Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 May 1875 — Forests and Hydraulics. [ARTICLE]

Forests and Hydraulics.

'[Read by ueo. W. Powell, Chairman of the Forest Co mmittee at the American Institute.] Mechanical engineers may tell us that it is bet tuning a nicely-balanced question to determine whether steam-power or waterpower is the most economical for driving operative machinery. If, however, we ask them how the case would stand if the streams were as free from excessive droughts anti freshets as they were before the deforesting of the hills, their verdict would be emphatic in favor »of waterpower. The great damage already done to our otherwise l*oundless hydraulic power is as certainly attributable to injudicious treatment of our forest interest as its ruin is to result from failure to adopt-scientific-wood-land economies similar to those practiced in the old world: as certain to do so as gravitation is to draw an unsupported body to the earth. If the commonest kind of common sense would not, as it does, teach this, numberless “stubborn facts" stand to testi ty to * When we l- >int to the disappearance of springs, ana 'rge streams as well as small ones where m water collecting and keeping arrangenit at provided by nature has been broken v;\ some of the numerous order of "D<-.bting Xhonias” ask us to prove that this was the cause of the effect. The make-up <Thomas is such that he is hard to be convinced, because he constitutionally prefers not to] see the point; but we can pre-ent facts which can hardly fail to be like gravel in the teeth, even for him. We point him to the New England mountain sprier which President Marsh saw in both conditions. First, lost by cutting off the trees. Second, restored by simply letting the bushes grow on a rocky knoll of only a single half acre in extent just above *it. In the same line of argument v § also present the following from Mons. Clare Etudes, etc., pages 53 and 54: “Eveiy Parisian may convince himself without venturing beyond the Bois de Boulogne or the forest of Let him, after a few rainy days, pass \i. long the Chetreuse road, which is bordered on the right by a wood, on the left by cultivated fields. The fail of water and the continuance of rain have been the same on both sides; but the ditch on the side of the forest will remain filled with water proceeding from the infiltration through the wooded soil long after the other, contiguous to the open ground, has became- dry. The ditch on the left will have discharged in a few' hours a quantity of water] fhich the ditch on the right re-

Suites several days to receive and carry own tiie ’valley." Houssingalttclls us of a large soring in the island of Ascension Which dried up after the wood around it was cut, ami at once reapjieared after reforesting its immediate vicinity. Marschand gives a similar testimony relative to the fouhtain of Yarieux which formerly supplied the Castle of l’runtrut. -He also cites the case of the iron works of Untorwyl, which formerly had an abundance of motive power from the fall of the Some, and which was noted lor being almost unaffected by either drought or heavy rain when the wood around its headwaters was standing, but which liecame as noted for the reverse qualities after deforesting. The introduction of steam was found necessary to prevent stopping the works altogether. Marscliaml also tells of the factory at St. Ursame. on a river which for time immemorial had supplied it abundant power, but which had been stopped altogether for want of its motor after the trees were stripped from its banks. ‘‘The influence of the forest on the springs,” says Hummel, “ is strikingly shown at Heilbran. The woods on the hills surrounding the town are cut in regular succession every twentieth ..year. As these cuttings approach a certain point the springs yield less water, some of them none at all; but as the young growth*shoots up they flow more and more freely, and at length bubble up again in their original abundance,” —Page thirty-two, Phyxixrhe Geographic. The Wolf Spring, in the Commune of Soubrey, has twice disappeared and twice come to life again from the same causes during the last ninety years. That it is by nature a first-class fountain is proved by the fact that during over forty consecutive years of that ninety it was famous as “ the best in the Clos du l)oubs. ■’ When, as a people, we wake up on this subject we shall hear less of the crash and the shriek resulting from dams and dykes being overstrained' by freshets; less reports of hundreds and of thousands, even of skilled laborers, with whom life is a struggle for bread, being thrown out of employment because the rivers sleep. In the north of Wales a spring of wondrous power anil purity wells up from the earth. In an edifice which is erected over it are numberless crutches and canes which have been brought there and left by cripples who superstitiouslv believe the fountain has'healed them. f» less than a quarter of a score of miles of its course as it dances away to the sea it turns machinery which gives employment to over 3,000 skilled toilers. In the latter office, by helping people to help thenurlrex, it is in " fact” many times more than doing what the lame and the halt “ fancy” it lias done for them. It has also furnished a type of what the All Father intends the genius of hydraulics to be to His children. Let us care for the forest guard He has given us for its protection. The forests are to the streams what the balance-wheel is to the steam-engine. - ----