320 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



values of not less than $900,000,000 is promised as a result of this 

 expenditure and an increase in tax income of 13.5 million. 



B. E. F. 



Luinhcr Prices, Report to the Price-Fixing Committee. Price Sec- 

 tion, Division of Planning and Statistics, War Industries Board, No- 

 vember, 1 91 8. Pp. 247. 



In this report, published in multigraph, average lumber prices for 

 various species in different materials and grades are summarized over 

 the period from the beginning of the year 19 13 to about the middle of 

 1918. The summaries are shown both in tabular form and in charts, 

 giving relative prices on the basis of the average quoted prices for July, 

 1913, to June, 1914. 



Three sources of lumber prices are considered, namely, (i) Trade 

 Papers, (2) Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Trade Com- 

 mission, and (3) the United States Forest Service. The first are de- 

 clared to be unreliable, and none of the published quotations are used 

 except from the Commercial Bulletin of Boston, which alone was found 

 to carry lumber-price quotations of a reliable character. The quota- 

 tions secured from the second source are limited in extent and much 

 of the information originally furnished was disregarded, as it was 

 based on trade-journal reports. The bulk of the report consists of a 

 summary of the information contained in the quarterly bulletins of the 

 Forest Service, which give the average prices f. o. b. mill of a great 

 variety of lumber from mills in all parts of the important lumber-pro- 

 ducing sections. These bulletins are based on direct reports from mills 

 of actual lumber prices, and, although there is considerable irregularity 

 noticeable in the material available for these reports from period to 

 period, this has, so far as practicable, been eliminated in the summaries. 



In all, seventeen different species are reported upon and prices for 

 various products and grades for each species are given, there being, in 

 the case of southern yellow pine, twenty separate materials dealt with. 



The author discusses briefly the major swing of lumber prices be- 

 tween 1873 and 1918, showing the general and rapid upward movement 

 which took place between 1890 and 1907 — an increase of 94 per cent, 

 as compared to a 14.6 per cent advance in general prices of all com- 

 modities. 



The trend of prices since 1907 is best indicated in the following 

 quotation from the report : 



"The actual fluctuations in lumber prices since 1907 show the effect of the 

 fundamental factors that have checked advances in lumber prices. It was not 



