Simcoe but probab wood, tama tions are v( amount of also export The hard wo ' '"-a- Peel :— of beech, mi few pines a used for f ue Halton hardwood a fencing, anc Wentw pine, beech, used for lun 10 is extensively carried on for exportation to European and American markets. The hard wootls are chiefly used for fuel and cedar for fencing. Frontenac : — As nearly as can be computed, about fifty per cent, of the land in Frontenac is still timbered with pine, basswood, ash, hemlock, beech, balsam, tamarack, cedar and maple ; principally used for lumber, fencing and fuel. Lennox and Addington: — Owing to the returns being in several instances obviously inaccurate, the extent of land in the counties under timber cannot be estimated. Four- fifths of Denbigh and associated townships are, however, reported to be under pine, maple, boech and cedar, and lumbering is extensively carried on. There is also a considerable quantity of timber land in North and South Fredericksburg, in Camden and in Sheflield. Prince Edward County : — About sixteen per cent, of the entire area is still covered with timber, consisting of beech, maple, elm, cedar, oak, black ash and some pine; used for lumber, fuel, coopers' staves, fencing and building. Hastings : — A large proportion of the acreage is still covered with timber — in some townships to the extent of seventy-five per cent. Haliburton : — About eighty per cent, of the entire area is still under timber, con- sisting principally of maple, beech, birch, hemlock, basswood, elm, ash, pine, tamarack and cedar ; used for lumber, fencing, railway ties, telegraph poles, shirijgles, bolts, saw- logs, etc. Peterborough : — A large proportion — not far short of one half of the area — is under timber, consisting of pine, cedar, beech, maple, hemlock, basswood, tamarack, birch and ash; used for timber, fencing, firewood, shingles, bolts, railway ties and telegraph poles. Bush fires have destroyed large tracts, particularly in the township of Harvey. Northu)nberland and Durham : — About eighteen per cent, of the total acreage is still timbered with hardwood, cedar, pine, hemlock, and tamarack. The former is used prin- cipally for fuel, the latter for building, fencing, and barrel staves. Victoria : — Probably about fifty per cent, of the uncleared land is under timber, con- sisting of cedar, pine, hemlock, maple, birch, beech, basswood, black ash, mountain ash, balsam, tamarack, oak, and elm ; used for lumber, fuel, building, and fencing. Ontario: — About seventeen per cent, of the area of Ontario is still under timber (excepting the township of Reach, which returns no percentage). The timber consists of pine, maple, beech, basswood, tamarack, balsam, cedar, black ash, hemlock, and elm ; used mainly for lumber, fuel, fences, staves, and domestic uses. York : — About twenty-two and a-half per cent, of the area of York is still under timber, consisting of beech, maple, elm, basswood, pine, hemlock, cedar, tamarack, and birch ; used for building purposes, fencing, and firewood. Sit)icoe:— It is impossible to glean from the returns the total acreage under timber, but probably over one-half of the entire county area is under maple, beech, elm, bass- wood, tamarack, pine, hemlock, cedar, balsam, birch, ash, and oak. Lumbering opera- tions are very extensively carried on in several of the townships, and there is a large amount of business done in hemlock bark (which is largely used within the county, and also exported for tanning purposes), and in railway ties, telegraph poles, and shingles. The hardwoods are principally used for fuel, and the soft woods for building and fencing. "u-i-Peel: — About eleven per cent, of the entire acreage is still under timber, consisting of beech, maple, hemlock, cedar, white and red oak, ash, elm, hickory, and basswood. A few pines are scattered in Chinguacousy and Toronto townships. The timber is generally used for fuel, fencing, and domestic purposes. Halton : — About seventeen per cent, of the entire area is still timbered, chiefly with hardwood and a limited amount of pine. The timber is principally used for lumber, fencing, and fuel. Wentworth .—Fourteen and a-half per cent, probably under timber, conaisting of pine, beech, maple, elm, black ash, cedar, tamarack, oak, hickory, walnut, and chestnut ; used for lumber, firewood, fencing, building, and general purposes. 10 188 Lineoln: — Exclusive of tho township of Oaistor, whioh does not report the area of land still timbered, Lincoln has over 24,400 acres still covered with beech, black ash, maple, elm, oak, hickory, and some pine ; used for firewood, fencing, building, and manu- facturing purposes, also for ship timber and railroad ties. Wetland: — About eighteen per cent, of the area is still under timber, consisting of beech, maple, oak, ash, basswood, elm, hemlock, poplar, birch, chestnut, walnut, and butternut ; used for shipbuilding, housebuilding, fencing, and fuel. Haldimand: — About twenty-four percent, of the acreage is still timbered, consisting chiefly of hard woods ; used for fencing, fuel, and building purposes. Norfolk : — About twenty-four per cent, of the entire area is still timbered, and the standing timber consists chiefly of pine, oak, maple, chestnut, black and white ash, elm, and cedar ; used for railway ties, lumber, fencing, firewood, and general purposes. Brant: — About twenty-five per cent is yet in timber of maple, beech, elm, oak, pine, cedat, basswood, tamarack, hickory, and ironwood. Waterloo : — About twenty-two and a-half per cent of the area is still timbered with pine, oak, beech, maple, cedar, ash, and hemlock. Grey : — About thirty-four per cent, of the land is still timbered chiefly with hard- wood. Very little pine exists and only sufficient cedar for fencing parposes. Bruce : — About twenty-five per cent of the land is timbered. Maple, basswood, elm, hemlock, cedar, ash, beech and birch predominatu ; there is also some pine. Huron: — About twonty-nine per cent is covered with timber ; hard and soft woods. Perth: — About twenty-one per cent is covered with timber, consisting of beech, elm, maple, basswood, black and white ash, pine, hemlock, cedar, birch and tapaarack. Oxford: — Seventeen per cent, under pine, cedar, beech, maple, elm, ash, basswood and oak. Elgin : — Thirty per cent is timbered with most of the indigenous woods excepting cedar. Middlesex : — Thirty-five per cent under hardwootl and some pine. Lambton : — Forty-eight per cent covered with oak, ash, elm, beech, maple, basswood, hickory and some pine. Kent : — Thirty-seven per cent, in oak, black and red ash, hickory, hard and soft maple, cherry, and sycamore, some black walnut, and some tulip. Easex: — Two-thirds still under bush, consisting chiefly of whitewood, oak, ash, elm, hickory, bass, sycamore, and other woods. Wellington : — About fifteen per cent is still timbered with beech, maple, elm, cedar, hemlock, basswood, ash and balsam. H !l