satisfactorily accounts for more than a very limited number of the
phenomena presented. It is only within a comparatively recent period that
these alternations of timber growth have attracted the attention of
scientific men; consequently little more than crude suggestions and
ill-digested facts are at the command of the general reader and writer.
And yet the facts themselves, such as they are, would fill a dozen volumes
of the size of Dr. Hough's recent "Report upon American Forestry." We can
only give a few of the more important facts we have gathered, and many of
these are so deficient in necessary detail that their value is greatly
lessened for scientific uses. This is especially true of nearly all those
noticed and collated by Dr. Hough, in his report to the United States
Commissioner of Agriculture, made in 1877, in which the alternations in
question are referred to at length, but no new suggestions presented, nor
any very important new facts given.

If our construction of the Bible genesis be the correct one, it will, we
think, be unhesitatingly admitted that all the facts collected and
collated by Dr. Hough, together with others more carefully noticed by our
ablest writers on vegetable physiology, not only harmonize with this
ancient Hebrew text, but so completely fit into it, both in its
implications and explications, that adverse criticism will be awed into
silence rather than provoked into any new controversy on the subject. This
remarkable genesis declares that the germs of all living things are in
themselves upon the earth--"upon the face of all the earth." It is true
that this declaration, as contained in the 11th verse of the first chapter
of Genesis, is textually limited to the vegetation of the earth; but the
further emphatic statement that "the animating principle of life" is in
the earth, coupled with the more substantive fact that God commanded the
waters and the earth to bring forth abundantly of every living creature,
with the single exception of man, conclusively extends the language of the