UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 168]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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160 soil toward the rivers and the ocean side. The water is thus held upon the soil, until it is either evaporated by the sun, or sinks down into the earth to raise its springs and fountains, and the sum total of its great general underground water level. Hence springs and streams once ran that are now perfectly dry, and wells from which water could be dipped from the top, have settled their water level some ten to twenty feet, and cellars once annually flooded with water are now always dry. For when the herdsman comes with his herds, these rough prairie surfaces are trodden and smoothed down, and made more compact and solid; the plow and harrow cuts and rakes all down to a dead level; cities are built and roofed and paved; streets are opened and drained and trodden ; and ditches, furrows and drains, both above and under ground, over millions of acres, in aJl possible ways, hurry the falling waters off toward the sea, instead of allowing them to sink quietly and sullenly into the earth to perpetually raise its average under ground water-level. If it be true that cold, damp soil attracts on the great scale the cold and dense currents of air, while the warm and dry soil attracts the moist currents, the general effects of this culture, and constant sinking of the underground water line, must be apparent, as well in respect to the changes of cold and heat, rain and drouth, as in respect to the nature and growth of the crops, from what has already been said. And the real effects, this generation of men have seen with their own eyes, all over this great valley. They need therefore no further description from me. W e come now to consider the effects of forests and tree culture on climate; and with this general survey before us, we are somewhat prepared, I trust, to estimate it at its true and real value, with no undue or absurd exaggeration of its real importance, amid causes so universal, irresistible, incessant, far-reaching, well-balanced, and eternal. It is of vast importance to us, because, like the drainage and culture, the explosions amid the upper strata of air, by means of balloons and torpedos, and their electric connection with wires to the railroads of the continents; or like the reports of the river water-guage, or the northern snow-line, or the approach of the southern rain-belt, it is one of the few, the very few means, of practical forecast, or of guidance or control, that we seem to have in our own hands, but shall hardly supersede the laws of gravity, the all-controling power of the great staring sun, the forces of heat and cold, and electricity and magnetism so called, or the consequent sweeps and swings, and tides and whirls, of the great circumambient air and the whirl of the great globe itself,