It must further be remembered, that every inch of the violent movement

of the rocks is accompanied with crushing concussion, or, at least, with

great abrasion, and, as you follow the deposit along the course of the

waters which transport it, you find the stones gradually rounding off in

form, and diminishing in size until they pass successively into gravel,

sand, impalpable slime.

I do not mean to assert that all the rocky valleys of the Alps have been

produced by the action of torrents resulting from the destruction of the

forests. All the greater, and many of the smaller channels, by which

that chain is drained, owe their origin to higher causes. They are

primitive fissures, ascribable to disruption in upheaval or other

geological convulsion, widened and scarped, and often even polished, so

to speak, by the action of glaciers during the ice period, and but

little changed in form by running water in later eras.[225]

In these valleys of ancient formation, which extend into the very heart

of the mountains, the streams, though rapid, have lost the true

torrential character, if, indeed, they ever possessed it. Their beds

have become approximately constant, and their walls no longer crumble

and fall into the waters that wash their bases. The torrent-worn

ravines, of which I have spoken, are of later date, and belong more

properly to what may be called the crust of the Alps, consisting of

loose rocks, of gravel, and of earth, strewed along the surface of the

great declivities of the central ridge, and accumulated thickly between

their solid buttresses. But it is on this crust that the mountaineer

dwells. Here are his forests, here his pastures, and the ravages of the

torrent both destroy his world, and convert it into a source of

overwhelming desolation to the plains below.

_Transporting Power of Rivers._

An instance that fell under my own observation in 1857, will serve to

show something of the eroding and transporting power of streams which,

in these respects, fall incalculably below the torrents of the Alps. In

a flood of the Ottaquechee, a small river which flows through Woodstock,

Vermont, a milldam on that stream burst, and the sediment with which the

pond was filled, estimated after careful measurement at 13,000 cubic

yards, was carried down by the current. Between this dam and the slack

water of another, four miles below, the bed of the stream, which is

composed of pebbles interspersed in a few places with larger stones, is

about sixty-five feet wide, though, at low water, the breadth of the

current is considerably less. The sand and fine gravel were smoothly and

evenly distributed over the bed to a width of fifty-five or sixty feet,

and for a distance of about two miles, except at two or three

intervening rapids, filled up all the interstices between the stones,

covering them to the depth of nine or ten inches, so as to present a

regularly formed concave channel, lined with sand, and reducing the

depth of water, in some places, from five or six feet to fifteen or

eighteen inches. Observing this deposit after the river had subsided and

become so clear that the bottom could be seen, I supposed that the next

flood would produce an extraordinary erosion of the banks and some

permanent changes in the channel of the stream, in consequence of the

elevation of the bed and the filling up of the spaces between the stones

through which formerly much water had flowed; but no such result

followed. The spring freshet of the next year entirely washed out the

sand its predecessor had deposited, carried it to ponds and still-water

reaches below, and left the bed of the river almost precisely in its

former condition, though, of course, with the slight displacement of the

pebbles which every flood produces in the channels of such streams. The

pond, though often previously discharged by the breakage of the dam, had

then been undisturbed for about twenty-five years, and its contents

consisted almost entirely of sand, the rapidity of the current in floods

being such that it would let fall little lighter sediment, even above an

obstruction like a dam. The quantity I have mentioned evidently bears a

very inconsiderable proportion to the total erosion of the stream

during that period, because the wash of the banks consists chiefly of

fine earth rather than of sand, and after the pond was once filled, or

nearly so, even this material could no longer be deposited in it. The

fact of the complete removal of the deposit I have described between the

two dams in a single freshet, shows that, in spite of considerable

obstruction from roughness of bed, large quantities of sand may be taken

up and carried off by streams of no great rapidity of inclination; for

the whole descent of the bed of the river between the two dams--a

distance of four miles--is but sixty feet, or fifteen feet to the mile.

_The Po and its Deposits._

The current of the river Po, for a considerable distance after its

volume of water is otherwise sufficient for continuous navigation, is

too rapid for that purpose until near Piacenza, where its velocity

becomes too much reduced to transport great quantities of mineral

matter, except in a state of minute division. Its southern affluents

bring down from the Apennines a large quantity of fine earth from

various geological formations, while its Alpine tributaries west of the

Ticino are charged chiefly with rock ground down to sand or

gravel.[226] The bed of the river has been somewhat elevated by the

deposits in its channel, though not by any means above the level of the

adjacent plains as has been so often represented. The dikes, which

confine the current at high water, at the same time augment its velocity

and compel it to carry most of its sediment to the Adriatic. It has,

therefore, raised neither its own channel nor its alluvial shores, as it

would have done if it had remained unconfined. But, as the surface of

the water in floods is from six to fifteen feet above the general level

of its banks, the Po can, at that period, receive no contributions of

earth from the washing of the fields of Lombardy, and there is no doubt

that a large proportion of the sediment it now deposits at its mouth

descended from the Alps in the form of rock, though reduced by the

grinding action of the waters, in its passage seaward, to the condition

of fine sand, and often of silt.[227]

We know little of the history of the Po, or of the geography of the

coast near the point where it enters the Adriatic, at any period more

than twenty centuries before our own. Still less can we say how much of

the plains of Lombardy had been formed by its action, combined with

other causes, before man accelerated its levelling operations by felling

the first woods on the mountains whence its waters are derived. But we

know that since the Roman conquest of Northern Italy, its deposits have

amounted to a quantity which, if recemented into rock, recombined into

gravel, common earth, and vegetable mould, and restored to the

situations where eruption or upheaval originally placed, or vegetation

deposited it, would fill up hundreds of deep ravines in the Alps and

Apennines, change the plan and profile of their chains, and give their

southern and northern faces respectively a geographical aspect very

different from that they now present. Ravenna, forty miles south of the

principal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and the

Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the Christian

era. The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon, and Ravenna is now four

miles from the sea. The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and the

Adige, at the distance of some four or five miles from each, was once a

harbor famous enough to have given its name to the Adriatic sea, and it

was still a seaport in the time of Augustus. The combined action of the

two rivers has so advanced the coast line that Adria is now about

fourteen miles inland, and, in other places, the deposits made within

the same period by these and other neighboring streams have a width of

twenty miles.

What proportion of the earth with which they are charged these rivers

have borne out into deep water, during the last two thousand years, we

do not know, but as they still transport enormous quantities, as the

North Adriatic appears to have shoaled rapidly, and as long islands,

composed in great part of fluviatile deposits, have formed opposite

their mouths, it must evidently have been very great. The floods of the

Po occur but once, or sometimes twice in a year.[228] At other times,

its waters are comparatively limpid and seem to hold no great amount of

mud or fine sand in mechanical suspension; but at high water it contains

a large proportion of solid matter, and according to Lombardini, it

annually transports to the shores of the Adriatic not less than

42,760,000 cubic metres, or very nearly 55,000,000 cubic yards, which

carries the coast line out into the sea at the rate of more than 200

feet in a year.[229] The depth of the annual deposit is stated at

eighteen centimetres, or rather more than seven inches, and it would

cover an area of not much less than ninety square miles with a layer of

that thickness. The Adige, also, brings every year to the Adriatic many

million cubic yards of Alpine detritus, and the contributions of the

Brenta from the same source are far from inconsiderable. The Adriatic,

however, receives but a small proportion of the soil and rock washed

away from the Italian slope of the Alps and the northern declivity of

the Apennines by torrents. Nearly the whole of the debris thus removed

from the southern face of the Alps between Monte Rosa and the sources of

the Adda--a length of watershed not less than one hundred and fifty

miles--is arrested by the still waters of the Lakes Maggiore and Como,

and some smaller lacustrine reservoirs, and never reaches the sea. The

Po is not continuously embanked except for the lower half of its course.

Above Piacenza, therefore, it spreads and deposits sediment over a wide

surface, and the water withdrawn from it for irrigation at lower points,

as well as its inundations in the occasional ruptures of its banks,

carry over the adjacent soil a large amount of slime.

If we add to the estimated annual deposits of the Po at its mouth, the

earth and sand transported to the sea by the Adige, the Brenta, and

other less important streams, the prodigious mass of detritus swept into

Lago Maggiore by the Tosa, the Maggia, and the Ticino, into the lake of

Como by the Maira and the Adda, into the lake of Garda by its

affluents, and the yet vaster heaps of pebbles, gravel, and earth

permanently deposited by the torrents near their points of eruption from

mountain gorges, or spread over the wide plains at lower levels, we may

safely assume that we have an aggregate of not less than four times the

quantity carried to the Adriatic by the Po, or 220,000,000 cubic yards

of solid matter, abstracted every year from the Italian Alps and the

Apennines, and removed out of their domain by the force of running

water.[230]

The present rate of deposit at the mouth of the Po has continued since

the year 1600, the previous advance of the coast, after the year 1200,

having been only one third as rapid. The great increase of erosion and

transport is ascribed by Lombardini chiefly to the destruction of the

forests in the basin of that river and the valleys, of its tributaries,

since the beginning of the seventeenth century.[231] We have no data to

show the rate of deposit in any given century before the year 1200, and

it doubtless varied according to the progress of population and the

consequent extension of clearing and cultivation. The transporting power

of torrents is greatest soon after their formation, because at that time

their points of delivery are lower, and, of course, their general slope

and velocity more rapid, than after years of erosion above, and deposit

below, have depressed the beds of their mountain valleys, and elevated

the channels of their lower course. Their eroding action also is most

powerful at the same period, both because their mechanical force is then

greatest, and because the loose earth and stones of freshly cleared

forest ground are most easily removed. Many of the Alpine valleys west

of the Ticino--that of the Dora Baltea for instance--were nearly

stripped of their forests in the days of the Roman empire, others in the

Middle Ages, and, of course, there must have been, at different periods

before the year 1200, epochs when the erosion and transportation of

solid matter from the Alps and the Apennines were as great as since the

year 1600.

Upon the whole, we shall not greatly err if we assume that, for a period

of not less than two thousand years, the walls of the basin of the

Po--the Italian slope of the Alps, and the northern and northeastern

declivities of the Apennines--have annually sent down into the Adriatic,

the lakes, and the plains, not less than 150,000,000 cubic yards of

earth and disintegrated rock. We have, then, an aggregate of

300,000,000,000 cubic yards of such material, which, allowing to the

mountain surface in question an area of 50,000,000,000 square yards,

would cover the whole to the depth of six yards.[232] There are very

large portions of this area, where, as we know from ancient

remains--roads, bridges, and the like--from other direct testimony, and

from geological considerations, very little degradation has taken place

within twenty centuries, and hence the quantity to be assigned to

localities where the destructive causes have been most active is

increased in proportion.

If this vast mass of pulverized rock and earth were restored to the

localities from which it was derived, it certainly would not obliterate

valleys and gorges hollowed out by great geological causes, but it would

reduce the length and diminish the depth of ravines of later formation,

modify the inclination of their walls, reclothe with earth many bare

mountain ridges, essentially change the line of junction between plain

and mountain, and carry back a long reach of the Adriatic coast many

miles to the west.[233]

It is, indeed, not to be supposed that all the degradation of the

mountains is due to the destruction of the forests--that the flanks of

every Alpine valley in Central Europe below the snow line were once

covered with earth and green with woods, but there are not many

particular cases, in which we can, with certainty, or even with strong

probability, affirm the contrary.

We cannot measure the share which human action has had in augmenting the

intensity of causes of mountain degradation, but we know that the

clearing of the woods has, in some cases, produced within two or three

generations, effects as blasting as those generally ascribed to

geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face of the earth more

hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower

of volcanic sand. Now torrents are forming every year in the Alps.

Tradition, written records, and analogy concur to establish the belief

that the ruin of most of the now desolate valleys in those mountains is

to be ascribed to the same cause, and authentic descriptions of the

irresistible force of the torrent show that, aided by frost and heat, it

is adequate to level Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa themselves, unless new

upheavals shall maintain their elevation.

It has been contended that all rivers which take their rise in mountains

originated in torrents. These, it is said, have lowered the summits by

gradual erosion, and, with the material thus derived, have formed shoals

in the sea which once beat against the cliffs; then, by successive

deposits, gradually raised them above the surface, and finally expanded

them into broad plains traversed by gently flowing streams. If we could

go back to earlier geological periods, we should find this theory often

verified, and we cannot fail to see that the torrents go on at the

present hour, depressing still lower the ridges of the Alps and the

Apennines, raising still higher the plains of Lombardy and Provence,

extending the coast still farther into the Adriatic and the

Mediterranean, reducing the inclination of their own beds and the

rapidity of their flow, and thus tending to become river-like in

character.

There are cases where torrents cease their ravages of themselves, in

consequence of some change in the condition of the basin where they

originate, or of the face of the mountain at a higher level, while the

plain or the sea below remains in substantially the same state as

before. If a torrent rises in a small valley containing no great amount

of earth and of disintegrated or loose rock, it may, in the course of a

certain period, wash out all the transportable material, and if the

valley is then left with solid walls, it will cease to furnish debris to

be carried down by floods. If, in this state of things, a new channel be

formed at an elevation above the head of the valley, it may divert a

part, or even the whole of the rain water and melted snow which would

otherwise have flowed into it, and the once furious torrent now sinks to

the rank of a humble and harmless brooklet. "In traversing this

department," says Surell, "one often sees, at the outlet of a gorge, a

flattened hillock, with a fan-shaped outline and regular slopes; it is

the bed of dejection of an ancient torrent. It sometimes requires long

and careful study to detect the primitive form, masked as it is by

groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and often by houses, but, when

examined closely, and from different points of view, its characteristic

figure manifestly appears, and its true history cannot be mistaken.

Along the hillock flows a streamlet, issuing from the ravine, and

quietly watering the fields. This was originally a torrent, and in the

background may be discovered its mountain basin. Such _extinguished_

torrents, if I may use the expression, are numerous."[234]

But for the intervention of man and domestic animals, these latter

beneficent revolutions would occur more frequently, proceed more

rapidly. The new scarped mountains, the hillocks of debris, the plains

elevated by sand and gravel spread over them, the shores freshly formed

by fluviatile deposits, would clothe themselves with shrubs and trees,

the intensity of the causes of degradation would be diminished, and

nature would thus regain her ancient equilibrium. But these processes,

under ordinary circumstances, demand, not years, generations, but

centuries;[235] and man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on

this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet

undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to

replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has wasted.

_Mountain Slides._

I have said that the mountainous regions of the Atlantic States of the

American Union are exposed to similar ravages, and I may add that there

is, in some cases, reason to apprehend from the same cause even more

appalling calamities than those which I have yet described. The slide in

the Notch of the White Mountains, by which the Willey family lost their

lives, is an instance of the sort I refer to, though I am not able to

say that in this particular case, the slip of the earth and rock was

produced by the denudation of the surface. It may have been occasioned

by this cause, or by the construction of the road through the Notch, the

excavations for which, perhaps, cut through the buttresses that

supported the sloping strata above.

Not to speak of the fall of earth when the roots which held it together,

and the bed of leaves and mould which sheltered it both from

disintegrating frost and from sudden drenching and dissolution by heavy

showers, are gone, it is easy to see that, in a climate with severe

winters, the removal of the forest, and, consequently, of the soil it

had contributed to form, might cause the displacement and descent of

great masses of rock. The woods, the vegetable mould, and the soil

beneath, protect the rocks they cover from the direct action of heat and

cold, and from the expansion and contraction which accompany them. Most

rocks, while covered with earth, contain a considerable quantity of

water.[236] A fragment of rock pervaded with moisture cracks and splits,

if thrown into a furnace, and sometimes with a loud detonation; and it

is a familiar observation that the fire, in burning over newly cleared

lands, breaks up and sometimes almost pulverizes the stones. This effect

is due partly to the unequal expansion of the stone, partly to the

action of heat on the water it contains in its pores. The sun, suddenly

let in upon rock which had been covered with moist earth for centuries,

produces more or less disintegration in the same way, and the stone is

also exposed to chemical influences from which it was sheltered before.

But in the climate of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is

a still more powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. The soil

that protects the lime and sand stone, the slate and the granite from

the influence of the sun, also prevents the water which filters into

their crevices and between their strata from freezing in the hardest

winters, and the moisture descends, in a liquid form, until it escapes

in springs, or passes off by deep subterranean channels. But when the

ridges are laid bare, the water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest

pores and veins and fissures and lines of separation of the rocks, then

suddenly freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and apparently solid blocks

of adamantine stone.[237] Where the strata are inclined at a

considerable angle, the freezing of a thin film of water over a large

interstratal area might occasion a slide that should cover miles with

its ruins; and similar results might be produced by the simple

hydrostatic pressure of a column of water, admitted by the removal of

the covering of earth to flow into a crevice faster than it could escape

through orifices below.

Earth or rather mountain slides, compared to which the catastrophe that

buried the Willey family in New Hampshire was but a pinch of dust, have

often occurred in the Swiss Italian, and French Alps. The land slip,

which overwhelmed and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of

Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September,

1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one of

the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of the Rossberg

or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in Switzerland,

and 450 of its people, on the 2d of September, 1806, is almost equally

celebrated. In 1771, according to Wessely, the mountain peak Piz, near

Alleghe in the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the

Cordevole, a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three

hamlets and sixty lives. The rubbish filled the valley for a distance of

nearly two miles, and, by damming up the waters of the Cordevole, formed

a lake about three miles long, and a hundred and fifty feet deep, which

still subsists, though reduced to half its original length by the

wearing down of its outlet.[238]

On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little below the

parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the valley of the Tiber,

which consequently flooded the village to the depth of fifty feet, and

was finally drained off by a tunnel. The mass of debris is stated to

have been about 3,500 feet long, 1,000 wide, and not less than 600

high.[239]

Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the magnitude of

geological convulsions, but they are of so rare occurrence in countries

still covered by the primitive forest, so common where the mountains

have been stripped of their native covering, and, in many cases, so

easily explicable by the drenching of incohesive earth from rain, or the

free admission of water between the strata of rocks--both of which a

coating of vegetation would have prevented--that we are justified in

ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as that to which the

destructive effects of mountain torrents are chiefly due--the felling of

the woods.

In nearly every case of this sort the circumstances of which are known,

the immediate cause of the slip has been, either an earthquake, the

imbibition of water in large quantities by bare earth, or its

introduction between or beneath solid strata. If water insinuates itself

between the strata, it creates a sliding surface, or it may, by its

expansion in freezing, separate beds of rock, which had been nearly

continuous before, widely enough to allow the gravitation of the

superincumbent mass to overcome the resistance afforded by inequalities

of face and by friction; if it finds its way beneath hard earth or rock

reposing on clay or other bedding of similar properties, it converts the

supporting layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes no obstacle to the

sliding of the strata above.

The upper part of the mountain which buried Goldau was composed of a

hard but brittle conglomerate, called _nagelflue_, resting on an

unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly toward the village. Much earth

remained upon the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been

felled, and the water had free access to the surface, and to the

crevices which sun and frost had already produced in the rock, and of

course, to the slimy stratum beneath. The whole summer of 1806 had been

very wet, and an almost incessant deluge of rain had fallen the day

preceding the catastrophe, as well as on that of its occurrence. All

conditions then, were favorable to the sliding of the rock, and, in

obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated itself into the

valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it was destroyed by

the conversion of the latter into a viscous paste. The mass that fell

measured between two and a half and three miles in length by one

thousand feet in width, and its average thickness is thought to have

been about a hundred feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more

than three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum acquired by

the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge blocks of stone far up

the opposite slope of the Rigi.

The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply inclined

stratum of limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous marl intervening,

which, by long exposure to frost and the infiltration of water, had lost

its original consistence, and become a loose and slippery mass instead

of a cohesive and tenacious bed.

_Protection against fall of Rocks and Avalanches by Trees._

Forests often subserve a valuable purpose in preventing the fall of

rocks, by mere mechanical resistance. Trees, as well as herbaceous

vegetation, grow in the Alps upon declivities of surprising steepness of

inclination, and the traveller sees both luxuriant grass and flourishing

woods on slopes at which the soil, in the dry air of lower regions,

would crumble and fall by the weight of its own particles. When loose

rocks lie scattered on the face of these declivities, they are held in

place by the trunks of the trees, and it is very common to observe a

stone that weighs hundreds of pounds, perhaps even tons, resting against

a tree which has stopped its progress just as it was beginning to slide

down to a lower level. When a forest in such a position is cut, these

blocks lose their support, and a single wet season is enough not only to

bare the face of a considerable extent of rock, but to cover with earth

and stone many acres of fertile soil below.[240]

In Switzerland and other snowy and mountainous countries, forests render

a most important service by preventing the formation and fall of

destructive avalanches, and in many parts of the Alps exposed to this

catastrophe, the woods are protected, though too often ineffectually, by

law. No forest, indeed, could arrest a large avalanche once in motion,

but the mechanical resistance afforded by the trees prevents their

formation, both by obstructing the wind, which gives to the dry snow of

the _Staub-Lawine_, or dust avalanche, its first impulse, and by

checking the disposition of moist snow to gather itself into what is

called the _Rutsch-Lawine_, or sliding avalanche. Marschand states that,

the very first winter after the felling of the trees on the higher part

of a declivity between Saanen and Gsteig where the snow had never been

known to slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, thundered

down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with it a hitherto

unviolated forest to the amount of nearly a million cubic feet of

timber.[241] The path once opened down the flanks of the mountain, the

evil is almost beyond remedy. The snow sometimes carries off the earth

from the face of the rock, or, if the soil is left, fresh slides every

winter destroy the young plantations, and the restoration of the wood

becomes impossible. The track widens with every new avalanche. Dwellings

and their occupants are buried in the snow, or swept away by the rushing

mass, or by the furious blasts it occasions through the displacement of

the air; roads and bridges are destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell

till they overflow the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy

barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter

inundation.[242]

_Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest._

The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction

of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing

population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it

and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border

settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels

him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. With growing

numbers, too, come the many arts for which wood is the material. The

demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the

cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of

which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the

dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of

their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its

dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most

vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a

fortunate circumstance for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient

lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and

then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded by the

numerous rivers of the present and former British colonial possessions

in North America, have proved very fatal to the forests of that

continent. Quebec has become a centre for a lumber trade, which, in the

bulk of its material, and, consequently, in the tonnage required for its

transportation, rivals the commerce of the greatest European cities.

Immense rafts are collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the

Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the

current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its mighty

tides.[243] Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have been built to

convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and during the summer months

the St. Lawrence is almost as crowded with vessels as the Thames.[244]

Of late, Chicago, in Illinois, has been one of the greatest lumber as

well as grain depots of the United States, and it receives and

distributes contributions from all the forests in the States washed by

Lake Michigan, as well as from some more distant points.

The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to the woods

besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The narrow clearings around

his _shanties_[245] form openings which let in the wind, and thus

sometimes occasion the overthrow of thousands of trees, the fall of

which dams up small streams, and creates bogs by the spreading of the

waters, while the decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the

insects which breed in dead wood, and are, some of them, injurious to

living trees. The escape and spread of camp fires, however, is the most

devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their origin in

the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of trees fit for

industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only these fall before

the forester's axe, but the fire destroys, indiscriminately, every age

and every species of tree.[246] While, then, without much injury to the

younger growths, the native forest will bear several "cuttings over" in

a generation--for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every

four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before rejected

as unmarketable--a fire may render the declivity of a mountain

unproductive for a century.[247]

_American Forest Trees._

The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada no longer

boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the gigantic Sequoia of

California; and the growth of the larger forest trees is so slow, after

they have attained to a certain size, that if every pine and oak were

spared for two centuries, the largest now standing would not reach the

stature of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or three

generations.[248] Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, states

the following as the dimensions of "such trees as are esteemed large

ones of their kind in that part of America" [Vermont], qualifying his

account with the remark that his measurements "do not denote the

greatest which nature has produced of their particular species, but the

greatest which are to be found in most of our towns."

Diameter. Height.

Pine, 6 feet, 247 feet.

Maple, 5 " 9 inches, }

Buttonwood, 5 " 6 " }

Elm, 5 " }

Hemlock, 4 " 9 " }

Oak, 4 " } From 100 to 200 feet.

Basswood, 4 " }

Ash, 4 " }

Birch, 4 " }

He adds a note saying that a white pine was cut in Dunstable, New

Hampshire, in the year 1736, the diameter of which was seven feet and

eight inches. Dr. Dwight says that a fallen pine in Connecticut was

found to measure two hundred and forty-seven feet in height, and adds:

"A few years since, such trees were in great numbers along the northern

parts of Connecticut River." In another letter, he speaks of the white

pine as "frequently six feet in diameter, and two hundred and fifty feet

in height," and states that a pine had been cut in Lancaster, New

Hampshire, which measured two hundred and sixty-four feet. Emerson wrote

in 1846: "Fifty years ago, several trees growing on rather dry land in

Blandford, Massachusetts, measured, after they were felled, two hundred

and twenty-three feet. All these trees are surpassed by a pine felled at

Hanover, New Hampshire, about a hundred years ago, and described as

measuring two hundred and seventy-four feet.[249]

These descriptions, it will be noticed, apply to trees cut from sixty to

one hundred years since. Persons, whom observation has rendered familiar

with the present character of the American forest, will be struck with

the smallness of the diameter which Dr. Williams and Dr. Dwight ascribe

to trees of such extraordinary height. Individuals of the several

species mentioned in Dr. Williams's table, are now hardly to be found in

the same climate, exceeding one half or at most two thirds of the height

which he assigns to them; but, except in the case of the oak and the

pine, the diameter stated by him would not be thought very extraordinary

in trees of far less height, now standing. Even in the species I have

excepted, those diameters, with half the heights of Dr. Williams, might

perhaps be paralleled at the present time; and many elms, transplanted,

at a diameter of six inches, within the memory of persons still living,

measure six, and sometimes even seven feet through. For this change

in the growth of forest trees there are two reasons: the one is,

that the great commercial value of the pine and the oak have

caused the destruction of all the best--that is, the tallest and

straightest--specimens of both; the other, that the thinning of the

woods by the axe of the lumberman has allowed the access of light and

heat and air to trees of humbler worth and lower stature, which have

survived their more towering brethren. These, consequently, have been

able to expand their crowns and swell their stems to a degree not

possible so long as they were overshadowed and stifled by the lordly oak

and pine. While, therefore, the New England forester must search long

before he finds a pine

fit to be the mast

Of some great ammiral,

beeches and elms and birches, as sturdy as the mightiest of their

progenitors, are still no rarity.[250]

Another evil, sometimes of serious magnitude, which attends the

operations of the lumberman, is the injury to the banks of rivers from

the practice of floating. I do not here allude to rafts, which, being

under the control of those who navigate them, may be so guided as to

avoid damage to the shore, but to masts, logs, and other pieces of

timber singly intrusted to the streams, to be conveyed by their currents

to sawmill ponds, or to convenient places for collecting them into

rafts. The lumbermen usually haul the timber to the banks of the rivers

in the winter, and when the spring floods swell the streams and break up

the ice, they roll the logs into the water, leaving them to float down

to their destination. If the transporting stream is too small to furnish

a sufficient channel for this rude navigation, it is sometimes dammed

up, and the timber collected in the pond thus formed above the dam. When

the pond is full, a sluice is opened, or the dam is blown up or

otherwise suddenly broken, and the whole mass of lumber above it is

hurried down with the rolling flood. Both of these modes of proceeding

expose the banks of the rivers employed as channels of flotation to

abrasion,[251] and in some of the American States it has been found

necessary to protect, by special legislation, the lands through which

they flow from the serious injury sometimes received through the

practices I have described.[252]

_Special Causes of the Destruction of European Woods._

The causes of forest waste thus far enumerated are more or less common

to both continents; but in Europe extensive woods have, at different

periods, been deliberately destroyed by fire or the axe, because they

afforded a retreat to enemies, robbers, and outlaws, and this practice

is said to have been resorted to in the Mediterranean provinces of

France as recently as the time of Napoleon I.[253] The severe and even

sanguinary legislation, by which some of the governments of mediaeval

Europe, as well as of earlier ages, protected the woods, was dictated by

a love of the chase, or the fear of a scarcity of fuel and timber. The

laws of almost every European state more or less adequately secure the

permanence of the forest; and I believe Spain is the only European land

which has not made some public provision for the protection and

restoration of the woods--the only country whose people systematically

war upon the garden of God.[254]

_Royal Forests and Game Laws._

The French authors I have quoted, as well as many other writers of the

same nation, refer to the French Revolution as having given a new

impulse to destructive causes which were already threatening the total

extermination of the woods.[255] The general crusade against the

forests, which accompanied that important event, is to be ascribed, in a

considerable degree, to political resentments. The forest codes of the

mediaeval kings, and the local "coutumes" of feudalism contained many

severe and even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for the preservation

of game than from any enlightened views of the more important functions

of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis informs us that William the Conqueror

destroyed sixty parishes, and drove out their inhabitants, in order that

he might turn their lands into a forest,[256] to be reserved as a

hunting ground for himself and his posterity, and he punished with death

the killing of a deer, wild boar, or even a hare. His successor, William

Rufus, according to the _Histoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois

d'Angleterre_, p. 67, "was hunting one day in a new forest, which he had

caused to be made out of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when,

by mischance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyreus de Rois [Sir

Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed the beast, and slew

the king, who was beyond it. And in this very same forest, his brother

Richard ran so hard against a tree that he died of it. And men commonly

said that these things were because they had so laid waste and taken the

said parishes."

These barbarous acts, as Bonnemere observes,[257] were simply the

transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, and even

of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. "The death of a hare," says

our author, "was a hanging matter, the murder of a plover a capital

crime. Death was inflicted on those who spread nets for pigeons;

wretches who had drawn a bow upon a stag were to be tied to the animal

alive; and among the seigniors it was a standing excuse for having

killed game on forbidden ground, that they aimed at a serf." The feudal

lords enforced these codes with unrelenting rigor, and not unfrequently

took the law into their own hands. In the time of Louis IX, according to

William of Nangis, "three noble children, born in Flanders, who were

sojourning at the abbey of St. Nicholas in the Wood, to learn the speech

of France, went out into the forest of the abbey, with their bows and

iron-headed arrows, to disport them in shooting hares, chased the game,

which they had started in the wood of the abbey, into the forest of

Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, and were taken by the sergeants which kept

the wood. When the fell and pitiless Sir Enguerrand knew this, he had

the children straightway hanged without any manner of trial."[258] The

matter being brought to the notice of good King Louis, Sir Enguerrand

was summoned to appear, and, finally, after many feudal shifts and

dilatory pleas, brought to trial before Louis himself and a special

council. Notwithstanding the opposition of the other seigniors, who, it

is needless to say, spared no efforts to save a peer, probably not a

greater criminal than themselves, the king was much inclined to inflict

the punishment of death on the proud baron. "If he believed," said he,

"that our Lord would be as well content with hanging as with pardoning,

he would hang Sir Enguerrand in spite of all his barons;" but noble and

clerical interests unfortunately prevailed. The king was persuaded to

inflict a milder retribution, and the murderer was condemned to pay ten

thousand livres in coin, and to "build for the souls of the three

children two chapels wherein mass should be said every day."[259] The

hope of shortening the purgatorial term of the young persons, by the

religious rites to be celebrated in the chapels, was doubtless the

consideration which operated most powerfully on the mind of the king;

and Europe lost a great example for the sake of a mass.

The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the extension of the

forest and the enforcement of the game laws, induced several of the

French kings to consent to some relaxation of the severity of these

latter. Francis I, however, revived their barbarous provisions, and,

according to Bonnemere, even so good a monarch as Henry IV reenacted

them, and "signed the sentence of death upon peasants guilty of having

defended their fields against devastation by wild beasts." "A fine of

twenty livres," he continues, "was imposed on every one shooting at

pigeons, which, at that time, swooped down by thousands upon the

new-sown fields and devoured the seed. But let us count even this a

progress, for we have seen that the murder of a pigeon had been a

capital crime."[260]

Not only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain--the cutting

of an oxgoad, for instance--severely punished, but game animals were

still sacred when they had wandered from their native precincts and were

ravaging the fields of the peasantry. A herd of deer or of wild boars

often consumed or trod down a harvest of grain, the sole hope of the

year for a whole family; and the simple driving out of such animals from

this costly pasturage brought dire vengeance on the head of the rustic,

who had endeavored to save his children's bread from their voracity. "At

all times," says Paul Louis Courier, speaking in the name of the

peasants of Chambord, in the "Simple Discours," "the game has made war

upon us. Paris was blockaded eight hundred years by the deer, and its

environs, now so rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to support

the gamekeepers."[261]

In the popular mind, the forest was associated with all the abuses of

feudalism, and the evils the peasantry had suffered from the legislation

which protected both it and the game it sheltered, blinded them to the

still greater physical mischiefs which its destruction was to entail

upon them. No longer protected by law, the crown forests and those of

the great lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupulously

plundered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights of property in

small private woods were no longer respected.[262] Various absurd

theories, some of which are not even yet exploded, were propagated with

regard to the economical advantages of converting the forest into

pasture and ploughland, its injurious effects upon climate, health,

facility of internal communication, and the like. Thus resentful memory

of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular ignorance, and the

cupidity of speculators cunning enough to turn these circumstances to

profitable account, combined to hasten the sacrifice of the remaining

woods, and a waste was produced which hundreds of years and millions of

treasure will hardly repair.

_Small Forest Plants, and Vitality of Seed._

Another function of the woods to which I have barely alluded deserves a

fuller notice than can be bestowed upon it in a treatise the scope of

which is purely economical. The forest is the native habitat of a large

number of humbler plants, to the growth and perpetuation of which its

shade, its humidity, and its vegetable mould appear to be indispensable

necessities.[263] We cannot positively say that the felling of the

woods in a given vegetable province would involve the final extinction

of the smaller plants which are found only within their precincts. Some

of these, though not naturally propagating themselves in the open

ground, may perhaps germinate and grow under artificial stimulation and

protection, and finally become hardy enough to maintain an independent

existence in very different circumstances from those which at present

seem essential to their life.

Besides this, although the accounts of the growth of seeds, which have

lain for ages in the ashy dryness of Egyptian catacombs, are to be

received with great caution, or, more probably, to be rejected

altogether, yet their vitality seems almost imperishable while they

remain in the situations in which nature deposits them. When a forest

old enough to have witnessed the mysteries of the Druids is felled,

trees of other species spring up in its place; and when they, in their

turn, fall before the axe, sometimes even as soon as they have spread

their protecting shade over the surface, the germs which their

predecessors had shed years, perhaps centuries before, sprout up, and in

due time, if not choked by other trees belonging to a later stage in the

order of natural succession, restore again the original wood. In these

cases, the seeds of the new crop may often have been brought by the

wind, by birds, by quadrupeds, or by other causes; but, in many

instances, this explanation is not probable.

When newly cleared ground is burnt over in the United States, the ashes

are hardly cold before they are covered with a crop of fire weed, a tall

herbaceous plant, very seldom seen growing under other circumstances,

and often not to be found for a distance of many miles from the

clearing. Its seeds, whether the fruit of an ancient vegetation or newly

sown by winds or birds, require either a quickening by a heat which

raises to a certain high point the temperature of the stratum where they

lie buried, or a special pabulum furnished only by the combustion of the

vegetable remains that cover the ground in the woods. Earth brought up

from wells or other excavations soon produces a harvest of plants often

very unlike those of the local flora.

Moritz Wagner, as quoted by Wittwer,[264] remarks in his description of

Mount Ararat: "A singular phenomenon to which my guide drew my attention

is the appearance of several plants on the earth-heaps left by the last

catastrophe [an earthquake], which grow nowhere else on the mountain,

and had never been observed in this region before. The seeds of these

plants were probably brought by birds, and found in the loose, clayey

soil remaining from the streams of mud, the conditions of growth which

the other soil of the mountain refused them." This is probable enough,

but it is hardly less so that the flowing mud brought them up to the

influence of air and sun, from depths where a previous convulsion had

buried them ages before. Seeds of small sylvan plants, too deeply buried

by successive layers of forest foliage and the mould resulting from its

decomposition to be reached by the plough when the trees are gone and

the ground brought under cultivation, may, if a wiser posterity replants

the wood which sheltered their parent stems, germinate and grow, after

lying for generations in a state of suspended animation.

Darwin says: "In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation, where I had

ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren

heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man, but several

hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-five

years previously and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native

vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable--more

than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to

another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath plants were

wholly changed, but _twelve species_ of plants (not counting grasses and

sedges) flourished in the plantation which could not be found on the

heath."[265] Had the author informed us that these twelve plants

belonged to a species whose seeds enter into the nutriment of the birds

which appeared with the young wood, we could easily account for their

presence in the soil; but he says distinctly that the birds were of

insectivorous species, and it therefore seems more probable that the

seeds had been deposited when an ancient forest protected the growth of

the plants which bore them, and that they sprang up to new life when a

return of favorable conditions awaked them from a sleep of centuries.

Darwin indeed says that the heath "had never been touched by the hand

of man." Perhaps not, after it became a heath; but what evidence is

there to control the general presumption that this heath was preceded by

a forest, in whose shade the vegetables which dropped the seeds in

question might have grown?[266]

Although, therefore, the destruction of a wood and the reclaiming of the

soil to agricultural uses suppose the death of its smaller dependent

flora, these revolutions do not exclude the possibility of its

resurrection. In a practical view of the subject, however, we must admit

that when the woodman fells a tree he sacrifices the colony of humbler

growths which had vegetated under its protection. Some wood plants are

known to possess valuable medicinal properties, and experiment may show

that the number of these is greater than we now suppose. Few of them,

however, have any other economical value than that of furnishing a

slender pasturage to cattle allowed to roam in the woods; and even this

small advantage is far more than compensated by the mischief done to the

young trees by browsing animals. Upon the whole, the importance of this

class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as to furnish a

very telling popular argument for the conservation of the forest as a

necessary means of their perpetuation. More potent remedial agents may

supply their place in the _materia medica_, and an acre of grass land

yields more nutriment for cattle than a range of a hundred acres of

forest. But he whose sympathies with nature have taught him to feel that

there is a fellowship between all God's creatures; to love the brilliant

ore better than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crystallized red copper

better than the shillings and the pennies forged from them by the

coiner's cunning; a venerable oak tree than the brandy cask whose staves

are split out from its heart wood; a bed of anemones, hepaticas, or wood

violets than the leeks and onions which he may grow on the soil they

have enriched and in the air they made fragrant--he who has enjoyed that

special training of the heart and intellect which can be acquired only

in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, "where man is distant, but God

is near"--will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a tribe of

harmless vegetables, barely because their products neither tickle his

palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the

forest solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurselings

of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that

sheltered them.[267]

Although, as I have said, birds do not frequent the deeper recesses of

the wood,[268] yet a very large proportion of them build their nests in

trees, and find in their foliage and branches a secure retreat from the

inclemencies of the seasons and the pursuit of the reptiles and

quadrupeds which prey upon them. The borders of the forests are vocal

with song; and when the gray morning calls the creeping things of the

earth out of their night cells, it summons from the neighboring wood

legions of their winged enemies, which swoop down upon the fields to

save man's harvests by devouring the destroying worm, and surprising the

lagging beetle in his tardy retreat to the dark cover where he lurks

through the hours of daylight.

The insects most injurious to rural industry do not multiply in or near

the woods. The locust, which ravages the East with its voracious armies,

is bred in vast open plains which admit the full heat of the sun to

hasten the hatching of the eggs, gather no moisture to destroy them, and

harbor no bird to feed upon the larvae.[269] It is only since the felling

of the forests of Asia Minor and Cyrene that the locust has become so

fearfully destructive in those countries; and the grasshopper, which now

threatens to be almost as great a pest to the agriculture of some North

American soils, breeds in seriously injurious numbers only where a wide

extent of surface is bare of woods.

_Utility of the Forest._

In most parts of Europe, the woods are already so nearly extirpated that

the mere protection of those which now exist is by no means an adequate

remedy for the evils resulting from the want of them; and besides, as I

have already said, abundant experience has shown that no legislation can

secure the permanence of the forest in private hands. Enlightened

individuals in most European states, governments in others, have made

very extensive plantations,[270] and France has now set herself

energetically at work to restore the woods in the southern provinces,

and thereby to prevent the utter depopulation and waste with which that

once fertile soil and delicious climate are threatened.

The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifarious as the

motives that have led to its destruction, and as the evils which that

destruction has occasioned. It is hoped that the planting of the

mountains will diminish the frequency and violence of river inundations,

prevent the formation of torrents, mitigate the extremes of atmospheric

temperature, humidity, and precipitation, restore dried-up springs,

rivulets, and sources of irrigation, shelter the fields from chilling

and from parching winds, prevent the spread of miasmatic effluvia, and,

finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply of a material

indispensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful

exercise of every art of peace, every destructive energy of war.[271]

But our enumeration of the uses of trees is not yet complete. Besides

the influence of the forest, in mountain ranges, as a means of

preventing the scooping out of ravines and the accumulations of water

which fill them, trees subserve a valuable purpose, in lower positions,

as barriers against the spread of floods and of the material they

transport with them; but this will be more appropriately considered in

the chapter on the waters; and another very important use of trees, that

of fixing movable sand-dunes, and reclaiming them to profitable

cultivation, will be pointed out in the chapter on the sands.

The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures and the mechanical

arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and

navies of Christendom within the present century, has greatly augmented

the demand for wood,[272] and, but for improvements in metallurgy which

have facilitated the substitution of iron for that material, the last

twenty-five years would almost have stripped Europe of her only

remaining trees fit for such uses.[273] The walnut trees alone felled in

Europe within two years to furnish the armies of America with

gunstocks, would form a forest of no inconsiderable extent.[274]

_The Forests of Europe._

Mirabeau estimated the forests of France in 1750 at seventeen millions

of hectares [42,000,000 acres]; in 1860 they were reduced to eight

millions [19,769,000 acres]. This would be at the rate of 82,000

hectares [202,600 acres] per year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet,

_Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes_, I take these statistical

details, supposes that Mirabeau's statement may have been an extravagant

one, but it still remains certain that the waste has been enormous; for

it is known that, in some departments, that of Ariege, for instance,

clearing has gone on during the last half century at the rate of three

thousand acres a year,[275] and in all parts of the empire trees have

been felled faster than they have grown. The total area of France,

excluding Savoy, is about one hundred and thirty-one millions of acres.

The extent of forest supposed by Mirabeau would be about thirty-two per

cent. of the whole territory.[276] In a country and a climate where the

conservative influences of the forest are so necessary as in France,

trees must cover a large surface and be grouped in large masses, in

order to discharge to the best advantage the various functions assigned

to them by nature. The consumption of wood is rapidly increasing in that

empire, and a large part of its territory is mountainous, sterile, and

otherwise such in character or situation that it can be more profitably

devoted to the growth of wood than to any agricultural use. Hence it is

evident that the proportion of forest in 1750, taking even Mirabeau's

large estimate, was not very much too great for permanent maintenance,

though doubtless the distribution was so unequal that it would have been

sound policy to fell the woods and clear land in some provinces, while

large forests should have been planted in others.[277] During the

period in question, France neither exported manufactured wood or rough

timber, nor derived important collateral advantages of any sort from the

destruction of her forests. She is consequently impoverished and

crippled to the extent of the difference between what she actually

possesses of wooded surface and what she ought to have retained.

Italy and Spain are bared of trees in a greater degree than France, and

even Russia, which we habitually consider as substantially a forest

country, is beginning to suffer seriously for want of wood. Jourdier, as

quoted by Clave, observes: "Instead of a vast territory with immense

forests, which we expect to meet, one sees only scattered groves thinned

by the wind or by the axe of the _moujik_, grounds cut over and more or

less recently cleared for cultivation. There is probably not a single

district in Russia which has not to deplore the ravages of man or of

fire, those two great enemies of Muscovite sylviculture. This is so

true, that clear-sighted men already foresee a crisis which will become

terrible, unless the discovery of great deposits of some new

combustible, as pit coal or anthracite, shall diminish its evils."[278]

Germany, from character of surface and climate, and from the attention

which has long been paid in all the German States to sylviculture, is,

taken as a whole, in a far better condition in this respect than its

more southern neighbors; but in the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and

Austria, the same improvidence which marks the rural economy of the

corresponding districts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, is producing

effects hardly less disastrous. As an instance of the scarcity of fuel

in some parts of the territory of Bavaria, where, not long since, wood

abounded, I may mention the fact that the water of salt springs is, in

some instances, conveyed to the distance of sixty miles, in iron pipes,

to reach a supply of fuel for boiling it down.[279]

_Forests of the United States and Canada._

The vast forests of the United States and Canada cannot long resist the

improvident habits of the backwoodsman and the increased demand for

lumber. According to the census of the former country for 1860, which

gives returns of the "sawed and planed lumber" alone, timber for

framing and for a vast variety of mechanical purposes being omitted

altogether, the value of the former material prepared for market in the

United States was, in 1850, $58,521,976; in 1860, $95,912,286. The

quantity of unsawed lumber is not likely to have increased in the same

proportion, because comparatively little is exported in that condition,

and because masonry is fast taking the place of carpentry in building,

and stone, brick, and iron are used instead of timber more largely than

they were ten years ago. Still a much greater quantity of unsawed lumber

must have been marketed in 1860 than in 1850. It must further be

admitted that the price of lumber rose considerably between those dates,

and consequently that the increase in quantity is not to be measured by

the increase in pecuniary value. Perhaps this rise of prices may even be

sufficient to make the entire difference between the value of "sawed and

planed lumber" produced in the ten years in question by the six New

England States (21 per cent.), and the six Middle States (15 per cent.);

but the amount produced by the Western and by the Southern States had

doubled, and that returned from the Pacific States and Territories had

trebled in value in the same interval, so that there was certainly, in

those States, a large increase in the actual quantity prepared for sale.

I greatly doubt whether any one of the American States, except, perhaps,

Oregon, has, at this moment, more woodland than it ought permanently to

preserve, though, no doubt, a different distribution of the forests in

all of them might be highly advantageous. It is a great misfortune to

the American Union that the State Governments have so generally disposed

of their original domain to private citizens. It is true that public

property is not sufficiently respected in the United States; and it is

also true that, within the memory of almost every man of mature age,

timber was of so little value in that country, that the owners of

private woodlands submitted, almost without complaint, to what would be

regarded elsewhere as very aggravated trespasses upon them.[280] Under

such circumstances, it is difficult to protect the forest, whether it

belong to the state or to individuals. Property of this kind would be

subject to much plunder, as well as to frequent damage by fire. The

destruction from these causes would, indeed, considerably lessen, but

would not wholly annihilate the climatic and geographical influences of

the forest, or ruinously diminish its value as a regular source of

supply of fuel and timber. For prevention of the evils upon which I have

so long dwelt, the American people must look to the diffusion of general

intelligence on this subject, and to the enlightened self interest, for

which they are remarkable, not to the action of their local or general

legislatures. Even in France, government has moved with too slow and

hesitating a pace, and preventive measures do not yet compensate

destructive causes. The judicious remarks of Troy on this point may well

be applied to other countries than France, other measures of public

policy than the preservation of the woods. "To move softly," says he,

"is to commit the most dangerous, the most unpardonable of imprudences;

it diminishes the prestige of authority; it furnishes a triumph to the

sneerer and the incredulous; it strengthens opposition and encourages

resistance; it ruins the administration in the opinion of the people,

weakens its power and depresses its courage."[281]

_The Economy of the Forest._

The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and the practice

of that art, divide themselves into two great branches--the preservation

of existing forests, and the creation of new. From the long operation of

causes already set forth, what is understood in America and other new

countries by the "primitive forest," no longer exists in the territories

which were the seats of ancient civilization and empire, except upon a

small scale, and in remote and almost inaccessible glens quite out of

the reach of ordinary observation. The oldest European woods, indeed,

are native, that is, sprung from self-sown seed, or from the roots of

trees which have been felled for human purposes; but their growth has

been controlled, in a variety of ways, by man and by domestic animals,

and they always present more or less of an artificial character and

arrangement. Both they and planted forests, which, though certainly not

few, are of recent date in Europe, demand, as well for protection as for

promotion of growth, a treatment different in some respects from that

which would be suited to the character and wants of the virgin wood.

On this latter branch of the subject, experience and observation have

not yet collected a sufficient stock of facts to serve for the

construction of a complete system of sylviculture; but the management of

the forest as it exists in France--the different zones and climates of

which country present many points of analogy with those of the United

States and some of the British colonies--has been carefully studied, and

several manuals of practice have been prepared for the foresters of that

empire. I believe the best of these is the _Cours Elementaire de Culture

des Bois cree a l'Ecole Forestiere de Nancy, par M. Lorentz, complete,

et publie par A. Parade_, with a supplement under the title of _Cours

d'Amenagement des Forets, par Henri Nanquette_. The _Etudes sur

l'Economie Forestiere, par Jules Clave_, which I have often quoted,

presents a great number of interesting views on this subject, and well

deserves to be translated for the use of the English and American

reader; but it is not designed as a practical guide, and it does not

profess to be sufficiently specific in its details to serve that

purpose. Notwithstanding the difference of conditions between the

aboriginal and the trained forest, the judicious observer who aims at

the preservation of the former will reap much instruction from the

treatises I have cited, and I believe he will be convinced that the

sooner a natural wood is brought into the state of an artificially

regulated one, the better it is for all the multiplied interests which

depend on the wise administration of this branch of public

economy.[282]

One consideration bearing on this subject has received less attention

than it merits, because most persons interested in such questions have

not opportunities for the comparison I refer to. I mean the great

general superiority of cultivated timber to that of strictly spontaneous

growth. I say _general_ superiority, because there are exceptions to the

rule. The white pine, _Pinus strobus_, for instance, and other trees of

similar character and uses, require, for their perfect growth, a density

of forest vegetation around them, which protects them from too much

agitation by wind, and from the persistence of the lateral branches

which fill the wood with knots. A pine which has grown under those

conditions possesses a tall, straight stem, admirably fitted for masts

and spars, and, at the same time, its wood is almost wholly free from

knots, is regular in annular structure, soft and uniform in texture,

and, consequently, superior to almost all other timber for joinery. If,

while a large pine is spared, the broad-leaved or other smaller trees

around it are felled, the swaying of the tree from the action of the

wind mechanically produces separations between the layers of annual

growth, and greatly diminishes the value of the timber.

The same defect is often observed in pines which, from some accident of

growth, have much overtopped their fellows in the virgin forest. The

white pine, growing in the fields, or in open glades in the woods, is

totally different from the true forest tree, both in general aspect and

in quality of wood. Its stem is much shorter, its top less tapering, its

foliage denser and more inclined to gather into tufts, its branches more

numerous and of larger diameter, its wood shows much more distinctly the

divisions of annual growth, is of coarser grain, harder and more

difficult to work into mitre joints. Intermixed with the most valuable

pines in the American forests, are met many trees of the character I

have just described. The lumbermen call them "saplings," and generally

regard them as different in species from the true white pine, but

botanists are unable to establish a distinction between them, and as

they agree in almost all respects with trees grown in the open grounds

from known white-pine seedlings, I believe their peculiar character is

due to unfavorable circumstances in their early growth. The pine, then,

is an exception to the general rule as to the inferiority of the forest

to the open-ground tree. The pasture oak and pasture beech, on the

contrary, are well known to produce far better timber than those grown

in the woods, and there are few trees to which the remark is not equally

applicable.[283]

Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, that it

admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the retention or

discharge of water at will, while the facilities it affords for

selecting and duly proportioning, as well as properly spacing, the trees

which compose it, are too obvious to require to be more than hinted at.

In conducting these operations, we must have a diligent eye to the

requirements of nature, and must remember that a wood is not an

arbitrary assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to

the caprice of its owner. "A forest," says Clave, "is not, as is often

supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each other in long

perspective, without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each

other; it is, on the contrary, a whole, the different parts of which are

interdependent upon each other, and it constitutes, so to speak, a true

individuality. Every forest has a special character, determined by the

form of the surface it grows upon, the kinds of trees that compose it,

and the manner in which they are grouped."[284]

_European and American Trees compared._

The woods of North America are strikingly distinguished from those of

Europe by the vastly greater variety of species they contain. According

to Clave, there are in "France and in most parts of Europe" only about

twenty forest trees, five or six of which are spike-leaved and resinous,

the remainder broad-leaved."[285] Our author, however, doubtless means

genera, though he uses the word _especes_. Rossmaessler enumerates

fifty-seven species of forest trees as found in Germany, but some of

these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly garden trees, and

some others are only varieties of familiar species. The valuable manual

of Parade describes about the same number, including, however, two of

American origin--the locust, _Robinia pseudacacia_, and the Weymouth or

white pine, _Pinus strobus_--and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, though

it is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely say that Europe

does not possess above forty or fifty trees of such economical value as

to be worth the special care of the forester, while the oak alone

numbers not less than thirty species in the United States,[286] and some

other North American genera are almost equally diversified.[287]

Few European trees, except those bearing edible fruit, have been

naturalized in the United States, while the American forest flora has

made large contributions to that of Europe. It is a very poor taste

which has led to the substitution of the less picturesque European for

the graceful and majestic American elm, in some public grounds in the

United States. On the other hand, the European mountain ash--which in

beauty and healthfulness of growth is superior to our own--the horse

chestnut, and the abele, or silver poplar, are valuable additions to the

ornamental trees of North America. The Swiss arve or zirbelkiefer,

_Pinus cembra_, which yields a well-flavored edible seed and furnishes

excellent wood for carving, the umbrella pine which also bears a seed

agreeable to the taste, and which, from the color of its foliage and the

beautiful form of its dome-like crown, is among the most elegant of

trees, the white birch of Central Europe, with its pendulous branches

almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in length, flexibility, and

gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the "cypresse funerall," might be

introduced into the United States with great advantage to the landscape.

The European beech and chestnut furnish timber of far better quality

than that of their American congeners. The fruit of the European

chestnut, though inferior to the American in flavor, is larger, and is

an important article of diet among the French and Italian peasantry. The

walnut of Europe, though not equal to some of the American species in

beauty of growth or of wood, or to others in strength and elasticity of

fibre, is valuable for its timber and its oil.[288] The maritime pine,

which has proved of such immense use in fixing drifting sands in France,

may perhaps be better adapted to this purpose than any of the pines of

the New World, and it is of great importance for its turpentine, resin,

and tar. The epicea, or common fir, _Abies picea_, _Abies excelsa_,

_Picea excelsa_, abundant in the mountains of France and the contiguous

country, is known for its product, Burgundy pitch, and, as it flourishes

in a greater variety of soil and climate than almost any other

spike-leaved tree, it might be well worth transplantation.[289] The cork

oak has been introduced into the United States, I believe, and would

undoubtedly thrive in the Southern section of the Union.[290]

In the walnut, the chestnut, the cork oak, the mulberry, the olive, the

orange, the lemon, the fig, and the multitude of other trees which, by

their fruit, or by other products, yield an annual revenue, nature has

provided Southern Europe with a partial compensation for the loss of

the native forest. It is true that these trees, planted as most of them

are at such distances as to admit of cultivation, or of the growth of

grass among them, are but an inadequate substitute for the thick and

shady wood; but they perform to a certain extent the same offices of

absorption and transpiration, they shade the surface of the ground, they

serve to break the force of the wind, and on many a steep declivity,

many a bleak and barren hillside, the chestnut binds the soil together

with its roots, and prevents tons of earth and gravel from washing down

upon the fields and the gardens. Fruit trees are not wanting, certainly,

north of the Alps. The apple, the pear, and the prune are important in

the economy both of man and of nature, but they are far less numerous in

Switzerland and Northern France than are the trees I have mentioned in

Southern Europe, both because they are in general less remunerative, and

because the climate, in higher latitudes, does not permit the free

introduction of shade trees into grounds occupied for agricultural

purposes.[291]

The multitude of species, intermixed as they are in their spontaneous

growth, gives the American forest landscape a variety of aspect not

often seen in the woods of Europe, and the gorgeous tints, which nature

repeats from the dying dolphin to paint the falling leaf of the American

maples, oaks, and ash trees, clothe the hillsides and fringe the

watercourses with a rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the

brightest groupings of the tropical flora. It must be admitted, however,

that both the northern and the southern declivities of the Alps exhibit

a nearer approximation to this rich and multifarious coloring of

autumnal vegetation than most American travellers in Europe are willing

to allow; and, besides, the small deciduous shrubs which often carpet

the forest glades of these mountains are dyed with a ruddy and orange

glow, which, in the distant landscape, is no mean substitute for the

scarlet and crimson and gold and amber of the transatlantic woodland.

No American evergreen known to me resembles the umbrella pine

sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it.[292] A cedar,

very common above the Highlands on the Hudson, is extremely like the

cypress, straight, slender, with erect, compressed ramification, and

feathered to the ground, but its foliage is neither so dark nor so

dense, the tree does not attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor

has it the lithe flexibility of that tree. In mere shape, the Lombardy

poplar nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to

compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the wind; for

under such circumstances, the one is the most majestic, the other the

most ungraceful, or--if I may apply such an expression to anything but

human affectation of movement--the most awkward of trees. The poplar

trembles before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its

foliage, gropes around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in

impotent passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more closely to

its stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an humble obeisance to the

tempest, bends to the wind with an elasticity that assures you of its

prompt return to its regal attitude, and sends from its thick leaflets a

murmur like the roar of the far-off ocean.

The cypress and the umbrella pine are not merely conventional types of

the Italian landscape. They are essential elements in a field of rural

beauty which can be seen in perfection only in the basin of the

Mediterranean, and they are as characteristic of this class of scenery

as the date palm is of the oases of the desert. There is, however, this

difference: a single cypress or pine is often enough to shed beauty over

a wide area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty is not so much

that of the individual as of the group. The frequency of the cypress and

the pine--combined with the fact that the other trees of Southern Europe

which most interest a stranger from the north, the orange and the lemon,

the cork oak, the ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens--goes

far to explain the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed it is

only in the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel

carriages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of the

earth, and form any proper geographical image of that country. At other

seasons, not high walls only, but equally impervious hedges, and now,

unhappily, acacias thickly planted along the railway routes, confine the

view so completely, that the arch of a tunnel, or a night cap over the

traveller's eyes, is scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the

gratification of his curiosity.[293]

_Sylviculture._

The art, or, as the Continental foresters call it, the science of

sylviculture has been so little pursued in England and America, that its

nomenclature has not been introduced into the English vocabulary, and I

shall not be able to describe its processes with technical propriety of

language, without occasionally borrowing a word from the forest

literature of France and Germany. A full discussion of the methods of

sylviculture would, indeed, be out of place in a work like the present,

but the almost total want of conveniently accessible means of

information on the subject, in English-speaking countries, will justify

me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than would otherwise be

pertinent.

The two best known methods are those distinguished as the _taillis_,

copse or coppice treatment,[294] and the _futaie_, for which I find no

English equivalent, but which may not inappropriately be called the

_full-growth_ system. A _taillis_, copse, or coppice, is a wood composed

of shoots from the roots of trees previously cut for fuel and timber.

The shoots are thinned out from time to time, and finally cut, either

after a fixed number of years, or after the young trees have attained to

certain dimensions, their roots being then left to send out a new

progeny as before. This is the cheapest method of management, and

therefore the best wherever the price of labor and of capital bears a

high proportion to that of land and of timber; but it is essentially a

wasteful economy. If the woodland is, in the first place, completely cut

over, as is found most convenient in practice, the young shoots have

neither the shade nor the protection from wind so important to forest

growth, and their progress is comparatively slow, while, at the same

time, the thick clumps they form choke the seedlings that may have

sprouted near them. If domestic animals of any species are allowed to

roam in the wood, they browse upon the terminal buds and the tender

branches, thereby stunting, if they do not kill, the young trees, and

depriving them of all beauty and vigor of growth. The evergreens, once

cut, do not shoot up again,[295] and the mixed character of the

forest--in many respects an important advantage, if not an indispensable

condition of growth--is lost;[296] and besides this, large wood of any

species cannot be grown in this method, because trees which shoot from

decaying stumps and their dying roots, become hollow or otherwise

unsound before they acquire their full dimensions. A more fatal

objection still, is, that the roots of trees will not bear more than two

or three, or at most four cuttings of their shoots before their vitality

is exhausted, and the wood can then be restored only by replanting

entirely. The period of cutting coppices varies in Europe from fifteen

to forty years, according to soil, species, and rapidity of growth.

In the _futaie_, or full-growth system, the trees are allowed to stand

as long as they continue in healthy and vigorous growth. This is a

shorter period than would be at first supposed, when we consider the

advanced age and great dimensions to which, under favorable

circumstances, many forest trees attain in temperate climates. But, as

every observing person familiar with the natural forest is aware, these

are exceptional cases, just as are instances of great longevity or of

gigantic stature among men. Able vegetable physiologists have maintained

that the tree, like most reptiles, has no natural limit of life or of

growth, and that the only reason why our oaks and our pines do not reach

the age of twenty centuries and the height of a hundred fathoms, is,

that in the multitude of accidents to which they are exposed, the

chances of their attaining to such a length of years and to such

dimensions of growth are a million to one against them. But another

explanation of this fact is possible. In trees affected by no

discoverable external cause of death, decay begins at the topmost

branches, which seem to wither and die for want of nutriment. The

mysterious force by which the sap is carried from the roots to the

utmost twigs, cannot be conceived to be unlimited in power, and it is

probable that it differs in different species, so that while it may

suffice to raise the fluid to the height of five hundred feet in the

sequoia, it may not be able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty in

the oak. The limit may be different, too, in different trees of the same

species, not from defective organization in those of inferior growth,

but from more or less favorable conditions of soil, nourishment, and

exposure. Whenever a tree attains to the limit beyond which its

circulating fluids cannot rise, we may suppose that decay begins, and

death follows, from the same causes which bring about the same results

in animals of limited size--such, for example, as the interruption of

functions essential to life, in consequence of the clogging up of ducts

by matter assimilable in the stage of growth, but no longer so when

increment has ceased.

In the natural woods, we observe that, though, among the myriads of

trees which grow upon a square mile, there are several vegetable giants,

yet the great majority of them begin to decay long before they have

attained their maximum of stature, and this seems to be still more

emphatically true of the artificial forest. In France, according to

Clave, "oaks, in a suitable soil, may stand, without exhibiting any sign

of decay, for two or three hundred years; the pines hardly exceed one

hundred and twenty, and the soft or white woods [_bois blancs_], in wet

soils, languish and die before reaching the fiftieth year."[297] These

ages are certainly below the average of those of American forest trees,

and are greatly exceeded in very numerous well-attested instances of

isolated trees in Europe.

The former mode of treating the futaie, called the garden system, was to

cut the trees individually as they arrived at maturity, but, in the best

regulated forests, this practice has been abandoned for the German

method, which embraces not only the securing of the largest immediate

profit, but the replanting of the forest, and the care of the young

growth. This is effected in the case of a forest, whether natural or

artificial, which is to be subjected to regular management, by three

operations. The first of these consists in felling about one third of

the wood, in such way as to leave convenient spaces for the growth of

young trees. The remaining two-thirds are relied upon to replant the

vacancies, by natural sowing, which they seldom or never fail to do. The

seedlings are watched, are thinned out when too dense, the ill formed

and sickly, as well as those of inferior value, and the shrubs and

thorns which might otherwise choke or too closely shade them, are pulled

up. When they have attained sufficient strength and development of

foliage to bear or to require more light and air, the second step is

taken, by removing a suitable proportion of the old trees which had been

spared at the first cutting; and when, finally, they are hardened enough

to bear frost and sun without other protection than that which they

mutually give to each other, the remainder of the original forest is

felled, and the wood now consists wholly of young and vigorous trees.

This result is obtained after about twenty years. At convenient periods

afterward, the unhealthy stocks and those injured by wind or other

accidents are removed, and in some instances the growth of the remainder

is promoted by irrigation or by fertilizing applications.[298] When the

forest is approaching to maturity, the original processes already

described are repeated; and as, in different parts of an extensive

forest, they would take place in different zones, it would afford

indefinitely an annual crop of firewood and timber.

The duties of the forester do not end here. It sometimes happens that

the glades left by felling the older trees are not sufficiently seeded,

or that the species, or _essences_, as the French oddly call them, are

not duly proportioned in the new crop. In this case, seed must be

artificially sown, or young trees planted in the vacancies.

One of the most important rules in the administration of the forest is

the absolute exclusion of domestic quadrupeds from every wood which is

not destined to be cleared. No growth of young trees is possible where

cattle are admitted to pasture at any season of the year, though they

are undoubtedly most destructive while trees are in leaf.[299]

It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of young trees

against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent quadrupeds, and of older

ones against the damage done by the larvae of insects hatched upon the

surface or in the tissues of the bark, or even in the wood itself. The

much greater liability of the artificial than of the natural forest to

injury from this cause is perhaps the only point in which the

superiority of the former to the latter is not as marked as that of any

domesticated vegetable to its wild representative. But the better

quality of the wood and the much more rapid growth of the trained and

regulated forest are abundant compensations for the loss thus

occasioned, and the progress of entomological science will, perhaps,

suggest new methods of preventing the ravages of insects. Thus far,

however, the collection and destruction of the eggs, by simple but

expensive means, has proved the only effectual remedy.[300]

It is common in Europe to permit the removal of the fallen leaves and

fragments of bark and branches with which the forest soil is covered,

and sometimes the cutting of the lower twigs of evergreens. The leaves

and twigs are principally used as litter for cattle, and finally as

manure, the bark and wind-fallen branches as fuel. By long usage,

sometimes by express grant, this privilege has become a vested right of

the population in the neighborhood of many public, and even large

private forests; but it is generally regarded as a serious evil. To

remove the leaves and fallen twigs is to withdraw much of the pabulum

upon which the tree was destined to feed. The small branches and leaves

are the parts of the tree which yield the largest proportion of ashes on

combustion, and of course they supply a great amount of nutriment for

the young shoots. "A cubic foot of twigs," says Vaupell, "yields four

times as much ashes as a cubic foot of stem wood. * * For every hundred

weight of dried leaves carried off from a beech forest, we sacrifice a

hundred and sixty cubic feet of wood. The leaves and the mosses are a

substitute, not only for manure, but for ploughing. The carbonic acid

given out by decaying leaves, when taken up by water, serves to

dissolve the mineral constituents of the soil, and is particularly

active in disintegrating feldspar and the clay derived from its

decomposition. * * * The leaves belong to the soil. Without them it

cannot preserve its fertility, and cannot furnish nutriment to the

beech. The trees languish, produce seed incapable of germination, and

the spontaneous self-sowing, which is an indispensable element in the

best systems of sylviculture, fails altogether in the bared and

impoverished soil."[301]

Besides these evils, the removal of the leaves deprives the soil of that

spongy character which gives it such immense value as a reservoir of

moisture and a regulator of the flow of springs; and, finally, it

exposes the surface roots to the drying influence of sun and wind, to

accidental mechanical injury from the tread of animals or men, and, in

cold climates, to the destructive effects of frost.

The annual lopping and trimming of trees for fuel, so common in Europe,

is fatal to the higher uses of the forest, but where small groves are

made, or rows of trees planted, for no other purpose than to secure a

supply of firewood, or to serve as supports for the vine, it is often

very advantageous. The willows, and many other trees, bear polling for a

long series of years without apparent diminution of growth of branches,

and though certainly a polled, or, to use an old English word, a

doddered tree, is in general a melancholy object, yet it must be

admitted that the aspect of some species--the American locust, _Robinia

pseudacacia_, for instance--when young, is improved by this

process.[302]

I have spoken of the needs of agriculture as a principal cause of the

destruction of the forest, and of domestic cattle as particularly

injurious to the growth of young trees. But these animals affect the

forest, indirectly, in a still more important way, because the extent of

cleared ground required for agricultural use depends very much on the

number and kinds of the cattle bred. We have seen, in a former chapter,

that, in the United States, the domestic quadrupeds amount to more than

a hundred millions, or three times the number of the human population of

the Union. In many of the Western States, the swine subsist more or less

on acorns, nuts, and other products of the woods, and the prairies, or

natural meadows of the Mississippi valley, yield a large amount of food

for beast, as well as for man. With these exceptions, all this vast army

of quadrupeds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse, and roots grown on

soil reclaimed from the forest by European settlers. It is true that the

flesh of domestic quadrupeds enters very largely into the aliment of the

American people, and greatly reduces the quantity of vegetable nutriment

which they would otherwise consume, so that a smaller amount of

agricultural product is required for immediate human food, and, of

course, a smaller extent of cleared land is needed for the growth of

that product, than if no domestic animals existed. But the flesh of the

horse, the ass, and the mule is not consumed by man, and the sheep is

reared rather for its fleece than for food. Besides this, the ground

required to produce the grass and grain consumed in rearing and

fattening a grazing quadruped, would yield a far larger amount of

nutriment, if devoted to the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished

by his flesh; and, upon the whole, whatever advantages may be reaped

from the breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that the cleared land

devoted to their sustenance in the originally wooded part of the United

States, after deducting a quantity sufficient to produce an amount of

aliment equal to their flesh, still greatly exceeds that cultivated for

vegetables, directly consumed by the people of the same regions; or, to

express a nearly equivalent idea in other words, the meadow and the

pasture, taken together, much exceed the plough land.[303]

In fertile countries, like the United States, the foreign demand for

animal and vegetable aliment, for cotton, and for tobacco, much enlarges

the sphere of agricultural operations, and, of course, prompts further

encroachments upon the forest. The commerce in these articles,

therefore, constitutes in America a special cause of the destruction of

the woods, which does not exist in the numerous states of the Old World

that derive the raw material of their mechanical industry from distant

lands, and import many articles of vegetable food or luxury which their

own climates cannot advantageously produce.

The growth of arboreal vegetation is so slow that, though he who buries

an acorn may hope to see it shoot up to a miniature resemblance of the

majestic tree which shall shade his remote descendants, yet the longest

life hardly embraces the seedtime and the harvest of a forest. The

planter of a wood must be actuated by higher motives than those of an

investment the profits of which consist in direct pecuniary gain to

himself or even to his posterity; for if, in rare cases, an artificial

forest may, in two or three generations, more than repay its original

cost, still, in general, the value of its timber will not return the

capital expended and the interest accrued.[304] But when we consider the

immense collateral advantages derived from the presence, the terrible

evils necessarily resulting from the destruction of the forest, both the

preservation of existing woods, and the far more costly extension of

them where they have been unduly reduced, are among the most obvious of

the duties which this age owes to those that are to come after it.

Especially is this obligation incumbent upon Americans. No civilized

people profits so largely from the toils and sacrifices of its immediate

predecessors as they; no generations have ever sown so liberally, and,

in their own persons, reaped so scanty a return, as the pioneers of

Anglo-American social life. We can repay our debt to our noble

forefathers only by a like magnanimity, by a like self-forgetting care

for the moral and material interests of our own posterity.

_Instability of American Life._

All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of life, have

their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary

defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in

form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United

States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as

variable as the habits of the population. It is time for some abatement

in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us

almost a nomade rather than a sedentary people.[305] We have now felled

forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore

this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise

means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the

meadows, and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the

springs and rivulets with which it waters the earth. The establishment

of an approximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly

characterized distinctions of rural surface--woodland and plough

land--would involve a certain persistence of character in all the

branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, which

depend upon or are immediately connected with either, without implying a

rigidity that should exclude flexibility of accommodation to the many

changes of external circumstance which human wisdom can neither prevent

nor foresee, and would thus help us to become, more emphatically, a

well-ordered and stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a

people of progress.

NOTE on word _watershed_, omitted on p. 257.--Sir John F. W.

Herschel (_Physical Geography_, 137, and elsewhere) spells this

word _water-sched_, because he considers it a translation, or

rather an adoption of the German "Wasser-scheide, separation of

the waters, not water-_shed_, the slope _down which_ the waters

run," As a point of historical etymology, it is probable that the

word in question was suggested to those who first used it by the

German _Wasserscheide_; but the spelling _water-sched_, proposed

by Herschel, is objectionable, both because _sch_ is a

combination of letters wholly unknown to modern English

orthography and properly representing no sound recognized in

English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that

_watershed_, in the sense of _division-of-the-waters_, has a

legitimate English etymology.

The Anglo-Saxon _sceadan_ meant both to separate or divide, and

to shade or shelter. It is the root of the English verbs _to

shed_ and _to shade_, and in the former meaning is the A. S.

equivalent of the German verb _scheiden_.

_Shed_ in Old English had the meaning _to separate_ or

_distinguish_. It is so used in the _Owl and the Nightingale_, v.

197. Palsgrave (_Lesclarcissement, etc._, p. 717) defines _I

shede_, I departe thinges asonder; and the word still means _to

divide_ in several English local dialects. Hence, _watershed_,

the division or separation of the waters, is good English both in

sense and spelling.