66 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
have a national home-timber industry, it can only be when the 
issues involved are more fully realised than they are nowadays. 
. As in agricultural practice failure can only be obviated by the 
application of scientific methods in farm cultivation, so is it with 
forestry. To become a profitable industry it must be practised as 
an applied science, and not as an empirical routine. 
We live beyond the days when it would be possible to apply the 
autocratic remedy for want of woodlands introduced in Scotland by 
the Jacobean statute, which compelled the landlords not only to 
plant wood and forest and make hedges, but also enjoined them, 
under penalties, to see that each of the tenants planted one tree for 
every merke of land. Nor, indeed, can much be said, of the 
success of the compulsion. And I do not imagine anything could 
be gained nowadays by the method adopted in Scotland in the 
middle of last century by the ‘‘ Select Society,” as it was called, of 
offering a premium to farmers who planted the most trees within a 
specified time. That such processes were deemed unecessary is 
interesting as showing how old standing has been the recognition 
of the want of sufficient woodland area in the country. At the 
present time there are those who would reverse, as it were, the 
process of the old statute, and who look to the acquisition by the 
State of large areas of waste land, and their affurestation by it, for 
the solution of this forestry question. It is, no doubt, a wise 
policy which encourages private enterprise to deal with the details 
of industries, and only invokes State aid as a directive and con- 
trolling foree when its need can be clearly shown. That there is 
need for State aid in the case of forestry I do not deny, but it is 
not required to the extent just mentioned. 
I unhesitatingly say that the State ought to treat the forest areas 
now in its possession in a reasonable and scientific mauner, instead 
of leaving them as objects for the finger of scientific scorn. They 
might be made, in part at least, models of the best forestry practice. 
It is no use to dispute with the sentiment and taste which have 
prevailed in making the New Forest what it now is, and it is hope- 
less to expect an unanimous verdict as to the destiny of State woods 
and upon the method of treatment to which they should be subject. 
We have had recently, in the lively discussion regarding the 
management of Epping Forest, an illustration of how large is the 
number of people who have views upon the subject of the manage- 
ment of woodlands, and how the majority of them, if they had their 
way, would, through ignorance, defeat the very object they desire 
