1906-7.] Do WE NEED A FORESTRY COLLEGE? 299 
to go over a newly acquired limit and prepare a working plan for operating 
it on the basis of removing yearly only the amount of timber that would 
equal the annual growth. This is very encouraging, and a sign of the 
times, but it is an isolated case, and cannot be taken to mean that the 
lumbermen are going to engage foresters in large numbers. 
When the graduates in forestry are able to demonstrate their ability 
to increase the profits of the lumbermen, they may look for profitable 
employment among them, but not before; and this demonstration must 
be made in Ontario, or at least in Canada.- If they can show that they 
are no mere theorists, but practical, well trained men, capable of direct- 
ing large lumber operations economically, they will be assured of em- 
ployment by the private holders of timber lands, who are business men 
and willing to pay for efficient service. 
I doubt very much if there is any business in this country carried on 
with so little regard to economy, with so much waste, as the great lumber 
industry. The profits of the business, owing largely to the low first cost 
of the standing timber, have been handsome, and the lowest possible 
cost of production has not been so imperative in this as in most other 
industries. Waste of timber, of supplies and of labor has characterized 
the business from the earliest days of lumbering in Canada. Until quite 
recently good pine timber was used to make roads and shanties, when less 
valuable trees were equally available. Felled trees containing much good 
material but defective in part were left in the bush to rot or add to the 
material for forest fires. Food and other supplies were frequently left 
to spoil. Delays in driving logs down stream owing to poor management, 
have added to the cost of production, and in many ways the lumbering 
business has been conducted in a reckless manner that very few businesses 
in these days of keen competition could stand. 
This state of affairs has been due to no lack of desire on the part of 
the limit holders to make as much money as possible from their timber 
holdings, but their operations were conducted on a large scale, often at 
great distances from the head office, and the proprietors had to depend on 
the work of the men whose whole training had been received under similar 
wasteful conditions. In most cases these men are not observant except 
in one beaten path. They learned, in the gradual promotion from a 
lumber Jack or shanty man to foreman and perhaps to superintendent, 
to estimate the quantity of timber a given tree would make, and to make 
a good guess at the quantity of standing merchantable pine on a given area, 
but their methods of removing this timber are in most cases those followed 
by their predecessors with little change. The damage done to young 
timber in felling trees and which could be largely avoided, they seldom 
