Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/414

 386 John Minto. The careful and able writer of the valuable paper of which the foregoing seven propositions are a part, says truly, ''If they are correct they enforce two very important conclusions ; one relating to the regulation of our rivers and the other to forestry. ' ' The last proposition Colonel Chittenden states is connected with the first statement I made in connection with the run- off from the Willamette as close as manifest effect to cause ; when I said in my view that the general level of life-sustaining moisture has lowered in many places two feet— in some places ten— by the process of ditching to drain roadbeds, common and rail, and for field crops, so that it is no longer the home of damp land birds, like the curlew, crane, gray plover and snipe, or the ducks, geese and swans, that it used to be sixty years ago. But I have given the observations of my labor-life on both plains and mountains in the June Historical Magazine of this year (1908) and did, indeed, in a more general way, in 1898 in opposition to the German system of forestry, the legality of which I doubted when it was first initiated and felt that it was not in accord with the genius of our form of government. Seemingly to reconcile those like the writei, who believes that timber production is the very highest class of productive industry, we are beginning to see in the magazines that give the value of forestry as preservative of water flow, pictures of community life in Germany where communities have in- of the sudden intake by the feeding roots. On the other hand, some varieties of prunes shed their fruit when suffering from drouth. I have also noted the soft maple — a fine street shade tree in Western Oregon — take on autumn colors and shed its leaves fifteen to twenty days in advance of its neighbors of the same species, solely on account of a difference in the depth of soil under them. I have seen, within this month of October. French walnuts shed their leaves while their nuts were immature, clinging to the tree with hull unopen, the result of being on shallow soil with rock imder and compact blue grass sod over their roots ; while other trees of the same sort, within fifty feet of them, but on deep unsodded soil, were dropping the nuts of normal size clean from the hull, and holding their leaves, which slowly changed color. Where irrigation can be secured, on the property of an orchardist, its use is the surest means of producing perfect fruit. Thus water becomes more important as a resource, increasing the production of crops, of heat and of power.