32 Forestry Quarterly 



a proportionate charge to protection should be made from the 

 costs of constructing and maintaining the entire permanent 

 improvement system of the forest, since every Ranger Station, 

 trail road, bridge or telephone line may play an essential part 

 in the protection system. 2. Aside from direct expenditures 

 must be considered indirect costs. These would include the 

 value of the losses occasioned by fire in the destruction of 

 merchantable timber, the cost of forest replacement after fire, 

 damage to improvements and range. Still other losses are 

 apparent, as in the depreciation of site and the lowered sale value 

 of stumpage where the investments of purchasers may be threat- 

 ened or wiped out by fire, and the stumpages prices paid by them 

 must compensate for the risks of operation. The sum of all these 

 items of expenditure, loss and depreciation make up the total 

 bill occasioned by the danger of fire — and there are other haz- 

 ards besides fire to which the forest is exposed. Even the Forest 

 Service does not, as yet, attempt to approximate more than a 

 part of the direct costs and the more obvious losses occasioned 

 by fire. 



On about 160,000,000 acres of the National Forests, large areas 

 are non-forested. Other great areas have more or less cover of 

 unmerchantable timber. The Forester's Reports segregate "tim- 

 bered" from "open" lands. For the nine years 1905-1913, an 

 average annual loss of 3.94 acres per 1,000 acres on "timbered" 

 and "open" lands is reported. Of this there is reported an aver- 

 age loss of 1.53 acres per 1,000 in the "timbered" and an average 

 of 2.41 acres per 1,000 in the "open." Excluding the exceedingly 

 unfortunate year 1910, the losses in "timbered" country aver- 

 aged 0.47 acres per 1,000 and for the "open,"' 1.72 acres per 

 1,000, a total of 2.19 acres per 1,000 acres. Because of the great 

 variation in weather and other conditions from year to year, over 

 such a short period it is futile to attempt the comparison of 

 records by years in trying to determine the relative progress in 

 protective efificiency. This, however, is known to have been 

 very great — doubtless many hundred per cent. The lowest 

 reported losses were in 1906, with 0.7 acre per 1,000 acres. The 

 greatest losses were in 1910, when 19.90 acres per 1,000 were 

 burned. 



If about 0.5 acre per 1,000 acres were burned each year, and 

 if each burn should be in a new place, at the end of a rotation 



