APPENDIX. . 63 



had been continued and enforced by their successors throughout 

 the United States to the present day, there would be less occasion 

 for fearing a timber famine in the near future. 



In the locality of these earliest lumbering operations in the New 

 World, are yet to be found many huge stumps of the towering pines 

 then standing, which must have attained to large proportions long 

 before the time of Columbus. There is good reason for believing 

 that some of them are stumps of trees reserved for masts for the 

 royal navy, and marked with the broad arrow in Queen Anne's 

 reign. These stumps, if undisturbed, are destined to remain yet 

 another century, unimpeachable, though silent witnesses to the fact 

 of the depreciation of our present forest growth, in age, in size, in 

 strength and enduring qualities. 



The vast forests that then covered and adorned the continent, and 

 which had often been renewed by the processes of nature, have since 

 been largely displaced by the hand of man, which in hewing down 

 these forests has so far outstripped their natural reproduction that 

 the present generation is compelled to consider the best methods of 

 protecting what now remains. 



"We consume yearly" in this country, according to late estimates 

 of Prof. Fernow, Chief of Forestry Division in the Department of 

 Agriculture at Washington, "not less than twenty billion cubic feet 

 of wood. This amount is made up in round numbers in the follow- 

 ing manner : 2,500,000,000 feet for lumber market and wood manu- 

 factures ; 500,000,000 feet for railroad construction ; 500,000,000 

 feet for fence material, etc. ; 250,000,000 feet for charcoal ; 17,500,- 

 000,000 leet for fuel. To this it will be safe to add for waste- 

 ful practices and for the destruction of yearly conflagrations, 

 at the least, twenty-five per cent." Without adding anything for 

 that which is wasted and burned up, we find the consumption of 

 timber to be about fifty-six cubic feet per capita, and of cord wood 

 283 cubic feet. 



Prof. Fernow estimates that it would require 100,000,000 acres, 

 —an area five times as large as the land surface of Maine — of well 

 stocked thrifty forests equal to the best managed German forests, 

 to produce continuously that which is used for railroad construction, 

 (fifty cubic feet per annum being the estimated product of such 

 forests) and 500,000,000 acres to supply the lumber market, etc. 

 On this basis, it would require 100,000,000 acres to produce the 

 fence material. Allowing a yearly increment of 100 cubic feet of cord 



