174 College of Forestry 
and stimulation of the mind and the health and vigor of the 
body. 
We come now to remark that the greatest thing which 
we face at the present moment is the accumulated effects 
of three hundred years of invasion of this terrain by 
civilized man. By this I do not mean a survey of° all 
that man has accomplished, but the effects upon the 
vegetation itself and upon the land which it occupied and 
in some measure still occupies. ‘This is not to be assumed to 
be a statement which would detract from the pride and com- 
placency with which we are want to view the great 
things accomplished by man in working out his civiliza- 
tion in this new land. But now that a day of conscien- 
tious taking of stock has come, and we are engaged in advo- 
cating a future policy in harmony with present scientific 
knowledge and social conscience, I think we are pretty gener- 
ally agreed that our resources so far as they were expressed 
in forest and especially in the plant producing capacity of the 
land have on the whole been rather badly handled. We are 
forced to this conclusion when we observe how large a per- 
centage of our land is not at the present producing anything 
of value or at any rate a reasonable return, and worse, not in 
a position to become productive land in any adequate sense. 
One recalls in this connection the depressing landscape of 
eut over and burned over lands in the Adirondacks and Cat- 
skills, the waste, scrub-timbered hill lands of the Alleghany 
Plateau and the Hudson Highlands, the poor pastures and 
run down farms of hill lands and swamp lands yielding no 
good forest and still undrained for crop yield. 
The fact is, we are right at the point of appraising our 
lands and of making a classification and allotment with re- 
spect to their permanent productive capacity whether as farm 
lands or as forest producing lands with the added function 
of protection of soil cover, water storage and run off and of 
preserving the natural loveliness of the state and its facilities 
for recreation. By ‘“ we” I mean not only all of us as citi- 
zens of New York State but the private land owner also who 
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