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Forest trees, for shelter, ornament and profit
Forest trees for shelter ornament and profit Author:Arthur Bryant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION, It is admitted that Trees are essential to .civilization, and the fact is acknowledged that man cannot advance in improvement beyo... more »nd the rudest form of pastoral life, without the use of timber. The question next arises, whether or not onr countrymen will go on recklessly destroying an article of absolute necessity and immense daily consumption, without regard to a source of future supply ? The rapid destruction ' of our forests within the past few years is really appalling. The State of New York, which, not many years since, exported great quantities of pine lumber, now obtains a supply for home consumption from abroad. The forests of Maine are said to be so completely stripped, that scarcely a pine tree of old growth is to be seen. At the present rate of consumption, the pine woods of the Northwestern States are likely to be exhausted in less than twenty-five years. It was estimated that the amount of lumber cut in 1869, in the States of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, was 3,311,372,255 feet. To obtain this quantity, 883,032 acres, or 1,380 square miles, were stripped of their trees. The destruction of hard-wood forests is likewise very rapid. There is a constantly increasing demand for valuable kinds of timber for the manufacture of machinery, farming implements, furniture, railway cars and wooden work of every description. Millions of ties, and millions of cords of firewood, are annually required by railroads. There can be no doubt that previous to the settlement of Central and Northern Illinois, the quantity of timber was annually diminished by the ravages of fire. When these ravages were in a measure stopped, a dense growth of young trees sprang up in the scattered woodlands, and twenty years since there was more wood than at the first set...« less