Next to the quality of the soil, the forest covering of a country does the most to determine its uses to man. Although the Western prairies have the temporary advantage that they are more readily brought under cultivation than wooded regions, the forests of a land contribute so largely to man’s well-being, that without them he can hardly maintain the structure of his civilization. The distribution of American forests is peculiar. All the Appalachian mountain system and the shore region between that system and the sea, as well as the Gulf border as far west as the Mississippi, were originally covered by the finest forest that has existed in the historical period, outside of the tropics. In the highlands south of Pennsylvania and in the western table-land north to the Great Lakes, this forest was generally of hard-wood or deciduous trees; on the shore-land and north of Pennsylvania in the highlands, the pines and other conifers held a larger share of the surface. The parts of the land bordering the Mississippi on the west, as far as the central regions of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, are forest clad. Michigan and portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota have broad areas of forests, but the cis-Mississippian States of Indiana and Illinois, and the trans-Mississippian country west to the Sierra Nevada, is only wooded, and that generally scantily, along the borders of the streams. Data for precise statements are yet wanting, but there is no doubt that this area is untimbered over about seven eighths of its surface, and the wood which exists has a relatively small value for constructive purposes. North of the regions described, except along the Pacific coast, where fine soft-wood forests extend from near San Francisco to Alaska, the forest growth rapidly diminishes in size, and therefore in value, the trees becoming short and gnarled, and the kinds of wood inferior. So that the region north of the St. Lawrence and of the Great Lakes is not to be regarded as having any very great value from the forest resources it affords. In estimating the value of North America to man, the limitation of good forests to the region east of the Mississippi must be regarded as a disadvantage which is likely to become more serious with the advance of time. Undoubtedly the timberless character of the prairie country for at least two hundred miles west of the Mississippi is in the main due to the constant burning over of the surface by the aborigines. It seems possible that these regions may yet be made to bear extensive woods. The elevated plains that lie farther to the west seem to have too little rainfall for the support of forests.