312 Forestry Quarterly. 



was so great that one is tempted to wish our Constitution-makers, Legisla- 

 tures and Governors had let the whole business alone ! 



"Yet the tragedy has its comic after-piece. For our State authorities 

 are now resuming on the Forest Reserve the once-ridiculed policy of tree- 

 planting, instead of leaving the matter to Nature; and we hear com- 

 placent statements of the hundreds of thousands of new trees which have 

 been set out. Yet everybody knows, or ought to know, that these planta- 

 tions that cannot be properly managed hereafter without the use of 'the 

 forester's weapon,' the axe, and that when, at great expense, they 

 shall have been brought to the condition of ripe, marketable forest-crops, 

 nothing can be done with them, under our Constitution, but let them decay, 

 or sell them as burnt and fallen timber after 'accidental' fires, and go on 

 planting new ones ! The alternative is to amend the Constitution — a slow 

 and doubtful process — or else 'construe' it so as to make it mean what it 

 does not say — an easy and fashionable but most demoralizing expedient." 



The writer should have stated that this tree-planting is entirely 

 unconstitutional according to the clause in the Constitution which 

 requires these lands to be left in the "wild state." 



Other amusing miscarriage of well intentioned legislation is 

 recited. The speaker finally concluded : 



"And, as to the general problem of 'conservation,' I think it is the busi- 

 ness of all engineers to pour cold water on hot heads, and prevent, so far 

 as they may, the reckless operations of a sincere, but ignorant, enthusiasm." 



This is somewhat severe on our enthusiastic conservers, but it 

 is perhaps useful to dampen the ardor of the over-enthusiastic. 



B. E. F. 



Die IValdungen des Konigrcichs Sacliscn. By Franz Mammen. 

 Leipzig, 1905. 331 pp. 4 . Price, Mk. 16. 



A belated reference to this monumental statistical work, dis- 

 cussing in the greatest detail the forest conditions in 1902 of the one 

 of the German States, which until lately has been leading all others 

 in financial results, Saxony, may be justified in order to bring out 

 the fact that these financial results have in part resulted from a 

 reduction in the length of the rotation and the cutting of the older 

 age-classes. The present distribution of age-classes is as follows : 



Over 100 81-100 61-80 41-60 21-40 1-20 years 



3.6 6.6 16.4 23.8 22.2 24.5 per cent. 



This for State forest. For private forest the relation is still 

 less favorable, the series being 



2.4 5.1 14.1 24.1 24.9 25.3 



