astern mountain land for
national forest, the purpose being not only to conserve water sources,
which national parks would accomplish quite as thoroughly, but
particularly to control lumbering operations in accord with principles
which will insure the lumber supply of the future. Here and there in
this reserve are limited areas of distinguished national park quality,
but whether they will be set aside as national parks is a question for
the people and the future to decide. Certainly the mountain topography
and the rich deciduous forests of the eastern United States should be
represented in the national parks system by several fine examples.

The Lafayette National Park differs from all other members of the
national parks system in several important respects. It is in the far
east; it combines seashore and mountain; it is clothed with a rich and
varied growth of deciduous trees and eastern conifers; it is intimately
associated with the very early history of America. Besides which, it is
a region of noble beauty, subtle charm and fascinating variety.

The Appalachian Mountain uplift, which, roughly speaking, embraces all
the ranges constituting the eastern rib of the continent, may be
considered to include also the very ancient peneplains of New England.
These tumbled hills and shallow valleys, accented here and there by
ranges and monadnocks, by which the geologist means solitary peaks, are
all that the frosts and rains of very many millions of years and the
glaciers of more recent geologic times have left of what once must have
been a towering mountain region crested in snow. The wrinkling of the
earth's surface which produced this range occurred during the Devonian
period when fishes were the predominant inhabitants of the earth, many
millions of years before birds or even reptiles appeared. Its rise was
accompanied by volcanic disturbances, whose evidences are abundant on
islands between the mouth of the Penobscot and Mount Desert Island,
though not within the park. The mind cannot conceive the lapse of time
which has reduced this range, at an erosional speed no greater than
to-day's, to its present level. During this process the coast line was
also slowly sinking, changing valleys into estuaries and land-encircled
bays. The coast of Maine is an eloquent chapter in the continent's
ancient history, and the Lafayette National Park is one of the most
dramatic paragraphs in the chapter.

Where the Penobscot River reache