1916] The Ottawa Naturalist. 131 



MUSEUMS AS AIDS TO FORESTRY. 



By Harlan I. Smith, Geological Survey, Ottawa. 



In gaining due recognition and support from the great 

 mass of the people, museums may be great aids to forestry. 

 Even the further application of museum methods in forestry, 

 may be of valuable service. The extent of the possibilities in 

 these lines of recruiting aid by means of museum methods of 

 publicity, recreation, instruction and research can hardly be 

 forecast. Such museums or methods, however, must be pro- 

 perl}^ adininistered to be effective. The methods used, for in- 

 tance, in the large and costly Botanical Museum in New York, 

 wotild be of little or no avail to forestry. That museum 

 may be of use to scientists, but is not of much human interest 

 to me, and, therefore, I judge, not to the average citizen, lum- 

 berman or forester. 



Vast expenditure of time and money is not necessarily 

 needed to secure valuable aid by these means. Museum cases, 

 if such are really required, may be made at a cost of less then 

 four dollars per foot front, as I have pointed out in The Ottawa 

 Naturalist of May, 1915, and The Scientific American of May 

 29, 1915. A large collection of specimens, maps, photographs 

 and labels is not needed to inoculate whole regions with the 

 germs of the ideas of the practicability and economic im- 

 portance, to say nothing of aesthetic values and the love of 

 forestry. A small exhibit may teach the general and valuable 

 principles of forestry, perhaps even better than a complete ex- 

 hibit of all kinds of trees, such as is shown in the American 

 Museum of Natural History in New York. Such a complete 

 exhibit might confuse or burden. The persons to be influenced 

 to give aid to forestry might be lost in the woods as it were. 



In the Rocky Mountains Park Museum at Banff, Alberta, 

 a beginning to a tree exhibit has been made. There are eleven 

 species of trees in the Park. Five grow in the valley, but the 

 other six are found only on the higher land. A complete col- 

 lection of the trunks and leaves of the trees growing in the valley 

 was made in two half days as a bi-product of other work, and 

 without any expense except as for time in cutting the trunks 

 to lengths for exhibition. At the same time two photographs 

 were made of each of these five kinds of trees ; one of a grove 

 or group of each kind of tree from a distance, and one of the 

 details of the trunk, bark, leaves and such flowers or fruits as 

 were then in season. Later photographs are to be made of the 



