210 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



forests on burned acres by live hundred per cent? Of that the pass- 

 ing passion of a landscape architect for exotic decorative plants might 

 precipitate a national calamity? Or that a few days of extra cold 

 weather in mid-winter might save a billion or so feet of good spruce 

 and its owners some millions of dollars? 



Mrs. O'Leary's cow is reputed to have spilled a pail of milk with 

 her left hind foot and burned Chicago. It may well be that the 

 superintendent's decision to open a new level in the Homestead Mine 

 in September brought about the killing and waste of several hundred 

 million feet of Black Hills timber and that this finally gave a pocket 

 full of railroad passes to a mycologist, and because of this that the 

 practice of wood-impregnation in America was measurably advanced, 

 so that the loss of the Black Hills timber may ultimately prove to 

 have been a boon. The forest is a very complex affair and the 

 forester has need of being a very well-trained and exceedingly wise 

 man. His real troubles have hardly yet begun and a test tube with a 

 cotton stopper or the pink-legged larvae of a bug even yet unknown 

 to the Bureau of Entomology may prove his best friends. Such things 

 do not of necessity detract from the interest of the forester in his work. 



If the cotton crop begins to fail because sonie bug is eating up the 

 l)olls, an entomologist will identify the insect and then proceed to 

 give it a name and work out its origin and its life history. By the 

 time he has finished this the entomologist may have some notions 

 as to what may be done to control the new pest. In all probability, 

 however, that entomologist will now be transferred to other en- 

 tomological work and experts in agriculture, having now detailed 

 and dependable information concerning the insect, will begin to experi- 

 ment with control measures. When they have established practicable 

 measures and eliminated impractical ones, in all probability they will 

 be transferred to other work and the job of getting farmers to 

 fhversify their crops will be turned over to a practiced publicity man 

 with a smattering of agricultural knowledge and an easy way with 

 editors and politicians and storekeepers and bankers. 



When the chestnut-blight fungus began to work it was unnoticed 

 for several years. Then some one called the attention of a mycologist 

 to the dying trees. The mycologist examined the fungus and gave it 

 a name. Other mycologists became interested and gave it other 

 names. Some mycologists said that it was a native species which 

 for more or less intelligible reasons had run amuck, while others 



