Let

Then let us take our children and instruct them likewise. the boy, and the girl also, be taught to find pleasure in budding and grafting in the orchard or on the rose bush, in grafting flower roots for the hybrids and fruit roots for the field planting. Let them learn to shape the trees in the orchard to their taste, and to designate the name and character of the fruit by the style of the growth of the tree. Teach them how to plot a flower garden and to cultivate it; how to inoculate flower roots and generate new varieties, how to find soils for their most successful growth, how to combine colors, arrange the floral wreath or basket for the greatest effect. Let them watch the work of their own hands and see its changes, development and results until an interest is awakened in their employment, and a relish and a charm shall arise like spell of a fairy tale and hold them to a love of their occupation with a strength equally binding and a hundred times more healthful and noble than any enthusiast for wealth or art ever could experience. The love of nature's products is more elevating and healthful than any other love can be. The Divine Artist has more skill and the Divine Benefactor has more riches to display than any of his most gifted children. Will we not then go forth and take these proferred riches and teach our children to admire this infinite skill and to engage in those healthful employ. ments, and reap their untold rewards.

The sentence with which we commenced this paper expresses one of the most valuable truths ever uttered. The exhibition of it at the head of the widest circulated agricultural paper in the land for 25 years has not diminished one jot from its grandeur or effectiveness. Such is the nature of fundamental truths; repetition intensifies them; friction brightens them; exhibition gives their worth to the world. This sentence ought to stand at the head of every agricultural paper printed, and in its slightly modified form ought to head the columns of every horticultural periodical, until its invaluable truth has been so oft repeated before the world, that its fundamental lesson shall become the profound conviction of the minds of men, and they shall be moved to irresistable action from it; until our over-filled towns and crowded cities, those hot-beds of disease, crime, insanity, misery and pauperism, shall be eviscerated of their suffering contents, and the people return from worshipping false gods; from idleness, and revelry, and crime, and despair; from fetid air and loathsome apartments and unfit food; from speculative rivalries and dishonest and unproductive employment, to the natural labor of man; the rural industries of earth; to the healthful and productive avocations which the Divine Architect has so wisely designed.

We close with a single quotation: "High scientific authority says that the alarming increase of lunacy and suicide is due to the aggregation of people in metropolitan centers, where business rivalries are intense, and fortunes lost in a day.' The doctors

are no doubt right about the matter. Such facts should cause the blessings of rural life to be more highly appreciated than they now are." The most attractive and valuable portions of our modern cities are not their art productions; their huge manufacturing prisons; their colossal warehouses; their magnificent streets of marble and iron fronts, nor their palatial Beacon Hill or Fifth Avenue residences. Nor their museums and picture galleries and state and government buildings, or even their schools and colleges of learning. But it is their Honewell gardens and Central parks, and their Vick's and Hovey's floral and garden farms to which we invite our visiting friends; and above all, and of more value than all, are those rural suburban homes that have come so recently to encircle those metropolitan centers. Those sweet, quiet, healthful spots of natural beauty that bespangle their sur rounding bills and plains. These are the places to which our merchant princes, and manufacturing lords, and govermental czars, and educational savans, and every successful citizen, teacher and common laborer alike love to resort, and delight to honor. These are their nightly and Sabbath homes; their cherished and sacred sauctuaries of rest and thought and recuperation. Here is where they get their strength and their manhood renewed, and they are the jewels of horticulture. Let their number become greater, their influence broader and their healthfulness stronger and sweeter while fruits and flowers shall grow and men and women live to enjoy them.

TREES FOR THE ROADSIDE AND FARM.

H. M. THOMPSON, ST. FRANCIS.

Well situated and properly distributed woodlands are indispensable requisites to a successful agriculture. The immortal Humboldt says: "The forests are nature's reservoirs, the destruction of which is a two-fold calamity." 1st. Scarcity of wood for economic uses. 2d. Scarcity of water." To which may be added, 3d. Deterioration of climatic condition essential to the health of man. 4th. Lessening of agricultural productions. 5th. Loss of individual and national wealth, diminution of population and powers, causing a relapse to barbarism.

By means of the destruction of forests, climates have changed to great and sudden extremes, surface soils have been abraded; the beds of rivers elevated; level lands inundated by torrents; the mouths of rivers blockaded by sand bars; harbors destroyed; cities buried by drifting sands; soils have become sterile and vegetation impaired or destroyed; agricultural communities have

been scattered and reverted to barbarism, and with forest products no longer at command, nations have ceased to exist.

Intolerable extremes of climate, sterility of soil and scant population exist at the present day in Central Asia, Asia Minor, the Desert of Sahara, and the deforested countries bordering upon the Mediterranean Sea and the interior provinces of Portugal and Spain. These countries, which, according to historical records and modern researches and observations, once teemed with a dense and active population, possessed the elements of a progressive civilization, and were the germs or sites of mighty empires, are now, since the destruction of their forests, only known in history, and are inhabited by semi-barbarians or savages, earning a precarious subsistence by the chase, or from the grazing of scattered flocks and herds upon the scant vegetation of their now treeless plains. Since the destruction of the forests in the interior of Portugal and Spain, and in the Maderia and Jamaica Isles, the decrease of humidity in the atmosphere and rainfall has resulted in droughts, causing an annual lessening in the yield or a failure of crops, which has resulted in an abandonment of general agriricultural pursuits.

According to Hartwig, "In the Barbodoes, in consequence of the extirpation of the forests, frequently not a drop of rain falls for three years. In St. Helena the quantity of rain has increased in the same proportion as new woods have been planted, so that it is now about double what it was when Napoleon First resided in the island. In Malta, since the trees have been felled to make room for the increased cultivation of cotton, the rain has very much diminished." The Department of Var, France, abounded in numerous rivulets and streams, but in the year 1821 the olive trees, which from their numbers almost formed continuous woods, were frozen, and afterwards felled, a drying up of the streams was the consequence.

Prof. Dove says that "in the Cape Verde and Canary Islands the forests were felled, those in the Azores were burned, and these islands were transformed into naked rocks; rains which formerly irrigated the earth were dissipated or diminished." From similar causes Bousaingault says, "the streams all dried up in a neighborhood in South America; wars with Spain drove away the colonists, the woods again sprung up, and streams again began to flow in consequence of rains."

In making observations upon the result of forest destruction in South America, Humboldt says, "It has been remarked as increasing cultivation lessens the extent of the forests, the local plantations become less flourishing, and for this reason, these plantations are diminishing in number." Similar results are observed in the former tobacco producing districts of Virginia and Georgia, and in the winter wheat growing districts in New York, southern Michigan and eastern Wisconsin. In these states it is

noticed that since the lessening of the forest area, the sources of streams have dried up, the distribution of rain fall is more irregular, the yield of crops has decreased so largely, that in some portions of Virginia, the older tobacco plantations, once a source of wealth, have been abandoned, and the cultivation of winter wheat has been almost wholly abandoned in the timber region in Wisconsin, bordering on Lake Michigan, owing to a greatly diminished yield and liability to winter kill.

Where the woodlands have been destroyed, "one of the soonest noticed results," says Dr. Lapham "is the disappearance of the springs and the shrinkage of the streams." To this may also be added, the washing of the surface soils, of the high and rolling lands, and the elements of fertility they contain to the low lands or into the rivers, causing obstruction to navigation by the formation of sandbars and the blockade of harbors. The quantity of soil that is thus lost to agriculture can only be approximately estimated. It is stated that the quantity of sediment annually borne by the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico is sufficient to cover a surface one mile square to the depth of 268 feet. If it be estimated that the sediment transported by all other rivers in the United States, equals the quantity borne by the Mississippi, and the average depth of the surface soil be estimated to average four inches, and the washing away of the soil be confined to a limited locality, the area of farm lands thus effectually despoiled for present agricul tural purposes in one year, would equal the enormous sum of 1,608 square miles. Hence, aside from the effects of changed climatic conditions caused by the destruction of the forests, it may safely be concluded that the abrasion of the soil itself and the washing away of the organic and chemical elements of fertility it contains, will cause the most fertile lands in a few centuries at the most, to be changed to sandy, barren deserts. Thus the records of history, the observations and teachings of science and political economy, and the interests of agriculture, admonish us that in order to avert future calamity, some system must be devised for the preservation of a proper proportion of the original forest area, an extension of cultivated forests in treeless regions, and the restoration of woodlands on deforested farms.

TIMES OF PLANTING. The prevailing method of planting forest trees in compact area, regardless of the requirements of men, animals and crops, for shelter, and without regard to an economical distribution of forest products, is a method which has been copied from the practice of individuals and the potentates in Europe and the British Isles, where the principal reservation of forests are confined to one side or one corner of the farm. The reservation and the planting of forests in compact areas, in broken and mountainous countries, or sections of countries situated within the limits of moist trade winds, or in close proximity to bodies of water, or oceanic currents over which the prevailing winds

pass, may be admissible, although even in these cases not as climatically and pecuniarily beneficial in result as might be derived from the adoption of the more systematic method in the form of belts and groups, distributed and proportioned to the wants of each farm.

The form of planting trees by the roadside has been either a single or double line of trees, at one, two or more rods apart in the row, and the rows six or eight feet wide; the object of this form of planting being ornament and partial shade only. Having the single object of ornament in view, such a system of roadside planting may be admissable, but there are other objects to be accomplished; it is necessary to shield the soil and crops from the intense heat of the mid-summer sun; to check the velocity of the winds and thus retard the exhalation of moisture from the soil and vegetation; to fill up nature's reservoirs of moisture in the soil, by cooling and condensing the aqueous vapor in the atmosphere; to store up and modify electrical conditions, and regulate their distribution at those particular periods of the growing season, when the grasses, vegetables, cereals and fruits are approaching their period of greatest development, and consequently require the most favorable atmospheric conditions to enable them to complete the final process of growth; to prevent the occurrence of frost in early spring and late autumn, and thereby lengthen the summer and shorten winter; to retard the velocity of the wintry winds, and thereby lessen the radiation of latent heat, and to modify electrical extremes. It is evident, therefore, that to remedy the evils incident to all treeless countries, forest planting should be of such form or forms, and distributed in such a manner as will most effectively secure the greatest obtainable modification of climate.

Another point to be considered in deciding as to the best form of forest planting, is the question of transportation, viz.: that the wood products designed for economical uses may be utilized at the lowest possible cost of production and transportation. In order to supply treeless counties with forest products, the lumber has generally to be transported long distances, at an enormous loss in waste of material at the points of manufacture, and cost of transportation to points of consumption. According to the United States census of 1870 the value of manufactured lumber including shingles and staves-amounted to $210,159,327. In the present manufacture of lumber, owing to the cost of transportation to distant markets, only the most valuable portions of of the trees are utilized. The slabs, and other imperfect products and the top portion of the trees which go to waste, may be estimated to be equal in bulk to one-half of the utilized products. If these waste products could be utilized for fuel and other purposes, as would be the result if the timber lands were properly distributed, the value of the waste may be estimated at one-half the value of the present utilized lumber products at the places of