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10

ever cut down." But unhappily it is not
necessary to limit ourselves to conjecture
as to what may happen in extreme cases
of this kind. In at least one country in
modern times we have seen exemplified on
the largest conceivable scale the terrible
consequences of deying the ordinances
of Nature by destroying the forests and
neglecting to replace them. "China,"
writes Mr. Emerson Hough, dealing with
"The Slaughter of the Trees" in "Every-
body's Magazine" (May, 1908), "is the
best instance of aland that never cared
for forestry. She builds houses now of
little poles, uses for fuel saplings, shrubs,
herbage. Her children literally comb the
hillsides for bits of roots and shrubs for
fuel and fodder. The land is bared to
the bone. It is a land of floods. Villages
are swept away, hard-tilled fields ruined.
Starvation always stalks in China. Alter-
nate floods and water famines follow the
waste of forests." The most striking il-
lustration of these evils in the history of
China is the record of the Hwang-Ho, the
great Yellow River which drains the
Northern Provinces, and twice within the
last forty years has flooded vast areas of
nesely peopled country, destroying mil-
lions of the inhabitants in a few hours.
In the great flood of 1868, and again in
1887, the Hwang-Ho is credited with
something like seven million victims; and
considering that the floods covered ten
thousand square miles of territory,
studded with 3000 villages, the estimate
is probably not excessive. Possibly the
illustrations to this paper-some of which
were submitted to Congress by President
Roosevelt, with his last Message, in
which he dealt with the necessity for
reforesting the United States-may
give some faint idea of the ruin
and desolation that thus inevitably
follow the Passing of the Forest.
In China the work of destruction
is still going on. The Hwang Ho is peri-
odically flooded, and millons of lives are
sacrified simply because the forests in
Northern China have been cut down and
never replaced. "They cut off the trees
then the shurubs, then the grass until not
a single living thing remained on the
mountain sides. The rain washed the
soil from the rocks. With infinite pati-
ence every year they build terraces wher-
ever they can to save a little of the soil
for agriculture. The once fertile valley
lands are covered with gravel and rocks,
the debris of floods. The territory that
was once fertile is now bare, its flourish-
ing cities are falling into decay, the land
is becoming uninhabitable." And all this
devastation and waste of property and
life, and this destruction of man's handi-
work have been due to the reckless cut-
ting down of forests. The picture of de-
solation that some of these illustrations
reveal may stand as a general type of
the effects of deforestation in all coun-
tries in varying degrees. The loss of fer-
tile soil, the submergece of productive
land under a superincumbent load of bar-
ren debris and detritus from the hillsides,
the choking of river beds, the diversion of
reivers from their courses, and the disas-
trous floods that inevitably follow such
changes-all these evils are in every land
the direct consequence of the wholesale
extirpation of timber trees.

WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES SUFFER.

It would be easy to accumulate great
masses of evident of a character
similar to the foregoing, but I may
content myself with a few typical
instances. In Stanford's "Compendium
of Geographay and Travel," I find the
following reference to Cyprus in regard
to deforestation and its effects:-"The
disappearance of the woods, now reduced
to about 400 square miles in the southern
uplands, has seriously affected agricul-
tural prospects. With the forests went
the soil which was washed down to the
plains, choked the river beds and formed
malarious swamps; the hills became bare
rocks incapable of growing a blade of
grass, and the locust at once took pos-
session of the barren ground; whilst the
absence of trees deprived the earth of
its annual fertilising leaf mould. There
is now stony desert at the S.E. end