Cornell University Library OF THE Mew Work State College of Forestry uD seeps 2c ASpbf4Or 3766 RETURN TO ALBERT R. MANN LIBRARY ITHACA, N. Y. Corneil University Library SD 146.C34P57 ‘i essity of preserving an Te Cornell University The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924002876641 REPORT ON THE NECESSITY-OF PRESERVING AND REPLANTING FORESTS. COMPILED AT THE INSTANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF ONTARIO, BY R. W. PHIPPS, Toronto. Gorouto: PRINTED BY C. BLACKETT ROBINSON, 5 JORDAN STREET. 1883. To the Honourable 8S. C. Woon, Treasurer of Ontario, Sir,—Agreeably to the instructions of the Ontario Government, I have prepared a report on the important subject of the forests of the Province. The object of the Govern- ment, as I have understood and endeavoured to carry it out, has been to circulate the information procurable in so popular a form as to ensure its being generally read, and thereby to enlist the understanding and sympathies of all in the valuable work contem- plated—that of preserving such portions of forest as are necessary for our future supplies of timber, and for that still more important result, which the maintenance of forests secures the great climatic and agricultural benefit derived from regular supplies of mois- ture, whether in river, spring, or rainfall. The subject has long been one of my favourite studies, my first writing thereon in the Canada Farmer and other journals dating thirteen years ago, while I have had myself much personal experience, which I have found useful in preparing the report, a work which, I may remark, has occupied me several months. I have concerning the matter actually presented, followed the plan generally observed in other countries in drawing up such documents, namely, that the first Report should present the scientific aspect of the case as applicable to the country in question, together with statements of what steps have been taken by other governments in such matters, the results which have attended their efforts, as well as the causes which led to their action; accompanied by such additions to the stock of facts as personal knowledge enabled me to supply, and compilations, in as concise a form as possible, of such evidence touching the subject as is on record from the pens of gentlemen well acquainted with Canadian affairs, and such quotations as bear most directly from the most celebrated writers in America and Europe, concerning the advisability of action in the care of and reproduction of forests, and their explanation of the great principles on which such advice is based. Such reports have generally been preparatory to a more exact personal examination of the country, and the obtaining of evidence from individuals in its different localities, which, the writer would suggest, should now be undertaken. It may be added, that of the various scientific explanations adduced, none has been given except on the highest authority, nor without consulting numerous authorities, of some of which I now append a list. Of those authorities to which I am chiefly indebted, I may mention the various reports presented from time to time to the American Government, the valuable report compiled by the Commissioners of the Ontario Govern- ment concerning the Forestry Congresses at Montreal and Cincinnati ; the Montreal press reports of the former; the numerous excellent writings of Prof. Hough, U.S. Forestry Department ; some very useful and exhaustive reports concerning the examinations made by the East Indian Government in the system of European Forestry (for which I have to thank Hon. M. Joly and Prof. Goldwin Smith); Le Traitement des Bois, par Ch. iv. Broillard ; Les Bois, par Dupont et La Grye; Les Arbres, par Schacht; Brown on Forests and Moisture; and Reboisement in France, by John Crombie Brown, LL.D., Edinburgh ; The Forester, by James Brown, LL.D., Stirling; Bagneris on Sylviculture ; The Earth as modified by Human Action, by Zeo. P. Marsh; The Trees of America, by D. J. Browne, New York ; the far-famed meteorological works of Herschel, Flammarion, Glaisher, Humboldt, and others ; the reports of the various conservators of forests in Australia, New Zealand, and India; Lasett’s Timber and Timber Trees ; Chapman’s Geology of Canada; Vallis’ Influence of Forests, etc., etc. It may be remarked that this report, with the same or even less labour, might easily have been made much more bulky. But I have rather chosen to reject as much as pos- sible, so as to leave, in the present form, an amount of information more likely to secure perusal than if further extended. . INTRODUCTION. As a preface, perhaps I cannot do better than ask the reader to peruse, I need not ask him to admire, the following b2autiful piece, from ‘‘ Nature, or the Poetry of Earth and Sea,” by Madame Michelet :— ‘Alas, in how many places is the forest, which once lent us its shade, nothing more than a memory. The grave and noble circle, which so befittingly adorned the mountain, is every day contracting. Where you came in the hope of seeking life, you tind but the image of death. ‘©Oh, who will really undertake the defence of the trees, and rescue them from a general an1 senseless destrustion? Who will eloquently set forth their manifold mission, and their active and incessant assistance in the regulation of the laws which rule our globe? Without them, it seems delivered over to the blind destiny which will involve it again in chaos! The motive powers and puriticators of the atmosphere through the respiration of their foliage ; avaricious collectors, to the advantage of future ages, of the solar heat, it is they, too, which arrest the progress of the sea-born clouds, and compel them to refresh the earth ; it is they which pacify the storm, and avert its most disastrous consequences. In the low-lying plains, which had no outlet for their waters, the trees, long before the advent of man, drained the soil by their roots, forcing the stagnant waters to descend, and construct at a lower depth their useful reservoirs. And now, on the abrupt declivities they consolidate the crumbling soil, check and break in the torrent, control the melting of the snows, and preserve to the meadows the fertile humidity which in due time will overspread them with a sea of flowers. “ And is not this enough? To watch over the life of the plant and its general har- mony, is it not to watch over the safety of humanity? The tree, again, was created for the nurture of man, to assist him in his industries and his arts. But on this immense subject I cannot dwell. Only, it is our very emancipation. It is owing to the tree, to its soul earth-buried for so many centuries, and now restored to light, that we have se- cured the wings of the steam engine. “Thank Heaven for the trees! In this book, and with my feeble voice, I claim for them the gratitude of man. Let other writers of greater authority come to their assist- ance, and restore them to the earth, before she is utterly stripped, before she becomes an arid and uninhabitable desert. “One day, as seated before a forest of firs already marked for the axe, I was lost in a sad and silent dream. Another dreamer, who could well interpret my thoughts, told me that he came from the Engadine, the most elevated and the coldest region of Switzer- land, where the fir ceases to’ grow, where the larch can barely live, but where the arolla prospers, and hardily plants its roots on the edges of the glacier. It is a hero! I ex- claimed ; we are in Switzerland, and should we not see it?’ ‘You must make all possible haste,’ replied the stranger. ‘In the war which man has declared against the Tree, the last of the arollas will soon have disappeared.’ ” CONTENTS. The Past and Present Forest of Ontario.—The Writer’s Experience. —Danger of Fire to ie Remgining: WOrestis 5.5.ca:cc.a ie cailiaieinlanlnduccete wliacesa Acalubornegaimiesndaenniuteaianeentiteaace eas 1 Lhe. Mechanism, ofa reer iss cnivaeen see scaekeeewer ee eee eeesey Mapes ese tes due 16 How Moisture is Retained in Forests. ..........0.0.. 000 cc ccc cece eee eee eee en eens 18 The Great Natural System which Gives Rain in Due Season................000-.00 00s 20 NEP sctuteayesuiensilceans ta vels augue pete mista Sia lellp atin Weiatetuae ahteene aay mano eae ey meee 26 Marshal Vaillant’s Experiments............... 2... cece eee cece eee e teen n een 50 Connection of Forests with Production of Rain ........... 0... c ccc eee eee eeeeee 31 Herschel on Radiation. ......... 00... cece ee eee cacbiead heed aveonnen Muha deisel tonsa orate 32 Dr. Bryce on Forestsiand Rainfall. . 0.02005. cceaseeeeeseceres snes svete ieee eeeauads 35 The Lessons of History and some Contemporary Evidence...... ..........000 ee eee 38 Statements Collated from the Works of Distinguished Writers on the Subject.......... 40 Forests and their Management in other Countries. ............ 0. cc cece cece eee eee e eens 71 Experiments in Planting in the States and Canada, and Directions Founded thereon. :... 98 Report of the: Hon. How Oly se danie ee ccauhseadtnune voueaeeuan des omeeweeesecae 113 The Heights of Land in Ontario.............. pike ha ind BERR READ aah e and sareacbnaastowey 122 The: Great: Forest: to our Northreastincce cise ccssgn nw tees ooinde seed se euew. a ed dames es 124 PROUO CHO: LOM: BANE gcse o: sucess savayiese\ ca heanta aca Sie aii pence as Ste Sea Serguins anc ounda otcainuet axe Gleed 125 The North-West Territory of Ontari0s ove cussaeediens ones ee ieee none seen sageve arene 127 The Position in which Forests would Best Affect the Ontario Climate..... .......... 128 Treés: by’ the: Roadside s.cccscccrssmnraxenevseseees 4s tee eae eee Tes oe Mea os 129 A Word on the Present Amount of Forest in Ontario.............. 00.00.0002 eee eee 129 UH Gs DP OSSIBLS! ROMER: coy sez cx Geseviaus ay ecns 809 odceud ‘valu otevietanievdnsiadensid Mtge, eMbcreidasersueiaies. hae ba 131 Rayadeds (of Rite: vasiwse adem ataasetiaeones we taainesmsade hat x orp anene vem e 134 The Pine Lumber Remaining............ 0. cece cece eee eee eeee 135 Forest Existing in Ontario Counties,.........6 0... cee ee cee ee eens 136 Map of Heights of Land in Ontario—opposite page 122. Map of Forests—oppcsite page 136. KOE PR? Alecessity of Preserving and Replanting Forests. —-— ao WHEN the paddles of the Frenchmen first broke the clear waters of Toronto Bay, and their canoes grated on the bright beach of sand which then surrounded that harbour, Ontario, from the Detroit to the Ottawa, was under the roof of the forest. It contained at that time, as has been well remarked by one of the best qualified judges in the United States, perhaps the most valuable masses of timber which ever existed in a region of its size. There were hundreds of thousands—nay, there were millions of acres of magnificent maples, two feet—three—four feet through, their rugged trunks rising clear, separate, distinct, to the lofty arches of the forest, like the pillars of som» great cathedral, over- shadowing and crushing out by their ponderous vitality all inferior growths, so that below a carriage might have been driven for many miles in any direction, unimpeded through the park-like woodland. There were vast sections of beech timber, their clear blue-grey stems standing far away in the indefinite perspective of the forest, and here and there reflecting from their shining surfaces the occasional rays by which the sun was able to penetrate the mass of foliage overhead—great trees—three, or even four, fourteen feet logs to the trunk, a reservoir of plane-wood which would have lasted all the carpenters of the world for a century. There was white-oak, would have ribbed the navies of Europe, and ash sufficient to plank them all to the water-line. There are many perfect works in the forest, there is none more perfect than the white ash. Its shaft, round and perpendicular, sheathed in serrated bark of clear cut channels unique in their beauty, forms a picture the very axe might be loth to destroy. There were hickory trees by mil- lions, the shaggy outer-covering hanging in strips from the huge red-brown trunks, had kept the world in axe-handles till doomsday. There were miles upon miles—there were hundreds of miles of wide-spreading cedar flats, where the traveller’s foot might all day long press the mossy covering of their protruding and gigantic roots, while around him still arose on all sides the upright shafts, the curious leaning branches of that most pic- turesque of trees. There were dark and apparently illimitable forests of hemlock, of which axe and fire have long since found the limit, as the tanners are learning to their cost. There were millions of silver-skinned birches, and iron-woods in countless numbers. And above all others in use—above all others in money value, everywhere piercing the hard-wood foliage roof, rising to double its height above it ; lofty, dense, sombre, fully exposed to, but almost immovable by, the tempest, stood in far-spreading masses the giants of the forest—the great Canadian pine. It is not to be supposed that the forest of that day stood in clearly defined sections of different woods. ‘Trees of other species from the predominant always intermixed, but in many sections to so slight an extent that those who saw that vast woodland can well remember where, every here and there, all appeared maple, all beech, or all hemlock, far as eye could discern. ‘‘ What kind of land is it?” asks Cooper’s Major of the Indian. “ All sugar-bush ; what you want better?” is the reply. If the lord of these servants should at any time return from a far country, and demand to know the use the Canadians had made of his talent of timber, we should be puzzled to extricate it from the napkin of fire in which we had wrapped it. For the advance of the Anglo-Saxon across the North American region has been, so far as the trees are concerned, like that of Attila, who boasted that no grass ever grew where his charger’s feet had trodden. .No destruction was ever more ruthless, more injurious, more lasting in its effects, or more difficult of repair, than that to which Canadians, for the past hundred years, have cheered one another on. Among all the politicians who have in turn saved our country, few of them have thought it worth while to attempt to save the timber. And yet much might very easily, very valuably, have been done towards that end. But the Genius of Preservation was absent, while that of Destruction filled the land with his voice. Here might have been seen a rustic, placidly destroying a grove of white pine, worth a million of dollars, in order to uncover a barren waste of sandy land, which at first gave but little wheat, and has since pastured but a few cows ; there another, devoting to the flames a district of red oak, would have kept Malaga five years in wine puncheons, that he may bare a piece of hard red clay on a mountain slope, which he shall try to cultivate for a few years, and shall abandon when the winter torrents have washed the scanty humus away from the hard pan which all impenetrable lies below. Here is yet another who, to advance himself a little by burning in June a fallow which should have lain till fall, and thereby save a matter of ten of twenty dollars, has let fire run through five hundred acres of good hemlock bush, killing the young trees, girdling the old, and half ruining the soil for future agricultural purposes. Here you might have seen one rolling together and burning great logs of black walnut (a wood invaluable for furniture, of which the Canadian supply is long since exhausted, and the United States supply almost so), in order to make a farm, all the profit of which for forty years would not reach one-tenth of the sum the walnut, if left standing till now, would easily have drawn. Nay, an item which will be more comprehensible by every one, I have myself geen, on the sandy lands near Toronto, great heaps of almost clear pine, worth to-day forty dollars a thousand, given over to the flames. All old residents of Toronto can well remember the days before the railways—the old wharves piled high with pine for steamboat fuel—the long procession of wood-waggons, two cord on each—down Yonge street, and from the Kingston and Dundas roads. I fancy the pine so used. would now sell for a good deal more than all the steamers and all the freight they ever carried. “ We must have the land,” said the settlers, “we don’t want any boards, and there’s no sale for it in town.” A hundred miles north of Toronto, and within fourteen of a rail- coad, I have known heap after heap, acre after acre, square mile after square mile, till the forest was gone, where the splendid and massive rock elms, three to even six feet through at the butt, the long clear basswood, good for many a use, the straight logs of valuable cherry timber, and equally valuable red oak, with beech and maple, hemlock and iron- wood, uncounted and uncountable, arose in smoke, a sacrifice to the Goddess of Ignorance throughout the length and breath of the land. But one will say, ‘‘The land has to be cleared.” Yes, and no. It was necessary indeed to obtain land for the plough, but what I shall endeavour to shew in these pages, is that, had great reserves of the inferior lands, and of the mountain lands, been spared the axe, in proper and intermediate positions, good and constant succession of trees, and large supply of timber might have been obtained therefrom, while the land which was cleared would not only have yielded larger crops than the present much broader acreage affords, but would have yielded them at a much smaller cost of anxiety and labour. This point once demonstrated, we shall probably obtain some valuable ideas as to the road to be travelled in utilizing the forests which yet remain to us. In the settlement of woodlands, such as Ontario was once entirely, it would be well that those entrusted with the duty of choosing the sections to he occupied by new comers, should reserve large portions of inferior land for forest purposes. The settler here, in many cases, cleared, much to his own injury, hill, swamp, sand and hard pan which might well have been left untouched, while there was, at no great distance, plenty of excellent land. That poor land, left in forest, would have, by its climatic influence, rendered much more easy, and consequently, much more lucrative, the production of crops on the other, and would also, if fairly used, have continued an inexhaustible reserve of timber, of fire- wood, and of fence. Allow me to give an instance of my own experience in this matter, illustrative of the way in which heights of land, which should above all have been kept in forest, have been carelessly deforested in Ontario. On one of my expeditions many years back, undertaken in company with some other young men for the purpose of choosing farms among the vast forests then existing in the Province, after travelling a good many miles, we came to a district where there was evidently much good land, none of which, however, seemed at that time to be in the market. It was a broad and a splendid forest, dense with vast elm and heavy oak. There on all sides rose the mighty maple, rich in promise of sap and overflowing trough, intermixed with many a lofty basswood not unsuggestive of futures even sweeter, for amid the blossoms thick among its massing foliage, high over- head in buzzing millions the wild bees toiled and sang. Here and there, perhaps miles apart, a settler had cleared a limited rectangular space, his small log barn and smaller house half hidden by the waving luxuriance of his little patch of Indian corn, his field of wheat, his bit of meadow, where, tall, interweaving with each other, and covered with dull red flowers the clover and timothy, vigorous from the untired soil, climbed high against and even overtopped the four-foot fences. All here was deep and loamy clay. Travelling through continual and overhanging forest, we were not aware of the elevation, but in fact the country through which we were passing was the gradually arising slope of a mountain range. We passed on further, the land did not now appear so rich. It was still strong and fertile clay, but not at all the equal of that we had left. The oaks were smaller, the maples harder of trunk, and dying at the top, dark masses of hemlock frowned perpetual from the glade, and every here and there the spectre-like balsam, high, gaunt and spire-crowned, pointed his warning branches to the hard, red soil below. However, persuaded by settlers, who at any risk wished to bring other settlers around them, we bought land, cleared it and built on it. Other settlers came and did likewise. Then a while afterwards, when our road and clearings had introduced daylight for many a mile, we understood what we had done—we had occupied the height of land. The rich slope we had passed on one side was equalled, had we gone that far, by a slope of equal richness on the other side of the mountain. But we had halted, and many had halted, on the watershed, the summit of the mountains, a great table-land of many thousand acres, rich in its uncleared state with springs of water (on my hundred acres I had six or eight which promised to be never-failing), but of far inferior land to that which lay below. There was the great mistake. The authorities of that day knew nothing of it, the settlers knew nothing of it; and those great slopes, extending many a league, are now cleared of trees from highest ridge to far-distant valley on hither and farther slope, or showing every prospect of becoming so. The inevitable consequences will as surely follow. The land, even before I left that part of the country, was washing rapidly from the top. I have seen it gather eighteen inches deep against the fence on the lower side of a field. As for floods, since the leafy guardians of the height have been dislodged, I have seen a creek which would have flowed in full volume between one’s joined hands, with two hours’ rain roll down a red torrent which bore a ten pound stone some distance on its surface before it sank. The old forest, left above, would have held the rain in bed, leaf, and tangled brushwood for days, and sent it forth in gentle and gradual streams to the slope below. The summit land should never have been sold for settlement. With proper care in thinning and reproduction of trees, fenced against cattle and managed by foresters, that wide extent of tree-crowded height might have stood for ever a valuable forest, furnish- ing yearly lucrative supplies of saleable timber, and a far greater benefit, giving a continual fertility—by attracting rain, by preserving its former steady and numerous water-courses (seven-eighths of which are now dried up), and by preventing the now per- petual washing away of the soil—to all the far greater extent of far more easily cultivable land below. Let any one who’knows the district I speak of think how scarce barn timber and even firewood now is there, and consider how valuable a large reserve on the height would have been to the whole country. This opportunity exists no more. The land is in private hands or it is cleared. But we have many mountain ranges still unsold which might be better managed. Perhaps I may be permitted to refer again to my remembrances, and to remark that, a life-long resident of Ontario, and in my day largely engaged in clearing the forest, besides having had continual occasion to observe the work done in the same line by many of my relatives, who, coming to this country in the earlier part of the century, were mostly farmers, and what was long synonymous, choppers, I necessarily know some- thing of the process and results of clearing. Their axes rung in many an Ontario forest— in the dense bush near Chatham, among the heavy beech of the old Trafalgar survey, on the pines of the Yonge street line, away north in the Gwyllimburies, farther yet to the right and left of the Georgian Bay, in the woods where now stands Whitby town, and in many another forest glade, now forest glade no more. I have seen vast districts around me, where from elevated points we could once overlook many thousand square miles of forest and of lake, changed in a few years from leafy shades to sunny fields. In all my experience, though I have known many farmers who, believing that “ther’ll allus be wood,” cleared off every stick, and have now for many years bought wood, and in some cases coal; and though I knew some (myself included) who made spasmodic and ignorant attempts to preserve some forest, yet [ never knew one who seemed at all likely to secure to his successors enough timber on their own land. No doubt there are such ; but I have not been aware of them. This arose from many causes. Some cared little so their turn was served, and I have seen a farmer point to his ten or twenty acres of wood yet uncleared, with the remark, “ Well, I guess that’ll last my time. I didn’t own no bush to begin with, nor no land neither, and my sons’ll be better off than I was, for they’ll have the land anyhow. Be- sides, there'll always be lots of wood in this here wooden country.” Then, the pressure .of poverty was sometimes severe, and men sometimes driven almost to starvation point, had little scruple in destroying a hundred dollars’ worth of timber to procure five dollars’ worth of wheat, when they knew they could get the five dollars, could not get the hun- dred then, and were by no means sure that they ever would. Again, ignorance was very general. Few of us knew that, in destroying the forests, we were, in effect, pledging ourselves to pay a heavy rent for our farms. There is nothing now better known to the world of science, than the fact that any deforested country will cost the cultivator at least four or five dollars more per acre, to obtain the same crops which nature would have assisted him to procure, had a proper interspersion of forest reserves remained to continue the natural moisture and preserve the original fertility of the soil. And I may remark that it was impossible that this should be then known, as it is known in the present day. The knowledge, or rather the proof of the knowledge, had not been arrived at. It is only of late years that even the older nations of Europe have attempted carefully to investigate the matter. For instance, when, in 1870, I took occasion to write in the “Canada Farmer,” and other journalistic literature of the day pretty extensively concerning this matter, I found no such stores of knowledge, or of reference, as at present exist. Even in that short interval of twelve years great progress has been made. Fresh experiments have been carried out, and new and valuable information obtained, in American, European and Asiatic countries. The American Government, warned by the rapid decrease of their forests, and consequent and evident injury to the productive power of their soil, have for some years past had in operation a Forestry Bureau, which, under the efficient management of Dr. Hough, is doing excellent service, and has now issued its third volume of reports. France and Switzerland, convinced by recent experience of the injurious results of deforesting their mountain districts, are replanting at great expense the most elevated plateaux. In the case of the former country, vast additional outlay has been incurred, and with the most gratifying success, in establishing along the sea coast great plantations of valuable timber, a benefit to the climate, a source of profit to the proprietors, and a complete remedy for, and prevention against the wind-carried waves of sea sand, which previously every adverse gale scattered in masses far inland, to the utter destruction of the arable soil. In both these countries, within the same period, as well as in Germany, in the far distant region of Australia, and, indeed, in most civilized lands, schools of forestry have been improved or have been established, provision made for the drawing thence annually a body of trained foresters. for the service of the State, and governmental machinery created, whereby their services will be at once and continually available for the preservation of existing and the planting of fresh sections of woodland. But of all this, while the chief mass of Ontario timber was destroyed, little was known to the world, and less to the destroyers. If, here and there some one had more. skill in natural philosophy than his brethren of the log heap, he also had skill to see that he alone could not impress the masses in such a matter, and that his efforts would do but little to preserve the naturally assisting relation between forest leaf and ear of grain. Some few I heard of as having enclosed, thinned and protected from fire and cattle their modicum of woodland ; but so few and far between were these that I never knew person- ally one. JI knew thousands who did not. Those few who had means and will lacked experience and teachers. I remember, when little over twenty years of age, I made my first experiment in clearing a hundred acres. I left ten acres of solid, lofty timber in a strip along the north side as a shelter against the coldest wind. It was for ultimate, not for immediate service, for behind it stretched, broad and untouched, the forest of many miles in depth. The strip, when its border stood fully exposed by my clearing operations, formed a pretty picture. Thick with dense young trees below, and great hemlocks, red oaks of mighty size, waving beech and heavy maple nodding their leafy heads, above, it stood (for my fires had not touched it), from ground to summit twigs, a wall of living green ; which, when the cool daybreak air of June, purified beyond the imagination of city dwellers by many a charcoal heap, had covered the great leaf masses, the branches, the angular rail fence below, and every forest weed around, with myriads of bright and glancing drops of dew, shone, flashed and waved along its whole emerald length, and down a thousand opening and closing vistas, like the wall of Fairy-land itself, ‘These other country fellows,” thought I, “chop down everything, but I shall preserve thir beautiful growth, at least, whatever happens.” Well, time passed on. Next year was a dry summer, and an English gentleman who knew considerably less than the little we knew, cleared at one fell swoop a hundred acres behind mine, and burnt the soil of half his farm beyond redemption in the process. I was many miles away, and what shall hinder his fires from, by way of a gentle commencement, running all around the border, and some forty feet into my pretty reserve. Down went my young maples by the thou- sand; my little hemlocks, their roots burnt from under them, stood in blackened and spectre-like rows. The beauty of the strip was gone. Next year, a poor settler lived near with some cattle he could not feed, so turned them loose. They did not leave a young tree nor a green branch they could reach in my ten acres. The result of these combined attacks was that the moisture seemed to leave the strip. The vegetable coating of massing rootsand rotting leaves was swept away, and the great trees which fire and cattle could not destroy, seemed to dry, perish and fall of pure desiccation. In five years the green bit of fresh forest was a desolation of dry and rattling stalks, fit for nothing but the axe, and scarcely for that. But (and here was our lack of knowledge) had fire and cattle been excluded, the green bush had, with care, been green to-day. Throughout Ontario clearing has been largely similar. It has been pursued without plan or system, utterly oblivious of the great and vital principle that, in this country, as in all others, there were certain portions which should be left as forest, because the ground would be valuable for that purpose, and scarcely for any other; and certain por- tions which should also be so left, as elevated above the rest, they form the natural conductors to attract rain, store-houses to preserve it, and slopes down which, in driest weather, the refreshing streams still carry the reserved moisture from the wooded hill top, to the arid and parching soil at a distance, but below. Then, as for reserves on each farm of timber and fire-wood ; let us consider how these have been provided for :— On each one, two, or three hundred acre lot as it happened, the original proprietor left generally “some bush,” here, there, or anywhere in that part where it would least interfere with the cultivation of his cleared land. Well, fire would run in some of these reserved portions and it would blow down, fill with weeds, become an eyesore and be cleared off and “ cropped.” Or, the farm would be divided and sold; the bush lot buyer would have too much bush, and would clear most of it, so that now the two or three hundred acres would have but ten or twenty acres of forest. Or, the whole would be cleared; the cultivators saying to one another, “Oh, there’s lots of bush down on the sandy flats that never will be cleared (and here comes in the saving clause) in our time; we can always get wood hauled to our own doors in winter at one or one and a half dollars a cord. Let us clear off all the plaguy trees and crop the land!” . Or, a demand for cordwood for railroad or other purposes would spring up, and the farmer would be induced to sell his bush to the choppers. Notice how this would affect the one who had cleared. He had said, ‘“S3o-and-so has hundreds of acres of wood ; he can always sell to me.” Others say so of others; but the demand carries off the very woods they had been depending on. Then they must cut down the small groves they had been intending to keep “no matter what happens ;’ or they go to others and say, “ Well, wood’s very scarce round here; I don’t want a twenty miles’ hauling job ; tell you what, if you’ll let me have some out of your ten acre block, I'll give you a dollar and a half a cord and cut for myself. There!” The offer seems large to one who has been used to pay for having the wood destroyed, and he takes it. Others offer more, and the ten acre lot goes, and is in grass. Then the masses of woods, bounding his vision on every side, here a solid wall bordering his farm, there a strip along the horizon, were at first apt to deceive the settler into a belief of the continuance of the forest. I mentioned one a few lines back as saying, “There will always be wood on the sandy flats.” I will give here a little bit of experience showing how such expectations have been dissipated. Along the low shores of a great lake stretched a forest, wherein stood cedar trees, good enough and many enough for Solomon’s Temple, if he had been contented with white instead of red, intermixed with many a solid acre of the largest and tallest beech, maple and basswood I have ever seen. We used to look from our more elevated region upon this great carpet of tree-tops covering the valley with intermingling foliage, and many of us thought we need keep no timber, we could always buy it or own it there. Well, I was a boy, and mfust needs go raspberry picking one dry summer day, when we had had no rain for six weeks, and we must, of course boil our tea-kettle, or rather big tin can, and apparently the fire went out; and I am afraid in fact, we cared very little whether it did or not, for it was either long before the days, or far beyond the scope of the three months fire regulations, though they now are in full force in that district. Well, we went home, and about a week after, a column of dense black smoke could have been observed to the northward, and somebody said, ‘“‘ There’s a big fire along the shore.” There was indeed. The column of smoke broadened and blackened, and extended for weeks, nor did it subside until the heavy September rain, nor was utterly quenched before the win- ter snow. The devastation was melancholy to behold. The forest had fallen before it like grass before the scythe. Our tea-kettle had cost thousands of acres. Cedar and beech, oak and maple, were no more, and in their place, many summers after, a vast white carpet of close standing Canada thistles used to overspread the land. No more reserve of timber for us along the lake. But some will say, “At all events, the loss of the forest gave room for crops.” Unfortunately, it could not. Nature had planted and cultivated there the only crop such soil could grow. The trees, by protection and careful use, could have been continued a source of income for infinity ; but its burning took the top soil of a few inches of black earth from off a carpet of pebble stones and boulders. The best of the soil was gone, and nothing less than three centuries of rest, or the income of a Rothschild could restore it. The settler, too, can never fully realize the vast power of the settlers who are coming. He sees indeed, the sixty or a hundred acres on which he has abolished the forest ; but still he sees everywhere the embowering shade ; he drives to the village through avenues of trees; he visits the next farmer across five miles of dense wood ; nearly every hundred acres he sees is a hundred acres of timber, but he does not so well understand, at first, that for each there is an owner, ‘and that each piece of good and many of poor land will as surely, in a few years, find some one prepared to clear it, as that each separate snow- flake ina January field will before June meet a sunbeam to disperse it into air. If we look from end to end throughout the settled portion of Ontario, we shall find what the foregoing observations have led us toexpect. There are as yet, on many farms, portions of forest remaining, generally of small extent. But, as a rule, little care is taken to exclude cattle or to continue in its efficacy the timber plantation as a perpetual source whence many sturdy trees can every year be taken without injury to the continu- ance of the grove. On the contrary, all over our older districts, as any one who has travelled them as I have for the last forty years is well aware, the patches of reserved timber are every year becoming smaller and smaller, nor is there any replantation observable, at all calculated to fill their place. It must be thoroughly understood that unless powerful efforts be made in the direc- tion of replanting, the cultivated portions of Ontario will become almost denuded of trees, The whole force of circumstances and nature point inflexibly in that direction. Portions of the forest left standing will not, without care, continue many years in a state produc- tive of timber or beneficial to the climate. These trees have grown, root and trunk, in the shade. The outside rows, exposed to the sun, wither gradually, decay, and are easily uprooted by the force of the wind, injur- ing the inner and younger trees in their fall. Then, if cattle are allowed entrance they will kill every young tree, a process which, as far as my observation extends, dries up the soil in small blocks of forest, and precipitates windfalls of large trees in all directions. In fine, the forest in most sections of Ontario, if left to itself in isolated patches, rapidly deteriorates. When we add to this the continual pressure in all directions, inducing owners to sell their wood and clear their lands, we must admit that if no active move- ment be made-for their preservation, the forests which once overspread Ontario will soon give place to a bare and denuded surface, broken only by the low branches of an occa- sional orchard or the few trees which some one, here and there, has set in line along his fences or around his house. That there is cause for much apprehension in the matter is a fact which can be well proven by contemporary experience, and it would be impossible to find a better method of obtaining such than by examining what has happened in those portions of Canada settled previously to our own. Let us look to old Lower Canada, the present, Province of Quebec. Let us first consider the character of its inhabitants. The Lower Canadians are industrious, thrifty and home-loving. Their climate isa severe one. So far as the habits of their ancestors may be thought to influence, it may be remarked that no other nation were so careful in the preservation of their forests as, when they settled Quebec, were the French. There is, then, every reason to suppose that Quebec has been as well treated in that respect as Ontario is likely to be. May I, then, ask the attention of my readers to the condition of the older settled portions of Quebec, a state of affairs which any one travelling in that Province can verify, and which no one aware of the character of the witness whose testimony I am about to quote, will for a moment doubt. I allude to the Hon. H. G. Joly, of Quebec, from whose valuable report on ‘Forestry in Canada” I shall elsewhere quote further. With reference to the matter at present before us he says :— “ As far back as the year 1696 the attention of the French Governors of Canada was drawn to the wasteful destruction of the forests, and they were called upon to check it. Nothing, however, was done by them, and little has been done since. The result stares us reproachfully in the face, especially in the Province of Quebec, the oldest in the Dominion. ‘The old settlements are painfully bare of trees ; you can sometimes go miles without seeing any trees worth looking at, and the passing stranger fancies himself in a country more denuded of trees than the oldest parts of Europe. ‘There is a large district of very good agricultural land south of Montreal, where the scarcity of firewood, which is a matter of life and death in our climate, has compelled many a farmer to sacrifice a fine farm and leave the country. There are many other spots in the Province nearly as bad, and unfortunately the process of destruction is going on even now in more places than one.” There is no reason to suppose that the residents in our Province of Ontario will be, if left to their individual guidance, more careful of their wooden reserves than have been our French Canadian friends. If on the one hand the Lower Canadian habit of parti- tioning their farm lands among the members of a family was likely to create a demand 10 for more fuel and more timber’ from each hundred acres than is our own, it is to be remembered that in their rigorous climate they had greater cause to fear a scarcity, and had every necessity to practise the art of replanting and of husbanding their woodlands. Nor had they at the time most of their clearing was performed an excuse for carelessness in reservation of timber, which has to a great extent prevailed in Ontario, namely,—the certainty of being able, by means of the number of railways, which in every direction chequer the surface of the latter Province, to purchase coal at reasonable rates. The Province of Quebec had been sixty years in the hands of the British before coal was even to any extent used in New York city. On the other hand, to my own knowledge, many an Ontario farmer has cut down his last tree, sold off the timber from his last five or ten acres of bush, with the consoling reflection, “ Well, if the wood does run out, I can get coal, and folks say it’s hotter and cheaper.” Taking all this into consideration, no reason- able observer can doubt that the settled portion of Ontario is on the high road to becoming as destitute of woodland as Mr. Joly’s pamphlet pictures any part of Quebec. And here I will ask my readers to consider a point which might, perhaps, better come later, as more connected with what will then be introduced, but which may be now mentioned as concerning the Province just spoken of. We will remark, before we lose sight of this very important feature, the injurious effect this over