TRANSACTIONS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NORTHERN ILL. 283 



the British possessions in North America will last it is impossible to estimate. Heavy 

 drains are already being made on it. During the three years ending June 30, 1 871, the 

 Dominion of Canada exported timber to the value of $63,131,608, goJd ; the trade in- 

 creasing during that time about Si, 000,000 a year. 



Our railroads will consume annually 34,000,000 sleepers. At least 125,000 miles 

 of fencing are required to inclose the railroads of the country. The cost of lumber 

 and wood material employed would be $143,000,000, and it would take annually 

 $4,000,000 to keep these fences in repair. 



By the last returns 1 have seen (1872), there were in operation in the 

 United States 65,000 miles of telegraph, which destroyed in their construc- 

 tion 2,600,000 trees, while the annual repairs must call for some 250,000 

 more. The 20,000,000,000 matches manufactured in the United States 

 annually require, according to Mr. Marsh, 250,000 cubic feet of the best 

 pine lumber. At least 1,450,000 cords of wood, principally pine, were 

 required to bake the 2,899,382,000 bricks which the census of 1870 

 gives as the number made in that year, requiring the cutting off the trees 

 from 36,000 acres. The manufacture of shoe-pegs consumes annually 

 100,000 cords of white birch wood, worth $1,000,000. In 1850, the value 

 of the pine packing boxes made in the United States was $1,000,000 ; in 

 1870, they were valued at $8,200,000. 



The value of the material made into .woodenware in the United States 

 increased from $436,000 in 1850 to $1,600,000 in 1870. The value of the 

 material converted into agricultural implements in the United States in 

 1850 was only $8,000,000, while in 1870 it reached the enormous sum of 

 :$73,ooo,ooo, of which the forests must have furnished twenty millions' 

 worth. 



The enormous consumption of wood in this country will, however, 

 be sufficiently shown by the following figures : 



In i860, the value of logs sawed into lumber was $43,000,000; in 

 1870, it was over $103,000,000, an increase which neither the growth of 

 population nor the general advance in all prices can account for, and which 

 can only be explained by the supposition that the uses to which forest 

 products are applied are being rapidly extended, and that the foregoing 

 demands on American forests are increasing. 



But the statistics of the lumber trade do not show the entire destruc- 

 tion which is going on in our forests. (See Report of Department of 

 Agriculture, 1865.) 



Mr. Frederick Starr, Jr., in an interesting paper on American forests, 

 estimated that during the ten years between 1850 and i860 thirty millions 

 of acres of forest covered land were cleared in the United States for agri- 

 cultural purposes, or ten thousand a day for each working day during that 

 time. Of the trees thus cut, probably the largest portion never found their 

 way to the market, but were destroyed by fire for the sake of getting them 

 off the land as rapidly as possible. 



Ash Lumber. — In this report of Mr. Sargent, it is recommended that 

 the white ash be extensively planted in forests. He says that already 

 there is a rapidly-increasing export trade of ash lumber to Europe, Aus- 

 tralia and the Pacific coast, from Boston and New York, and that th^ pos- 



