514 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



been a boom in ash on account of the boom in golf. The ash 

 was needed for the making of golf clubs, so that the golf links 

 that were being formed in all directions were helping those who 

 were growers of ash. The sixth question was that of damage by 

 game. Finally, there was the question of how far they could 

 look for State aid to forestry. Mr Munro Ferguson and he had 

 sat on the Committee that investigated that question, and that 

 Committee had made certain suggestions, but none of these sug- 

 gestions had been acted on by the Government. They wanted 

 to get some State aid for forestry education. They wanted a 

 forestry school, to which practical working foresters could go for 

 a short course in the scientific principles of their business. It 

 was not unreasonable also to look for the Government giving, 

 under just and equitable conditions, some pecuniary assistance 

 to impecunious proprietors in the afforestation of waste lands. 

 The Government were doing a great deal for forestry in Ireland, 

 and Scotland should now have a look in, to see if there was any 

 public money to help impecunious landlords to afforest their 

 waste lands, seeing that this was a matter of national import- 

 ance, and was for the good of the whole community. He (the 

 Doctor) was not at all proud in these matters, and he was quite 

 prepared to take pecuniary aid if the Government saw fit to give 

 it. If there were a Carnegie who had fifty millions to give away, 

 and who knew the national importance of afforesting waste lands 

 and advancing forestry education, he would invite him to step 

 forward and announce his munificent gifts. But Carnegies did 

 not grow on every bush. He was not a married man — unfor- 

 tunately or fortunately, as they might choose to regard it — but 

 if he were a married man with a family, he did not know 

 that he could take a better way of providing for his successors 

 than by the planting of a large extent of forest land, which 

 his sons and grandsons could cut down fifty or sixty years 

 hence. In such a case, he could not help thinking that it would 

 be ineffable bliss for him, some fifty years hence, to look down 

 from the celestial regions, and see his grandsons enjoying them- 

 selves, and reaping the fruits of the timber crop he had planted 

 for them. 



After the loud and prolonged cheering, with which the genial 

 Doctor's peroration had been received, had subsided, the Chairman 

 said that the speech they had just heard from Dr Farquharson 

 was one of the most amusing and interesting addresses it had 



