262 Nebraska State Horticultural Society. 



and fifty thousand telegraph poles must be renewed yearly, not to 

 mention the telephone poles used and the telegraph poles required in 

 the construction of new lines, making a total annual consumption 

 for poles and ties two hundred and thirty-five thousand acres. The 

 match industry clears up yearly four hundred acres of pine. The Dia- 

 mond Match company has recently purchased forty-thousand acres of 

 Oregon timber, the whole to be manufactured into matches. Three 

 thousand five hundred acres are needed yearly in the manufacture of 

 shoe pegs. Shoe lasts and boot-trees take six thousand four hundred 

 acres more. One mill converts yearly ten thousand cords of wood 

 into toothpicks. Another manufactures seventy-five thousand clothes- 

 pins every day. Each of our several largest newspapers uses daily 

 from one hundred to one hundred and fifty tons of paper pulp, or ten 

 to fifteen thousand acres of timber per year. These figures have not 

 yet included the amount of timber converted into lumber, lath, 

 shingles, fence posts, farm implements, etc., etc. Seventy-five million 

 dollars worth of lumber is annually manufactured into wagons and 

 ■carriages. The lumber and paper trade consumes every year a total 

 ■of four million acres of forest, while the amount used for fuel alono 

 is greater than that required for all other purposes combined. Many 

 •of the minor products are quite as important. The woodlands yield 

 over 17 per cent of the granulated sugar made in the United States, 

 not to mention the many other indirect products, such as tanning ma- 

 terials and naval stores. 



Thus it will be seen that the purposes for which wood is used 

 require an enormous amount of it, and with the development of the 

 arts and industries the amount will still increase. To the enormous 

 clearings made in a single year to supply the demands for the forest 

 products must be added the losses accumulating from fires. Every 

 year vast areas are swept over and the timber is either more or less 

 •damaged or destroyed altogether. 



But the woodlands are of immense value to the country in other 

 ways than in the commercial products which they yield. It is proven 

 -over and over again that forests conserve the ground water and con- 

 trol its distribution. Unfortunately we have no scientific data to show 

 whether the presence or absence of forests has anything whatever 

 to do with the amount of precipitation. Contrary to popular belief 

 on this question, the extreme probability is that forests increase 

 precipitation, if at all, only very slightly, and that little appears as 

 local summer showers. But when it comes to using the rainfall you 

 have a different proposition. There can be no doubt that forests 

 rf-onserve t'^.e nioixt ire content of the ground. Their influence in regu- 



