198 ANKUAL REPORT. 



sumption of timber in this country to enable us to be incredulous re- 

 garding its claimed insufficiency. If your minds can grasp the follow- 

 ing figures, you will be better able to appreciate the forestry situation. 

 Careful estimates, based on the most laborious and painstaking 

 research of the forestry division of the national department of agri- 

 culture, place the annual consumptiou of timber at 20,000,000,000 

 cubic feet~240,000,000,000 feet of lumber; or, if we now number 

 60,000,000 people, 4,000 feet for each man, woman and child in the 

 land. This amount is made up as follows: 



For lumber market and wood manufactures, 2,500,000,000 cubic 

 feet; railroad construction (new construction, based on the average of 

 the past ten years), 360,000,000 cubic feet; charcoal, 250,000,000 

 cubic feet; fence material, 500,000,000 cubic feet; fuel, 17,500,000,000 

 cubic feet. 



These amounts are actually used, but they do not comprise the total 

 of forest depletion; for our wasteful practices, culling and thinning 

 forests (leaving the residue to die), and conflagrations, add from 

 twenty-five to fifty per cent to the already enormous total. It is 

 known that the carefully protected and intelligently cultured forests 

 of Germany make an annual growth of fifty cubic feet per acre. If 

 our forests were making a corresponding growth — which no intelli- 

 gent forester will admit — on the basis of the lowest estimate of loss 

 by waste and fire, it would take the growth of 500,000,000 acres to 

 keep pace with our consumption. 



Four years ago a careful canvass was made to determine the forest 

 area of the United Startes. Including the previously mentioned Pa- 

 cific coast belts, and the vast timbered regions of Alaska, we have a 

 total of only 489,280,000 acres. It is unsafe to estimate the annual 

 growth of our forests at over one-half those of Germany, of twenty- 

 five per cent; and it is certainly not unreasonable to put the loss by 

 waste and fire at thirty -five per cent — less than an average of the va- 

 rious estimates. This gives a total consumption of twenty-seven 

 billion cubic feet, and an annual growth of only 12,231,000,000 cubic 

 feet! Appalling as these figures are. they do not tell the whole story, 

 for it is admitted that many of the above estimated forest lands do 

 not possess a foot of valuable timber — are but swamps of brush, hill- 

 tops of scrubs, and worthless second growths on former timber 

 lands. 



It is my candid opinion that the citizens of the United States never 

 were confronted with a more serious problem than the one now under 

 consideration. They never were confronted with a problem which. 



