384 John Minto. assertions which I knew to be untrue, so far as they related to Oregon. There are now being laid before the reading public in the various cheap magazines, papers on this subject of conserva- tion of natural resources ; one of the best of these is the Teohnical World, in which a Mr. Roy Crandall claims that the Missouri River washes away yearly, in its course through the State, 8,000 acres of farm lands worth $100 per acre, or $800,000, supported, he says, by the estimates of Prof. W. J. McGee, of the Inland Waterway Commission, from whom he quotes. The writer is glad to be able to quote from advance sheets of a very able paper on forests and reservoirs with particular reference to navigable rivers, in the proceedings of the Ameri- can Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 7, by H. M. Chittenden, Lieutenant-Colonel, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, to be presented November 4, 1909. I quote only the summary of the points made by this able and trained sci- entific vn:'iter, and would be glad to see his entire paper as part of the next report from the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture of the United States. He reasons calmly against the assumption that forests have a beneficial influence in preserving stream flow. He notes that the experiments of Gustav Wex, chief engineer in the improvements on the river Danube, adopted in 1897 by the committee of the American Academy Gj Science, but proved inconclusive, as did those made in France by M. F. Bailee, reaching an opposite conclusion, as noted by Mr. Chit- tenden in the paper here alluded to. The writer took issue with the committee mentioned, in 1897, and is therefore glad to endorse Mr. Chittenden's summary, which follows: (1) The bed of humus and debris that develops under forest cover retains precipitation during the summer season, or a moderately dry season at any time of the year more effectively than do the soil and crops of deforested areai similarly situated. It acts as a reservoir moderating the run- off from showers and mitigating the severity of freshets, and promotes uniformity of flow at such periods. The above
