58 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
the market to a much larger extent than is presently the case, and 
that we might be very much less dependent than we are upon the 
surplus timber of other nations. 
The importance of this to the country is increased by the con- 
sideration of the continued appreciation of timber. There is 
abundant evidence forthcoming to indicate that the present rate 
of timber consumption of the world is in excess of the present 
reproduction in the forests of the great timber supplying countries, 
and with the persistence of existing conditions we would appear to 
be within measurable distance of a timber famine. Experience, too, 
teaches that we may expect not a-diminution but rather an increase 
in consumption. No doubt as civilisation advances the discoveries 
of science will, as they have done in the past, enable us to 
substitute in many ways for the naturally produced wood other 
substances prepared by manufacture; but this saving in some 
directions has been, and will probably continue to be, counter- 
balanced by greater utilisation in others—witness, for example, the 
enormous development within recent years of the wood-pulp 
industry abroad, and consider the prospect opened up by the 
manufacture of wood-silk which is now being begun in Britain. 
That the possibility of forest exhaustion is no chimera should 
be evident to anyone conversant with current timber literature. 
Taking North Europe for instance:—In Norway, ‘raw timber is 
yearly becoming more expensive and more difficult to obtain.” 
To Sweden “pitch pine long beams are taken from America, 
suitable ones of sufficient size and quality being unobtainable now 
in Sweden.” In Scandinavia, the virgin forests, “excepting such 
as are specially reserved by the Government in the districts where 
mills are situated, are almost exhausted.” In Russia, the Riga 
“supply of oak is exhausted.” These sentences, culled within the 
past few weeks from trade journals, show that this is a more 
pertinent question than some would suppose. In Sweden, which, 
it is remarkable, is actually importing logs from America, the 
situation is regarded as so serious that proposals are on foot for the 
imposition of a tax upon exported timber for the purpose of raising 
a fund for replanting denuded areas. But it is not only in North 
European countries that there are signs of the giving out of timber 
forests. As they fail, the demand upon Canadian and American 
stocks increases, and when we look at these, Canada “shows signs 
of beginning to find it hard to continue her voluminous exports to 
Europe, and at the same time send sufficient supplies to the United 
