174 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



for timber, but productive fields would^ take the place of 

 now barren wastes. We have thousands and thousands of 

 acres of sandy land in Wisconsin, which are, and always 

 will be worthless unless some system is adopted by which 

 they can be planted to forest trees. 



In our day, perhaps, we may not see the necessity of this, 

 but the years are not far away when our government, state 

 and national, will adopt measures to reforest our waste 

 lands. 



Fifty years ago, the timber lands of Michigan and Wis- 

 consin had no commercial value. Since then these lands 

 have brought millions of dollars to their owners, and now 

 are nearly worthless again because being stripped of their 

 timber. 



Ten years ago the timber lands of Oregon and Washing- 

 ton territories were hardly thought of as a visible supply of 

 timber, and to-day some of out wealthy lumber companies 

 are preparing to change their base of action to the western 

 slope of our continent. 



Those of us who hcive traveled over our lines of railways 

 for the first few years, have seen the immense piles of rail- 

 road ties at the stations in the timber countries, and we are 

 told that the visible supply is rapidly growing less. Some 

 of our states, as well as Wisconsin, have offered a bount^^y 

 or a rebate in taxes for trees planted by the road- side, and 

 there is no reason why railway companies should not be 

 compelled to plant trees on all of their lines, and in places 

 where drifting snows impede the travel, permanent ever- 

 green hedges would be an effectual barrier to snow block- 

 ades. 



There is no country in the world possessing such a variety 

 of forest trees as the United States, and no civilized coun- 

 try to-day but that is doing more for the protection of 

 their forests than we. We have four hundred and twenty 

 varieties of trees, and a large variety of them are valuable 

 in the arts, and for economic and useful purposes in the 

 various trades. But the most useful of these are found in 

 small areas of country, and in comparatively limited quan- 

 tities. The best and only timber now used by pattern mak- 



