THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 73 



to neglect the source of such necessity, comfort, luxury, and 

 wealth? Let us seek our answer from our experience of the 

 past. 



We shall begin with our ancestors, the settlers of this 

 continent, who were surrounded on all sides by the forest, and 

 who, regarding it as a constant menace destroyed it at every 

 turn. Much that they destroyed, however, w^as done in a per- 

 fectly legitimate way, for they did not dare to leave the forests 

 standing about their farms and villages for fear of 

 the danger of attacks from Indians and wild beasts. They 

 also needed to m.ake their homes, their articles of furniture and 

 their implements ; and required land for agriculture. We can- 

 not cast any blame on our ancestors, for thus destroying the 

 trees they regarded as dangerous, but we regret that the idea 

 passed from generation to generation and that it carried with 

 it as corallary the delusion that the supply was inexhastible. 

 It is clear that it w^as the abuse of the first idea that brought 

 us more quickly to the second, and to the stern realization that 

 our forests are far from inexhaustible. 



The settlers first began to cut timber in the eastern states, 

 then along the great waterways, and in the center 

 of the country and finally in the more northern of 

 the southern states and in all these areas, only the 

 largest and best trees were cut, no provisions being 

 made to protect or reforest the land. At present we 

 are taking from our forests .ibout three and one-half times 

 as much wood as is added by new growth, and two-thirds of 

 all the timber cut is simply destroyed. On the average since 

 1870 forest fires have yearly cost $50,000,000 in timber and 

 50 lives. In this country we consume four times as much 

 lumber per capita, as England and three times, as much as 

 Germany. We produce about one-third as much timber as 

 might be grown by careful management. At this rate, and 

 considering the increasing amount of land taken for agricul- 



