and the kind winds waft it away to the mountain sides, where it feeds the hungry trees. * * * Keeping up a fit proportion of forests to arable land, is the prime condition of human health. If the trees go, men must decay. Whoever works for the forests works for the happiness and permanence of our civilization. A tree may be an obstruction, but it is never useless. Now is the time to work if we are to be blessed and not cursed by the people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The nation that neglects its forests is surely destined to ruin."

Prof. Balfour, of Edinburgh, after citing and considering all the various opinions and theories of naturalists on the subject, says: "From all that has been stated, it would appear that an absorption of carbonic acid by the leaves of plants and an elimination of oxygen takes place during daylight, and that this process ceases in a great measure during the night. The exhalation of carbonic acid by healthy leaves is still doubtful, and the appearance of this acid gas may, in many of the experiments, be traced to an abnormal condition of the leaves. The great function of the leaves thus seems to be deoxydization, by means of which they are instrumental in keeping up the purity of the atmosphere. This function of plants is antagonistic in its results to animal respiration; for while the latter takes oxygen from the atmosphere, and replaces it by carbonic acid, the former removes carbonic acid, fixes carbon, and gives out oxygen. The processes of respiration and combustion are pouring into the atmosphere a large quantity of carbonic acid gas, while the active leaves of plants are constantly removing it, and, under the action of light, substituting oxygen. While plants thus get carbonaceous food, the air is by them kept in a state fitted for animal life."

Prof. Ferdinand Cohn, of Breslau, says: "The leaves are cell-villages which perform their daily tasks in the air and in the light. Their principal business is to obtain coal, which is the chief constituent of the vegetable body. Our atmosphere is an enormous coal mine, many miles in thickness, that cannot be exhausted in thousands of thousands of years. The coal, indeed, is not found pure in the air any more than the metal in the ore, but is, in combi nation with oxygen as a transparent gas, carbonic acid, and a peculiar art is required to separate it.

"In the mining districts, smelting houses are erected beside the pits, where the noble metal is extracted from the impure ores.

The green cells of the leaves combine the art of the miner with that of the smelter, and have the power of extracting the pure carbon from the atmosphere. In order to perform this work they must be shown up by the sun, for the sunlight alone can excite in them the marvellous faculty, Having extracted the carbon they combine it with water and with the mineral substances that have been drawn from the soil, and prepare from them the living matters out of which the plant itself builds up its cells and which, taken up into the body of an animal, are transformed by it into flesh and blood.

Prof. Schacht of the University of Bonn, says: "A mountain cliff, or a forest, are the natural protection against wind. In this respect, the forest cannot be without beneficial effect on the adjacent country; the young growth of trees flourishes, screened from the force of the wind, the arable land develops itself better, and the noxious influence of dry winds is turned aside. It is an indisputable fact that the forests exercise a salutary influence upon the temperature of a country." The value of trees as a protection against malaria is attracting much attention and in many places the planting of trees in malarious districts has been followed, apparently, with beneficial effects. "It has been observed," says Becquerel, "that humid air charged with miasmata is deprived of them in passing through the forest." The belief that trees planted in rows or belts afford an important protection against malarious and miasmatic vapors obtained long ago firm foothold in Italy and is now generally adopted, and the beneficial effects of a forest wall as a protection against noxious exhalations from marshes or other sources of disease are very generally admitted.

The United States Division of Forestry, having undertaken to collect information on the general sanitary effects of forests, with reference to our own country, announces in the annual report for 1885:

"As to the influence of forests upon climate the replies to the circulars are less satisfactory and of less value than they are in regard to the effects of forests upon the flow of the streams, as might have been expected. It requires a nicer and more methodical observation to ascertain the former than the latter. The shrinkage of streams and the alternations of flood and drought are obvious to all who dwell near them, whether they are intelligent enough to assign the proper causes of them or not. The occasional testimony of

the eye is all sufficient. But, it is only a higher order of observers who are competent to give testimony as to variations of climate and the extent to which such variations should be ascribed to one cause. or another. We shall have to wait, therefore, until we have such observers in sufficient number and they have extended their observations over a sufficient length of time to eliminate errors which may attach to particular instances, before we shall have a body of evidence which will be generally accepted as conclusive. Meantime we must depend upon the results of the observations which havebeen made by competent persons in other countries where the study of forestry has long been prosecuted and is not a novelty of the day. We have some truly scientific observers in regard to this as well as other subjects. They are doing useful work. But we need many more for the wide expanse of our country, not only in connection with our colleges and scientific academies, but in all our cities and larger, not to say smaller, towns. It is only by the careful comparison of a multitude of such observations, reaching through many years, that we can arrive at satisfactory conclusions. No agricultural college, at this day, should be regarded as doing its proper work, or as worthy of the name it bears, which has not a chair for instruction in forestry, in connection with which systematic observations in regard to the influence of forests on climate: are made."

Many think with Prof. Brewer of Yale College that, the chief sanitary value of forests is secondary, by their aid in furnishing water, or in hoarding the water supply. As to the aid that forests lend to the accomplishment of these ends there seems to be little doubt, and a fair unanimity of opinion. Whether, or not, rainfall is actually augmented by forests is still a mooted question, and notwithstanding much discussion as to the influence of forests on precipitation, there is yet much difference of opinion as to the effect of that influence and the way in which it is exerted, if exerted at all. In his discussion of the subject, Marsh, while questioning whether, taking the whole surface of the earth together, forests sensibly effect the total quantity of precipitation, or even that they had this influence when their extent was much greater than at present, he yet gives it as the opinion of the majority of foresters and physicists who have studied the question, that in many, if not in all cases, the destruction of the woods has been followed by a

diminution in the annual quantity of rain and dew. We cannot positively affirm, he says, that the total annual quantity of rair is diminished or increased by the destruction of the woods, though both theoretical considerations and the balance of testimony strongly favor the opinion that more rain falls in wooded than in open countries. An eminent French writer, Boussingault, whose observations on the drying up of lakes and springs from the destruction of the woods in tropical America, have often been cited as a conclusive proof that the quantity of rain was thereby diminished, after examining the question with much care remarks, "in my judgment, it is settled that very large clearings must diminish the annual fall of rain in a country, and that arguing from meteorological facts collected in the equinoctial regions there is a reason to presume that clearings diminish the annual fall of rain."

"It is not necessary," says Mr. George B. Loring of Massachusetts, in his address to the American Forestry Congress at St. Paul, "to assume that forests induce a heavier rainfall, or even to show that they influence locally the distribution of rain, to prove their beneficence in regulating the moisture available for the use of agriculture. The foliage of forests resists the violence of storms, breaks the force of the rainfall which percolates through the covering of leaves and moss, and is absorbed by the humus beneath to be given out by the slow process of retarded evaporation, the surplus finding its way to the springs deep in the earth. In an open field the storm beats with unbroken violence upon the surface impacted and hardened under the rays of the sun, fails to penetrate the soil, and rushes on in turbid streams down the slopes to swell the brooks and rivers, and instead of refreshing the earth, scarifying and wasting it. The world is full of examples of once verdant and productive areas which have become burned and blackened deserts. The gradual desiccation of the once green and productive islands of the West Indies, Santa Cruz and St. Thomas, which has been progressing for many years, is the result of the destruction of private forests. The little Island of Curacoa, where rich plantations, beautiful villas and terraced gardens have given place to aridity and desolation, because of the export of its valuable timber, is a striking illustration of the changes wrought by forest destruction. The entire coast of the Mediterranean, once the garden of the world, has been blighted into comparative barrenness by the denudation of the forest areas.

A portion of this territory, the Karst region of southern Austria, bordering on the Adriatic, has been the scene of extensive reforesting work of the Austrian government. Centuries ago it was covered with magnificent oak forests, and furnished piles and shipbuilding timber to Venice during her brilliant maritime career. So dense was the forest upon the Istrian coast that a squirrel could traverse it for miles on the branches of the trees. It was plundered systematically by Venetian spoilers, till the whole region was reduced to barrenness and poverty. For a score of miles north of Trieste the soil itself was washed away by the floods after the exportation of timber had been followed by relentless fires, leaving the bare rock in rugged masses as the sole covering of the surface. The work of restoration, commenced nearly twenty years ago, was one of exceeding difficulty. difficulty. Exposure to sun Exposure to sun and rain had exhausted the fertility of any remaining forest humus; the underlying masses of chalk were seamed and honeycombed with cavaties requiring a mixture of underlying clay to sprout either grass-seed or tree-seed. Millions of trees were annually supplied by the government nurseries of Austrian pine, ash, larch and other varieties, and year after year the slow and patient effort has been continued with results that promise the ultimate renovation of a vast area of several hundred thousand trees, though the blasted district. is yet a scene of comparative desolation, requiring millions of treasure and years of patient labor to restore a tithe of its profusion of forest wealth.

The productive capacity of the United States is due not alone to the great fertility of its central areas, but, in a large measure, to the amount and reasonable distribution of the rainfall. The lower latitudes, the Southern States, where high temperatures prevail and evaporation is greatest, have a rainfall of forty, fifty and sixty inches annually, with a liberal distribution through the summer months. The lake region and the Ohio basin have less, yet a good supply, suited to more temperate conditions, a lower temperature and less evaporation. Yet the droughts that occassionally prevail, and which are most severe on the borders of he wooded belt, as in Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, should admonish us to avail ourselves of the local benefits of forests in the equalization and conservation of the rainfall actually received."