Today the woods of the Ukraine forest region are greatly thinned, so that they take up more than one-third of the total surface only in the Polissye. Cutting down and rooting up of the woods some centuries ago was, without a doubt, an important part of the work of civilization. But now things are different. Now the forest is considered a very important part of a well organized cultural section, and is, therefore, carefully preserved in the truly civilized lands of Europe. In the beautiful forests of the Ukraine, however, a reckless exploitation is going on, and the evil results are already apparent, especially in the sparsely wooded borders of the forest region, as well as in the entire country [103]surrounding the steppe. The rivers have become small in volume of water, the sources dried up, and the ravines annually transform thousands of hectares into desert land. And this is happening in the granary of Europe, which some 300 years ago made foreign travelers marvel at its incredible fertility. All the rest of the Ukraine, as far as the foothills of the Yaila and the Caucasus, is occupied by the steppe region. The limits of this region, as we have said, are not distinct. In peninsula and island formations the forest penetrates toward the southeast. In this direction the forest islands become constantly rarer and smaller, so that the Russian plant-geographers have felt called upon to insert two transition zones between the real forest and the real steppe—the zone of the exterior steppe and the zone of the transitional steppe. The actual steppe region is supposed to begin at the line which extends thru Kishinev and Katerinoslav to the bend of the Don. This division may be criticized, however, since it at most, fits present conditions brought about in the last 200 years by the destruction of forests on the part of men. The historical sources of the Ukraine tell of large woodlands, which, in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, still extended along the sources of the Inhul and Inhuletz, along the Tasmin, on the river divides between the left-hand tributaries of the Dnieper, etc. They were not forest terraces, not mere strips of woods confined to river valleys; they covered the divides far and wide, as well as the broad tableau sheds lying between rivers. For this reason care must be taken in sketching the boundaries of the steppe. We therefore comprehend both the above mentioned transition zones into one, for which we would suggest the name luhi zone, because the luh, a meadow studded with scattered groups of trees and little groves, must have been the predominating plant formation of this transition country. [104]