12 ForESTRY. 
ALLEGED DISADVANTAGES. 
There appeared lately in one of the evening papers a letter 
from a noble earl in reference to Mr Keir Hardie’s proposal 
for State forestry. His lordship declared that it was futile to . 
think of profitable forestry in the United Kingdom, for two 
reasons—first, because of the furious storms which sweep these 
islands at irregular intervals; second, because the timber 
produced in our woods is far inferior in quality to that grown 
on the continent. As to the first objection, I deny emphatically 
that we are more exposed to storm than, say, Norway or 
Sweden, whence we draw such large supplies of coniferous 
timber. It is true that we suffer far more from wind damage 
than is the case in continental forests, but that is the result 
partly of our custom of planting in narrow belts and isolated 
small masses, and partly of the mischievous system of over- 
thinning which came into vogue in the nineteenth century. 
Trees that have been encouraged to grow heads out of all 
due proportion to their height will succumb to a storm that may 
be lifted harmlessly over a solid block of well-grown forest. A 
thousand contiguous acres of woodland will suffer far less from 
gales than 1000 acres scattered over an estate of 10,000 acres. 
Next as to the alleged inferiority of British timber to conti- 
nental. Surely that is a strange allegation against a country that 
used to supply timber for the noblest fleets that ever put to sea. 
I may say in passing that it was the demand for ship timber which 
initiated our vicious system of over-thinning. Shipwrights did not 
want straight boles ; they wanted bent timber, and you will actu- 
ally find in old treatises on forestry instructions about tying the 
limbs of oaks to produce the desired contortion. The result has 
been that we have conceived and aim at a false ideal. Our 
notion of what an oak ought to be is framed upon such a magnifi- 
cent deformity as the “ Major ’’ oak in Sherwood Forest. That 
we can grow fine straight oak if we choose may be seen in this 
example from the New Forest—a domain which, unhappily, the 
State is not permitted to treat on right principles. Here, again, 
is a wood of self-sown oak at Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, 30 
to 40 years old, which promises to develop into splendid clean 
timber. But to obtain examples of the highest development of 
oak timber we must go to France. Here are a series of photo- 
