]886.] EDITORIAL NOTES. 601 



The Forestry Commission of the State of New York has 

 recently issued a very comprehensive and elaborate report, in which 

 great prominence is given to the necessity for legislative enactments 

 giving greater security to the owners of forest lands, and providing 

 for the prompt punishment of trespassers. Speaking of forest fires, 

 which cause such lamentable destruction in the Adirondack forests, 

 the report says : " They do more than consume timber ; they change 

 the nature of the surface soil, and deprive it of the abiUty to produce 

 a second growth of the trees which they destroy. When the maples, 

 beeches, and pines of the forests are burned, these trees do not soon 

 recover the soil; these for the time give way to poplars, wild 

 cherries, and other inferior trees of no economic value. This new 

 growtli, unless destroyed by fire, is in time followed by another, in 

 which appear trees of the species which composed the original 

 forest. Such a rotation of forest crops, however, necessarily occupies- 

 a long time, and years must elapse before a forest destroyed by fire 

 can, even under the most favourable conditions, be replaced by a 

 new forest of similar composition. Land, however, upon which the 

 timber has been destroyed by fire rarely escapes subsequent burning. 

 A second fire runs more easily and rapidly than the first over the 

 ground cleared of its protecting covering of undergrowth, and finds 

 abundant fuel in the half-charred trunks which the first fire only 

 partially consumed. Each subsequent fire spreads more rapidly and 

 easily, the surface soil is gradually rendered unfit to produce plants 

 of any sort, or is washed into the streams ; rocky slopes are laid 

 bare, and whole regions, once valuable in the forests which they- 

 supported, are made worthless for ever." 



In reviewing the home-grown timber trade of 1885, The Tinibef 

 Trades Journal speaks rather more favourably than of the trade im 

 imported timber. The cause for this is not far to seek. There are 

 certain uses to which it is impossible to put satisfactorily any but 

 English timber, and however severe the competition with foreign 

 material, it wiU have no efifect on the market for English wood. If 

 the supply is in equipoise with the demand — and on the whole this 

 has been the case in 1885 — the market is sure to be steady. 



The greatest consumers of English timber are of course the" 

 railway companies, who take large quantities of elm, beech, and 

 especially oak. The wear and tear of their rolling stock necessitates 

 its constant renewal, and nothing stands the strain to which every 

 coal and goods waggon is put like English oak ; and so large is the 

 quantity of home-grown timber absorbed in the manufacture of 

 these, that it may be safely said, barring any unforeseen and unusual 



