Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/290

276 it, are to have the care, custody, control, and superintendence of the forest preserve; maintain and protect the existing forests and promote the further growth of forests; also to have charge of the public interests of the State with regard to forests and tree planting, and especially with regard to forest fires in every part of the State; and it is given power to make these functions effective. The forest preserve of the State consists of various tracts of State lands in eleven counties in the Adirondack region and three counties in the Catskills. The part known as the Adirondack region covers a territory circular in its general outline and about one hundred miles in diameter, having its center near the northeast corner of Hamilton County. With but little exception, it is an unbroken wilderness, reaching from Lake Champlain westward to the valley of the Black River. That part of the Catskills which belongs in the forest preserve is situated about forty miles west of the Hudson, and occupies the northwest corner of Ulster County, together with parts of the adjacent counties. The Adirondack region proper contains more than four million acres, of which the State has acquired title to more than eight hundred thousand acres. In the Catskill region the State owns more than five hundred thousand acres. These amounts do not include the county lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills. Not all the land is forest-land. Much of it is abandoned and partly cleared farming-lands, much burned lands, and a large percentage of it abandoned timber-lands through which the lumberman has passed, taking all of the valuable soft timber and much of the hard. As years go on, and these woods are protected from spoliation and damage, the young, soft-timber trees will grow up and the forest assume its primitive condition. The rest of the territory is clothed with the dense original growth. Many good roads traverse the region, but few railroads penetrate the wilderness to any considerable extent, and none cross it. The forest preserve is made up of many disconnected plots, more in some counties than in others; plots ranging from a few acres up to many thousands, surrounded usually by lands owned by individuals, and in many cases inaccessible by roads. In other cases individual lands are entirely surrounded by State lands. Among the causes which tend to decrease the area of the forest-lands within the counties of the forest preserve are mentioned fires—the most frequent and the most destructive of them all—windfalls and land-slides, lumbering, tanning—which is the occasion of considerable waste—manufacture of wood pulp, charcoal-burning and roasting ores, railroad-building, and farming. Although the forestry enterprise was at one time an object of opposition from the people of the Adirondack counties, a better acquaintance with the subject has wrought a modification in their feelings, and the report mentions as a matter worthy of note and congratulation that the commission is to-day receiving a hearty and intelligent support from the lumbermen and land-owners of the Adirondack region and the Catskills. Appended to the report are a list of the books and magazine articles pertaining to forestry to be found in ten of the large public libraries of the country, and a list of lands in the forest preserve, with a map of the Adirondack lands.

the report we find an essay on silk-culture, followed by notices, under the heading of "Miscellaneous Insects," of the destructive locusts or grasshoppers; the periodical cicada (or seventeen-year locust); the leather beetle, a new enemy to boots and shoes; the garden web-worm, the darksided cut-worm, the strawberry weevil, and the pear-midge. The "reports of agents" include notices respecting locusts at various points, insects affecting the fall wheat, the causes of destruction of the evergreen and other forest trees in Northern New England, and experiments in apiculture. Under the latter head Mr. Nelson W. McLain records, among other matters, experiments which he made to ascertain whether bees do harm to fruit. His bees were tempted with grapes, while other food was withdrawn from them, and the conditions of a severe drought were produced upon them. "They daily visited the fruit in great numbers, and labored diligently to improve