The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1877-09-01
SUPPLEMENT- to the F. C. ADVERTISER, Sept lst

denotes. But in some of our Southern and Cen
trail States this limit has already been passed.
The States of Ohio and Indiana, and the southern
parts of Kentucky and Michigan, so recently q
part of the great forest, have
even now q greater percentage OF treeless area
than Austria and the North-German Empire,
that have been settled and cultivated for upward
of a thousand years. The northern borders OF
Ohio are kept comparatively fertile by the neigh
borhood of the great lakes, but the centra! re-
gions, and many of the river counties, begin to
suffer from drought, and see their springs fail in
every summer. The " Blue Grass " region OF
Kentucky, once the pride of the West, has now
districts of such 2 barren and arid nature that
their stock farmers are moving toward the Cum
berland Mountains, because the creeks and old
springs dried up, and their wells became too low
to furnish water for their cattle.
Wherever tobacco and cotton are cultivated,
the work of ruin has made rapid advances, and
in all the southeastern counties of Virginia and
North Carolina, and throughout Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, the tray
eler may ride for hours without seeing more than
four or five trees in a group; droughts are becom-
ing more and more frequent, and the locust, that
ominous pioneer of the desert, has made its ap-
pearance.
The climatic influence of arboreal vegetation
must be more generally understood, before such
legislative measures as the importance of the
subject demands, can be hoped for. In the
economy OF nature forests perform innumerable
IuuCllOuS u1C LO AZ N0h LII
tate, and of which the following are only the
most important:
Woods, in the first place, are the water reser-
voirs of Nature, and hold in the net work of
their roots and their mose-carpet the moisture
which is intended to supply our water courses IN
the season of midsummer heat. One acre of
full grown beech trees absorbs and dispenses as
much humidity as twenty acres of grape vines
and tobacco, and more than two hundred acres of
cereals.
Forests produce rain. Under the influence
of vertical sun-rays trees exhale the aqueous
vapors which their leaves have absorbed from
the atmosphere, and in contact with the night
air or any stray current of lower temperature.
these vapors discharge rain-showers even in mid
summer, and at a great distance from the
sea.
By moistening the air woodlands also moder-
ate the extremes of heat and cold. 1t is seen
on the sea-shore how benefcently humidity
operates in allaylng the severity of winter, and
in summer the evaporation of dew and rain
gives us cool breezes when they are most needed.
By the extirpation of forests the climate of the
entire Cribs ROmanuS has been changed from
the summer temperature of West Virginia to
the furnace-heat of New Mexico and Ari-
IONA.
Besides this, the forest by shade in summer
and fuel in winter protects us directly against
the vIcissitudes of temperature, and at the
foot of high mountains interposes a mechanical
IVA ~ w bHN oAANJ ulu Nu1luCuC III /
the north, and floods in the south. The water
which not only flood and damage the
lowlands, but carry their fertile soil away, are
or detained by extensive forests.
Joseph ii. of Austria wss right to attach
heavy penalties to the destruction of the
So Bannwalder, % the woods on the Alpine slopes,
that protect the valleys from avalanches, and
to propose that in wars, even a / OutTance,
the trees of a country should be spared by
international agreement.
Our woods are also the home and shelter of
those best friends of man, the insectivorous
birds. A country destitute of trees is avoided
by birds, and left to the ravages of locusts
and other insects, which, as we saw on our own
continent, always attack the barren and naked
districts. Our locust-swarms devastated the
8 Great Vest i. e., the treeless expanse be-
'ween the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains,
but spared the woodlands of the Alleghanies
md the timber-regions of the Pacific slope.
The exhilarating influence of a woodland
is not altogether due to scenic effects
md Imagination. Forests exbale oxygen, the
ife-air of flames and animal lungs, and absorb
n neutraliZea a variety, of noxious gases. Scirr-
lous affections of the skin and other diseases
under the disinfecting influence of
DIR. Brehm observes that ophthal-
MIA and leprosy, which have become heredi-
airy diseases, not only in the valley of the Nile,
tut also on the table-lands of Barca and Tripoli,
re utterly unknown in the well-timbered valley
f Abyssinia, though the Abyssinians live
nore than a hundred geographical miles nearer
0 the equator than their afflicted neighbors.
The traditions of the " blessed islands of the
the " Garden of the Hesperides,' - pro-
ably referred to Madeira and the Cape-Verde I
archipelago, which, according to De Gama's
escription, must have come nearer to our idea
f terrestrial paradise than any other region
f this earth. The ills that flesh here is heir !
- he says, "are only three wounds, the
fleets of poison, and deerepitude-the latter
,.I- l. Sc hacora kba oopo.Io
on of the ninetieth year." Since the Por- v
lguese have felled their glorious forests for G
he sake of madeira (building-material), these
lands have become hot-beds of disease.
The valley of the Guadalquivir, as late ASIA =
,ntury before the discovery of America, sup
orted a population of 1000, 900 of probably q
lie healthiest and happiest men of Southern
urope. Since the live-oak and chestnut groves
the surrounding heights have disappeared
lis population has shrunk to a million and q
larter of sickly wretches, who depend for 4
sustenance on the scant produce of sandy 4
Irrens that become sander and drier from .
ar to year.
It would be exaggeration to say that the
of a treeless country is an evil with
It remedy. Nature is always ready to assist
any work of regeneration. and there is no III
sert so void and naked that it might not be
in the course of halfa century. The
of Egypt has wrested land from the
nd-wastes as the Hollanders win it from the
q, and by a cheaper process than the building .
extensive dikes. By planting date-palms r
d olive-trees, Egypt has added many hundred "
uare miles to her arabic surface, and, as
Iker- Pasha assures us, her annual rainfall
8 almost doubled. Between Karnak and
odan the rain-guage shows now a yearly
erage of sixteen inches, where nine inches
8 the mailman before 1920. And not only
limits of these tree-plantations, but also
adjoining districts, have been benefited
the table-land of Wady-Halfa the present
is not nearly as oppressive as 1t
s within the memory of men now living, and
rant bushes and wild-mulberries have sprung
where they never grew before. In France, p.
i, the Government has reclaimed the Ldndes, -
andy steppe on the southwestern coast, by
nting willows and bay-trees; and even
yeriae has been improved by the persistent TIA
of the French colonists.
how slow and laborious is this work OF
and how easily might we %forestali
necessity if we would begin in time! A a
oIo tive oct to nrotect the. woods of all the a