Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest

The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. With growing numbers, too, come the many arts for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a fortunate circumstance for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colonial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the forests of that continent. Quebec has become a centre for a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, consequently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, rivals the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense rafts are collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its mighty tides. Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as crowded with vessels as the Thames. Of late, Chicago, in Illinois, has been one of the greatest lumber as well as grain depots of the United States, and it receives and distributes contributions from all the forests in the States washed by Lake Michigan, as well as from some more distant points.

The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The narrow clearings around his shanties form openings which let in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects which breed in dead wood, and are, some of them, injurious to living trees. The escape and spread of camp fires, however, is the most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their origin in the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only these fall before the forester's axe, but the fire destroys, indiscriminately, every age and every species of tree. While, then, without much injury to the younger growths, the native forest will bear several "cuttings over" in a generation—for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before rejected as unmarketable—a fire may render the declivity of a mountain unproductive for a century.