METHODS AND PROFIT OF TREE-PLANTING. 3 



the supply of desirable timber, both pine and hard-wood, has materially- 

 diminished within the last twenty-five years. As a natural conse- 

 quence, the price has everywhere advanced, and a further advance is 

 as natural and inevitable, unless effective measures are taken to check 

 the waste of our forests and to restore them to their proper dimen- 

 sions. The necessity of vigorous action in regard to this matter is 

 beo-inning to be felt. In the sparsely wooded districts of the West 

 this is particularly true. The Legislatures and agricultural societies 

 of several of the States have already taken important action on the 

 subject. Laws have been enacted for the protection of the existing 

 forests from destruction by fires, and for encouraging the planting of 

 trees. The national Congress has also, within a few years, made 

 enactments both for the repression of timber-thieving on the public 

 lands and to encourage the planting of timber-trees. 



The enactments of Congress for the purpose of encouraging tim- 

 ber-planting, while they have marked a step in the right direction, 

 have not been so effective as they might have been. This has resulted 

 in part through evasion of the laws by speculators, who have only made 

 a pretense of planting while their real object was to get possession of 

 land which they could sell at a profit for agricultural purposes, and in 

 part because the requisitions of the law were too onerous to be com- 

 plied with by settlers without capital. The latter was of course unin- 

 tentional. But this, as well as other defects of the timber-culture acts, 

 came as the natural result of our ignorance in this country of the whole 

 matter of tree-planting. We know enough to plant apple and peach 

 trees in orchards, and a row of maples or elms, occasionally, along the 

 road-side, for shade and ornament. But of the cultivation of trees on 

 the large scale, in masses, as they grow in the native forests, few 

 among us know anything. A planted forest is a thing almost unknown 

 here. The chances are that, among the members of Congress who 

 framed the timber-culture acts, not one had any practical knowledge 

 of the subject. The whole matter is new to us, and we have hardly 

 any experience for our guide. For our knowledge we must go abroad, 

 where the subject is treated with the greatest and most scientific atten- 

 tion, as we have lately shown (" Popular Science Monthly," July, 1881). 

 In France and Germany, and other European countries, one of the 

 principle bureaus of government is that having charge of the forests 

 and rivers. Its annual reports are looked for and read with interest, 

 as having important bearings upon the revenue as well as upon the 

 health of the people and the agricultural and commercial resources of 

 the country. - 



It is a happy thing for us that, as we are waking up to the neces- 

 sity not only of checking the wasteful consumption of our existing 

 forests but of planting new ones, we have the experience and careful 

 study of the subject by European nations to aid us. For, although 

 their physical conditions are in many respects different from our own, 



