52 FOREST commissioner's REPORT. 



the lumberman rejects. Cedar has been every where sought for 

 railway sleepers ; white birch for spools, poplar for paper, hacme- 

 tack for ship's beams and knees, and nearly every kind of hard 

 wood for furniture, the interior finish of buildings and vessels, for 

 agricultural and other tools, and for exportation for fruit boxes. 

 The discovery of solvents, and the invention of ingenious machinery 

 for grinding the fibre of various trees have unduly stimulated the 

 manufacture of paper and pulp. "Wealthy men, in and out of the 

 State, combining their capital, have recently erected mills on a 

 large scale for the manufacture of paper fabrics that will require an 

 enormous forest growth to keep them supplied with raw material. 



Although this business, if ancillary to the older lumber business 

 and using only its waste products, would be not only profitable to 

 the operators, but advantageous to the State, it is questionable if 

 its temporary gains to owners compensate for its economic waste to 

 the people at large, when it appropriates so much of the live forests, 

 which a few years' growth would enlarge into valuable timber. It 

 does not seem a wise economy, if the necessities of coming genera- 

 tions are considered, to grind into pulp, or whittle into matches, or 

 split into laths straight and thrifty pine and spruce trees, the 

 resource for timber and lumber of our children, especially where it 

 is known that materials equally valuable for such productions, are 

 annually burnt at our mills or thrown into our rivers. 



All these usual and unusual operations, besides the number of 

 trees they destroy for which some compensation is obtained, fill the 

 forests everywhere with the waste tops, with the accumulating brush 

 of small growth destroj-ed in clearing and opening roads, and, where 

 all this debris has become dr}', sparks from the locomotive that 

 effects the transportation, kindle it into a confiagration that takes 

 from the woods annually without compensation as much in value as 

 as had been taken by the lumberman's axe. 



The effect all these operations with their necessary concomitants 

 are having in the restriction of the forest area of the State, may be 

 seen by the casual traveller in the wider openings of the general 

 landscape, in the shrinkage of streams and rivers and in the dete- 

 rioration in quality and size of the logs floated every season down 

 our great rivers. The summary' of the surve3's seems to indicate 

 that the annual cut of logs in the State is as large by cubic measure- 

 ment, perhaps larger, than ever ; but where it is considered that now 

 it takes ten trunks to make a thousand feet, whereas fifty years ago 



