- ADDRESS BY THE VICE-PRESIDENT, AUGUST 6, 1894. 51 
not only natural forests of great extent, and worked on thorough 
business principles ; but you will also see many thousands of acres 
of plantations adorning the rugged glens and steep hill-sides of 
“Caledonia stern and wild,” formed and managed on purely com- 
mercial principles, which yield a substantial return for the labour 
and capital expended in their formation, on land which otherwise 
must have lain waste and almost worthless to the owners, as 
well as serving no useful public purpose. 
An excessive denudation of forests has been going on, both by 
the forces of Nature and the hand of man, in many parts of the 
country for a considerable number of years, with little or no 
effort to restore the balance between woodland and treeless space. 
It is an open question, whether this denudation of forests has not 
an injurious effect on the climate of a country. On the low- 
lying seaboard this may be doubtful, but in upland and far inland 
districts, it is very possible ; and notable instances are on record of 
the ruinous effects following in the wake of the clearance of forests 
from wide areas. 
We will now turn to another aspect of the question, and ask,— 
What is to be done to make our waste lands more profitable to the 
owner and beneficial to the country? Plant them, we would reply, 
even although we are fully aware that it has been said “planting 
does not pay,” and whatever does not pay, or give good promise of 
paying, is at once thrown aside in this utilitarian age. Still, it is 
a fact that many statistics of undoubted accuracy have been pro- 
duced to show that planting does pay, when conducted with skill 
on suitable land, much of which could not be turned to any other 
purpose that would return one-fourth of the profits got from well- 
managed forests. Failures, no doubt, there have been in raising 
timber of sufficiently good quality to compete with foreign produce; 
but may not this have been the fault of the planter, rather than 
any drawback in the nature of the site, soil, or climate? I have 
often heard it stated by others than Scotsmen, that “trees won’t 
grow in Scotland,” meaning thereby not exactly that trees do not 
grow in our country, but that we cannot grow marketable 
timber in Scotland. As every member of this Society knows, this 
statement is a simple absurdity; but that timber of better quality, 
and consequently more value to the owner, could be grown in 
properly managed forests, skilfully formed, on much of the land 
now lying waste in this country, than is often met with in our 
woods, is a self-evident preposition. 
