ELISHA MITCHELL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY. 3 



out. Conditions will be presented analogous to those 

 experienced in Kurope and these must be treated along- 

 the same lines and finally resolved b}^ the application of 

 similar methods and by considering the general effects 

 upon our trees of their environments, the soils, atmos- 

 pheric changes and the various forms of plant and ani- 

 mal life. It will be understood from this how neces- 

 sary it is that the pathological characteristics of trees 

 worthy of extensive culture for their timber, should be 

 known. 



xVs yet we are in the dark about the demands of even 

 our more common trees. xVs a people it has scarcel}" 

 become known to us that our forests are exhaustable, 

 much less that there are large waste areas, now entirely 

 unproductive of commercial timbers and that these^ 

 areas less than iifty years ago were wooded, in some 

 instances heavily wooded, with valuable trees. There 

 are such tracts of waste land in North Carolina in what 

 are known as the "pine barrens" of the eastern coun- 

 ties. In the course of an examination of the timber 

 lands of eastern North Carolina undertaken last year 

 (1893) b}' the North Carolina Geological Survey some 

 inqviiry and research was made into the extent of these 

 weiste areas and a more extended discussion of the re- 

 sults of this examination will be found in Bulletin 3, of 

 the North Carolina Geological Survey, now being pub- 

 lished. These areas were found to include considerablv 

 over 400,000 acres and to be increasing so rapidly that 

 the causes leading to them were sought for. This en- 

 tailed an anal3^sis of the life histor y of the long 

 leaf pine and of the other pines with which, in this 

 region of North Carolina, it is most intimately associated. 

 While these observations are by no means either ex- 

 haustive, or even full, they will show in a general way 



