The Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1877-1885, 1884-08-06
Forest Destruction.

The London Times in its mention of
the recent International Forestry Exhi-
bition saws that centuries will hardly re-
pair the havoc wrought by fifty years
of unrestrained arboricide on the Alps,
the Pyrenees, the Apprentices, in Scot
land, Ireland, Denmark and North
America. Half Spain has been reduced
TO parched desert by the insanity,
though of longer standing than this sim
gle century, which denuded its sierras
of their shade. Italy totters on the
brink of a similar fate as the result
of more recent folly. Ireland, as was
lately explained, has been impoverished
by the destruction of sheltering foliage.
Vast tracts of Jutland have been
changed into heathery wastes by the
telling of the pines. In North America,
settlers acted as if timber was mere
incumbrance and obstruction, Since it
has been admitted to be commercially
of value, its fortune has been almost
worse. The population has regarded
its forests as mine of which the proper
destiny was to be straightayay severed
flssm the soil. For twenty years after
United States. the Ratchet ragged with
fury against the noblest woods in the
universe. In defiance of laws it contin-
ues Vindictive attacks.
Fear for the supply of fuel brought the
first pause in the devastation of Europe.
Flenchmep. AMI Germans began to be
alarmed that cutting without planting
mus end in nothing to burn. In this
country, which could dispense with
wood rs fuel, similar return to COM
mon sense proceeded from a discovery
that soil incapable of agriculture might
give profit as woodland. Only grad
ually has the more important discovery
been made, or poplrarized, that trees
may be in the highest degree profitable
though they be neither timber or fuel.
A mass of irrefutable evidence has dam
onstrated that trees play part in the
economy of nature for which no equal
substitute can be found. Coal may sup
plant wood as fuel. Iron may replace
teak and pine in shipyards. Danish
peasants may do without wooden clogs,
and authors may learn to dip their pens
in other gall than that from the
oak. Nature very seldqm arrives at an
effect in one way without leaving room
for human ingenuity to accomplish
it in another. Some natural pro-
cesses are at once so beneticent and so
complex that for man not to avail him.
self of them as they are is to sacrihc
| irretrievably the most manifest advant-
age Nature fits up in every wood a per-
feet laboratory auxiliary to the ends fol
which the farmer labors. Agriculture,
which strips a country of wood, con
dennis itself to the supertiuous cost o.
| trying, with success at best only par
! tial, to create artificial alternatives. The
| Laputan conaensers of sunbeams out Of
| cucumbers were not more foolish thar
the exterminators in the Old World and
the New of the vegetable reservoir 9th
erwise styled forests.
The whole case is here stated with the
utmost brevity, clearness and effect. L
is high time that this matter be better
understood The parching fields, failing
streams, and long drouths, with the
increasing necessity for artificial irriga
ton, tell story that could with diff
Guilty be made any more impressive
| Uass1chusetts PO1tUhnan