Forests may flourish independent of agriculture, but the latter can not prosper without the former. This was not so evident, however, to the early inhabitant, who felt he had thrust upon him more than his share of perpetual shade, and every owner and occupant of the soil combined with his neighbor in a warfare of destruction upon trees, and millions, the best of their kind ever produced were killed by cutting a circle around the trunk and left to decay. These deadenings were to be seen all over the country, as fast and as far as settlements were made or contemplated. And now, in less than a hundred years, more than eighty per cent. of this great forest has disappeared, and only small clumps in agricultural sections can be seen in any part of the state. The older trees that occupied their places in these remnants of woods have nearly all fallen by the hand of the axman, and the younger growths are being appropriated for various purposes, greatly in excess of possible reproduction to the remaining stock; and the time is not far distant, if things continue without change for the better, when the salubrious climate, with summer showers and productive soil, will become changed to one of uncertainty. The entire North-west is now on the very border of forest limit. Still thousands of portable saw-mills are moving over the states, destroying the remaining needful trees, and the rural districts will discover, when too late, that private interest is insufficient to protect forest lands in quantity enough to maintain climatic and sanitary influences without the aid of state government. Some years ago the legislature of Ohio passed a law, now in force, which lost the state many millions of growing forest trees that stood on the public grounds. The act reads: “Supervisors shall cut down _all bushes_ growing within any county or township highway, the same to be done within the months of July and August of each year.” Thus a clean sweep was made of every tree, bush and plant, as the word “bushes” was legally defined to mean places “abounding in trees and shrubs.” Trees of all kinds, sizes and ages, bordering and within the legal limits of the highways, met their doom under this act. And every growing scion that dared since to raise its head along the border lines of Ohio roads has met a similar fate in the months of July and August of each year.