RECKLESS DESTRUCTION OF FORESTS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEOTATOR.1
SIR,—There can be no doubt that the reckless destruction of forests, without any appreciable replanting, has had much to do with the frequently recurring famines in India. Under native rule, the demand for teak timber was trifling to what it be- came under the Honourable East India Company's Government. There was also a wide-spread Hindoo belief that planting was a propitiation for sins, and hence the numerous old mangos and tamarind "topes" scattered over the low country, and having a beneficial effect on the climate, but which are dying out, without others to succeed them. Between thirty and forty years back (to the best of my recollection), a Forest Conservancy Depart- waa organiaed,_to prevent the wasteful destruction of timber, and some slight inducements were held out to the Ryots to plant on their field-boundaries ; but nothing was done which could materially affect the rainfall, and our re- missness in regard to Nature's well-known laws has brought the predicable retribution. I extract the following from "Varieties of Viceregal Life," an interesting and instructive book, by the late Sir William Denison, some time Governor of Madras :—
" I have been discussing a question relative to the action of forests upon the rainfall, with reference to the very dry character of a great part of our plain country, and have arrived at the conclusion that the Government ought to take energetic action to remedy a state of things which has a most injurious effect upon our agriculture. I think I must have mentioned to you the curious fact that the south-west monsoon,— that is, the rainy part of it,—stops at a specific lino in the middle of a plain, which line is marked by the existence of a jungle on the rainy side, while the dry side is bare of trees. I at first attributed the pre- sence of trees to the rain, but I am now disposed to look upon the jungle as the cause of the rain, not the effect of it, for I have been told that just in proportion as the belt of jungle is out away, so does the line of rain retreat. When one comes to consider this, the reason is plain enougli,—the cleared ground is exposed to the action of a vertical sun at its solstice, and a heated stream of air ascends from it, converi- ing the rain into vapour, which is carried off by the prevailing winds, and falls into the Bay of Bengal. The desolation of a great part of the East, Palestine, Edon; Assyria, &a., may, I think, be traced to the causes which are now in operation in India, and which I wish to neutralise."
With an Indian experience of nearly forty years' I have never known the time when our difficulties and dangers, whether poli- tical or material, were other than internal, while we have been spending the resources and best blood of the country in fighting against dangers which were either visionary or of our own creating. They say, "It is never too late to mend," though this I doubt, for I doubt our long tenure of India. The duty to make the endeavour is not the less imperative. A beginning might be made in the direction of planting. The Australian blue-gum tree (Eucalyptus globosus) is asserted to be the fastest-growing tree in the world. It attains the height of from sixty to seventy feet in about fourteen years, drains malarious marshes in and about which it is planted, and both by leaf-evaporation and by attrac- tion of moisture moderates both heat and drought, and its timber is of a useful quality. There are no doubt many of the more temperate parts of India where it might be beneficially cultivated without difficulty, for it grows readily and rapidly from the
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