40 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



price is paid for the land by the state, but the donor has the 

 right by law to reacquire title to it any time within ten years, 

 but not thereafter, by paying the state the cost of improvements 

 plus 4 per cent, interest. A large number of small tracts 

 have been thus acquired and planted. .Several states have 

 begun the purchase of large tracts of non-productive forest land 

 for afforestation. 



State Forests. 



From the beginning of government in the United States 

 until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the guiding 

 principle of the public land policy was to get all the land into 

 private hands as rapidly as possible. The desire to have the 

 wilderness cleared, and to extend agriculture, justified the policy. 

 During the latter part of the nineteenth century, it began to be 

 realised that while the policy of rapid public land disposition 

 might be the best one to develop agriculture, mining, and 

 manufacturing, it was very questionable whether or not the 

 continuation of this policy as applied to forest land would best 

 serve the interests of a growing population. The theory of an 

 inexhaustible timber supply was exploded by the diminishing 

 cut in the great pineries of the northern states. It was seen 

 there that the private owner, not being interested in a second 

 crop of timber, made no provision for forest reproduction, and 

 the forest industries vanished with the harvesting of the virgin 

 crop. Gradually the present policy of national forests was 

 developed, by which 160,000,000 acres in the west are managed 

 by the Federal Service. In all this vast domain, any land 

 suitable for agriculture is still open to bona-fide settlers. 



The land policies of the eastern states in broad outline have 

 been similar to those of the Federal Government. Nearly all 

 the land in the thirteen original states belonged to the states 

 individually, and not to the nation. Most of it was disposed 

 of by sale or by grants for educational and other public purposes 

 before it was of much value. During the past decade, the 

 change in the land policies of the northern states has been very 

 marked. The purchase by the Federal Government of national 

 forests at the head-waters of our eastern navigable rivers has 

 had a strong effect in arousing public interest in forestry, but 

 the tendency in the eastern states is strongly toward state 

 forests. Some of these states began acquiring forest land even 



