A CORRESPONDENT of the Popular Science Monthly, gives a strong illustration in proof of the influence of trees upon rainfall. A friend of the writer who spent the months of February, March, and April last on the Island of Santa Crux, West Indies, says: - " When there twenty years ago, the island was a garden of freshness, beauty, and fertility - woods covered the hills, trees were everywhere abundant, and rains were profuse and frequent. The memory of its loveliness called him there at the beginning of the past year, when, to his astonishment, he found about one-third of the island - which is about 25 miles long - an utter desert. The forests and trees generally had been cut away, rainfalls had ceased, and a process of dessication beginning at one end of the land had advanced gradually and irresistibly upon the Island, until for seven miles it is dried and desolate as the sea shore. Houses and beautiful plantations have been abandoned, and the people watch the advance of desolation, unable to arrest it, but knowing almost to a certainty the time when their own habitations, their gardens and fresh fields, will become a part of the waste. The whole island seems doomed to become a desert.

The inhabitants believe, and my friend confirms their opinion, that this sad result is due to the destruction of the trees upon the island some years ago."