a particular agenda to pursue. Even so, the pictures that they present must have been ones that were very familiar to other Islanders at the time they were writing. But to Prince Edward Islanders at the beginning of the twenty-first century, every one of these vignettes — except the last — is from a lost world that has passed away for ever. The evocative line from the novel of L. P. Hartley, 'the past is another country’, is as applicable to the landscape of Prince Edward Island as it is to any other part of the world.315

Forest clearance and the water cycle - Based on their own observations three recorders considered that the clearing of the island's forests was bringing about changes to the water (or hydrological) cycle.316 Captain John MacDonald (1804) viewed these changes as beneficial on what he called 'interval lands' — these he defined as moist areas, "rarely of very considerable extent”, that occurred in ’hollows’ in the forest, and which before clearance were sometimes occupied by 'rivulets’ and ’allar-bushes’ [i.e. alder]. After tree clearance and exposure to the sun, such spots, he said, became ”dry and solid”, though they were still sufficiently ’strong' [i.e. fertile] "due to the moisture, or the washing from the higher sloping grounds, and the occasional Overflow of the rivulets” for timothy-grass to be grown, which ”likes strong moist land”, and thereafter for their maintenance as meadow or pasture land.

However as forest clearance became more general on the island, two other recorders considered that it was bringing about more severe changes to the water cycle, that were undesirable. In 1879 Francis Bain recorded in his journal the changes that had occurred at a spot in the York Point area:

On the rear of Howard’s farm317 there is a beautiful

spring which rushes out of a fissure in a massive bed of sandstone at the foot of a grassy hill. It expands into a

3‘5 The line is from the novel The Go-between by L. P. Hartley,

published in 1953.

316 Also, John MacGregor (1828) noted from his reading, rather than from his own observations, that “the air and earth undergo a considerable alteration of temperature when the land is cleared of wood; first, from the ground being exposed to the sun's rays, which cause the waters to evaporate more copiously; secondly, by lessening the quantity and duration of snow; and thirdly, by introducing warm winds through the openings made.”

3‘7 ‘Meacham‘s Atlas' (Allen 1880) shows several Howard properties in the general area of Francis Bain’s farm at York Point on the North River, the nearest being that of John Howard at Howards Creek.

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little pond, which now rests in a basin of rich, grassy slopes, which descend from the adjoining pasture land. When I first saw this spring many years ago it was in the depth of the primitive forest. Massive birches and maples of a century’s growth reared their trunks around it, [with] a canopy of foliage which the vivid rays of the sun seldom penetrated. It had three times the volume of water then. The forest cloak prevented the evaporation of moisture from the surface of these hills, and sinking down into the fissures of the earth it flowed out here in a strong gushing sparkling spring These springs are the gauge to show us how much more moisture is evaporated from the surface of a cleared country than from that of a wooded one. In a clear

country is more active circulation of moisture. 318

Then in 1902, after the island had experienced a very dry summer, Father Alfred Burke commented on a similar but more general effect:

We have just passed through a season of extreme drought and convinced ourselves of the serious situation that confronts us. The connection between forest and water supply, all are now ready to admit. Streams never before dry — the perennial streams of our youth — stripped of the luxuriant trees that grew along their banks were this year early waterless; others, not previously so copious, because of the woods conserved at their sources and the stand of trees on their banks, blessed the localities through which they flowed with an abundant supply of sweet waters. Moisture is everything to vegetable growth, and the forest is the

constant moisture distributor of nature.319

However, I note that the professional botanist John Macoun (1894) considered that rather than the soils getting dryer as a result of forest clearance, the opposite was happening, at least in coastal areas: he said that the fact that tamarack was ”now growing in pastures and meadows where hardwood [had] once covered the land” was proof that the soils were getting wetter, and he thought this was on account of the ”cutting away [of] the forests on the sea coast, [that] had let in the sea air”. However, he is the lone proponent of this theory.320

Forest clearance and climate change — In addition to its effect on the water cycle, a few writers recorded the opinion as being current among some of their contemporaries, that the clearance of the

3‘3 Bain 1868-1884 (23 October, 1879).

3‘9 Burke 1902.

32" 1 note also that Johnstone (1822) (p. 128, not extracted) considered that "when the country was [more] opened up" (i.e. through forest clearance), the resulting greater “free circulation" of the air would reduce the damage to crops from “frosty dews" that sometimes occurred.