As a child I played and bathed in a pretty tumbling brook among the Litchfield hills, and wondered that so small a stream but fifty years before had given power to all the mills now ruined on its banks. Twenty years more have passed, and now in the heat of summer there is hardly water for a child to bathe. The hills are stripped, the stream has dwindled, but the spring floods tear through the valley like a deluge. Even the larger streams that still turn the mill-wheels and make the wealth of Connecticut are not the trusty servants that they once were. In summer they grow weak and must be supplemented with steam, and at times they rise in fury and carry destruction before them. It is the beginning of woes, but our Atlantic slope with its heavy rainfall cannot easily be changed to a desert. In the far West it is different. Colorado, Nevada and California, with a less regular rainfall and with greater floods and smaller streams, would soon find the desert encroaching on the habitable land. But in these very States the waste of timber is most extravagant. Mining-camps and cities devour the woods about them, and in every dry summer many hundred square miles are burned by the recklessness of Indians and white men. Where the Californian mountains have been cleared, the browsing millions of sheep keep down all new growth, and, bringing great wealth in our age, they threaten to impoverish posterity. The dreary experiment has been tried by the ancient races of both continents. Why should we repeat it? The question should command the earnest attention of State and national governments. In our own land already one old race has wrought its own destruction in this same way. ALFRED TERRY BACON. [Footnote 1: In studying the ruins of the Mancos and neighboring cañons I have made constant use of the reports of explorations by Mr. W. H. Jackson and Mr. W. H. Holmes in _Bulletins of U. S. Geolog. and Geograph. Survey_, Second Series, No. 1, and _Annual Report_ of the same survey for 1876.] THE ARTS OF INDIA. [Illustration: BUDDHIST RELIC-CASKET.]