vate owners of forest land cared only for what they could get out of it. 

 We could not expect them to feel much concern about effects a hundred 

 miles or fifty years away. We therefore could not depend upon them to 

 handle forests so as to assure the general population full benefits and neces- 

 sary protection. 



The Forest Service The Forest Service of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, which was established in 1875, has made many careful 

 scientific studies of forest conditions in different parts of the country. It has 

 thus been able to give sound advice on the care and management of forests 

 and wood-lots from every point of view. From these investigations we learn, 

 first, how to protect forests against certain injuries and, second, how to increase 

 their value. We now know that it is possible to get all the wood we really need 

 without destroying our forests, if only we follow certain principles. 



Over one hundred million acres of land have been left barren by "timber 

 mining" and fires. The reforesting of such areas is continuously under way in 

 many parts of the country. A great deal of worn-out land and sand-dune land 

 is well suited to forests. In many cases it is necessary only to protect the young 

 growth from fires. Another method of extending the area of growth is to 

 stock existing forest lands more fully. 



Increasing Yield and Quality It is likely that not more than from 

 seventy to one hundred of the nearly one thousand native species of trees in 

 this country are worth growing, from the economic point of view. The red 

 cedar grows very slowly; the white pine or the red oak could be grown in 

 the same soil to great advantage. We could replace the red spruce in New 

 England with the Norway spruce, just as many areas of France denuded by 

 the First World War, as well as other European regions, have been restocked 

 with Douglas fir imported from this country. In some localities we may per- 

 haps find foreign trees better suited to our purposes than the native trees. In 

 the course of a number of years the rapid-growing varieties will yield much 

 more timber than the others. But rapid growth is not of itself a deciding fac- 

 tor, for it is necessary to consider the toughness of wood and other qualities. 

 The whitewood, or tulip tree, for example, grows much faster than the oak, 

 but it can never be used as a substitute for the oak. 



Without increasing the amount of growth, the value of timber can be in- 

 creased through efforts to keep the trunks and branches straight. By thinning 

 out the crooked or twisted trees, it is possible to concentrate the growth in 

 the best trees and so to increase the yield of a forest area. 



Avoiding Wood Waste In the national forests lumbermen are given 

 practical demonstrations of scientific cutting, seeding, reforesting, etc., and 

 also of the economical handling of growth. In careless lumbering, a tree ij: 

 sometimes damaged while being cut down, and trees left standing are some- 

 times injured. At the forest-products laboratories and the forest experiment 



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