e
United States Geological Survey, and the preparation of plans for their
conservative use with the Bureau of Forestry, which is also charged with
the general advancement of practical forestry in the United States.
These various functions should be united in the Bureau of Forestry,
to which they properly belong. The present diffusion of responsibility
is bad from every standpoint. It prevents that effective co-operation
between the Government and the men who utilize the resources of the
reserves, without which the interests of both must suffer. The
scientific bureaus generally should be put under the Department of
Agriculture. The President should have by law the power of transferring
lands for use as forest reserves to the Department of Agriculture. He
already has such power in the case of lands needed by the Departments
of War and the Navy.

The wise administration of the forest reserves will be not less helpful
to the interests which depend on water than to those which depend on
wood and grass. The water supply itself depends upon the forest. In
the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production. The
western half of the United States would sustain a population greater
than that of our whole country to-day if the waters that now run to
waste were saved and used for irrigation. The forest and water problems
are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States.

Certain of the forest reserves should also be made preserves for the
wild forest creatures. All of the reserves should be better protected
from fires. Many of them need special protection because of the great
injury done by live stock, above all by sheep. The increase in deer,
elk, and other animals in the Yellowstone Park shows what may be
expected when other mountain forests are properly protected by law and
properly guarded. Some of these areas have been so denuded of surface
vegetation by overgrazing that the ground breeding birds, including
grouse and quail, and many mammals, including deer, have been
exterminated or driven away. At the same time the water-storing capacity
of the surface has been decreased or destroyed, thus promoting floods in
times of rain and diminishing the flow of streams between rains.

In cases where natural conditions have been restored for a few
years, vegetation has again carpeted the ground, birds and deer are
coming back, and hundreds of persons, especially from the immediate
neighborhood, come eac