56 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



VII. Report on the Excursion of the Society to Sweden in 1902. 

 By George U. Macdonald, Forester, Raith, Kirkcaldy. 



It was with feelings of intense delight and expectancy that, on 

 Friday, the 18th of July, many members of the Royal Scottish 

 Arboricultural Society boarded the good ship " Balder," which 

 was to convey them from Granton Pier to Gothenburg, where they 

 were safely landed on the following Sunday forenoon. To those 

 of us whose daily occupation is the tending and management of 

 woods, as well as to those who are more directly identified with 

 the manufacture of timber, it is a matter of no wonder that for 

 weeks previously we could think of little else than the lessons we 

 were to learn from visiting a country long familiar to us as one 

 of the greatest exporters of timber to Britain. 



In the following remarks it will be the aim of the writer to deal 

 rather with those phases of the tour which bear more directly on 

 the principles and methods on which forestry is conducted in 

 Sweden, than with the daily incidents of the Excursion, which 

 have already been described in the leading newspapers. 



Sweden has a forest area of twenty-nine million acres, about one- 

 fifth part of which is owned by the State, the remainder being 

 in the possession of private proprietors. Living in a sparsely 

 populated country, in which there was no great demand for wood, 

 either for home use or for export, it is no great wonder that, some 

 centuries ago, the Swedish people believed that in their vast 

 forests they had a wealth of timber which was practically in- 

 exhaustible, and that they had little need to trouble themselves 

 about the conservancy and management on scientific principles of 

 what appeared to them a boundless tract of growing trees. But 

 time works many changes ; and the keen-eyed and prudent Swede 

 at length discovered that in his timber-clad slopes lay his country's 

 wealth ; that the demand by foreign countries for this natural pro- 

 duct of his land was yearly increasing ; and that, if Sweden was to 

 keep the lead in satisfying that demand, her people must seriously 

 set themselves to work out the problem whether or not, without 

 any care or protection on their part, their forests could continue, 

 not only to supply their own increasing wants, but could also be 

 relied on as a permanent and ever-increasing source of revenue to 

 the nation, by the sale of surplus timber in foreign markets. 



