Plan to Meet Needs for Wood and Timber. 309 



lumber feet per acre which would about cover our present 

 annual cut. 



Considering that the managed forests of Prussia, on a very 

 much smaller area (less than 7 million acres) produced in 1850 

 precisely the amount of 28 cubic feet per acre, we may feel 

 assured that this production by unaided nature is most likely 

 an over-estimate, as far as useful material goes, and that we 

 are justified in believing that our present consumption exceeds 

 at least by more than double the annual growth. 



And since, according to the same authority, there is hardly 30 

 years' supply in sight, the time for delay and dilly-dallying with 

 Nature's good will is certainly past, and positive measures 

 are becoming urgent. 



Even if the remainder of uncut timber were all handled under 

 what is called the method of conservative logging, as at present 

 understood, it is questionable whether our requirements for the 

 future can be secured, and the situation much changed. 



We should understand the true inwardness of conservative 

 logging. In the first place, it means a more careful utilization 

 of the existing natural crop ; secondly, it involves leaving a part 

 of the crop for additional increrrient by restricting the cut to a 

 certain diameter; thirdly, if applied to the fullest extent, it 

 means leaving here and there seed trees, that might help in se- 

 curing a new crop if nature is kind, but it does nothing to insure 

 such a new crop or to assist its development, and since the fi- 

 nancial condition of the operation prevents the removal of weed 

 trees, the latter have at least as good a chance, often a better 

 one, to reproduce as against the better species which are the 

 object of the logging and which, by this very fact, are constantly 

 reduced in the composition of the forest. If, then, fire is kept out, 

 the trees left of the original growth will lay on additional in- 

 crement, and in 20 or 30 years will have grown to desirable log 

 size, permitting the logger to return for another harvest; but 

 there is no assurance that a new, young crop will spring up and 

 take the place of the original, nor if such crop perchance, should 

 establish itself, that it will be of the right kind and will in the 

 shade of the left-over trees develop advantageously. 



Conservative logging, then, is rather concerned with a more 

 conservative utilisation of the present crop, and has only a sub- 



