This conclusion is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other natural resources.

The waste of soil is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the United States.

In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this subject, estimated that in the upland regions of the states south of Pennsylvania three thousand square miles of soil had been destroyed as the result of forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year.

No seeing man can travel through the United States without being struck with the enormous and unnecessary loss of fertility by easily preventable soil wash.

The soil so lost, as in the case of many other wastes, becomes itself a source of damage and expense, and must be removed from the channels of our navigable streams at an enormous annual cost.