y deciduous forests. In the United States
nearly sixty per cent of the inhabitants live in areas reclaimed from
such forests. Yet the area of the forests is less than a quarter of the
three million square miles that make up the United States.

In their relation to human life the forests of America differ far more
than do either grass-lands or deserts. In the far north, as we have
seen, the pine forests furnish one of the least favorable environments.
In middle latitudes the deciduous forests go to the opposite extreme
and furnish the most highly favored of the homes of man. Still farther
southward the increasing luxuriance of the forests, especially along
the Atlantic coast, renders them less and less favorable to mankind. In
southern Mexico and Yucatan the stately equatorial rain forest, the most
exuberant of all types of vegetation and the most unconquerable by man,
makes its appearance. It forms a discontinuous belt along the wet east
coast and on the lower slopes of the mountains from southern Yucatan to
Venezuela. Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of the Orinoco, but
revives again in still greater magnificence in the Guianas. Thence
it stretches not only along the coast but far into the little known
interior of the Great Amazon basin, while southward it borders all the
coast as far as southern Brazil. In the Amazon basin it reaches its
highest development and becomes the crowning glory of the vegetable
world, the most baffling obstacle to human progress.

Except in its evil effects on man, the equatorial rain forest is the
antithesis of the forests of the extreme north. The equatorial trees are
hardwood giants, broad leaved, bright flowered, and often fruit-bearing.
The northern trees are softwood dwarfs, needle-leaved, flowerless, and
cone-bearing. The equatorial trees are often branchless for one hundred
feet, but spread at the top into a broad overarching canopy which shuts
out the sun perpetually. The northern trees form sharp little pyramids
with low, widely spreading branches at the base and only short twigs at
the top. In the equatorial forests there is almost no underbrush. The
animals, such as monkeys, snakes, parrots, and brilliant insects, live
chiefly in the lofty treetops. In the northern forests there is almost
nothing except underbrush, and the foxes, rabbits, weasels, ptarmigans,
and mosquitoes live close to the ground in the shelter of the branches.
Both forests are alike, however, in being