"The tenth of November 1888 was a fine autumn day before the dreary span of winter in Washington, DC. The afternoon was warm, one of several days with pleasant temperatures, and there was only a trace amount of rain.1 The agreeable weather likely lifted the spirits of Washingtonians, and as night fell and the sky darkened and the temperature dropped, there was an air of excitement and anticipation among leading intellectuals in the nation's capital. Nearly three hundred years of European settlement had greatly altered the landscape of the United States.2 The Virginia and New England countryside found by the first English colonists contained extensive old-growth forest. Thereafter, the landscape was cleared of forests, felled for their wood products and replaced by homesteads, towns, and farmland. The vast virgin forests of New England - towering white pines, giants of the forest, famed for the masts they had provided the navy; mixtures of beech, maple, and birch along with hemlock and spruce in northern states; oaks and hickories in southern New England - had long since been felled.3 Similar widespread clearing had altered the forests of Virginia and other states along the eastern seaboard, and the same pattern of forest clearing was repeated in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions with the westward expansion of the population.4 A popular belief at the time was that deforestation was decreasing rainfall"--