THE CENTRAL FOREST AUTHORITY. 1 47 



knowledge by managing other people's estates. But it is a very 

 different thing to advise other people, and to pay for your own 

 mistakes yourself. The little knowledge I have of forestry I 

 have slowly and laboriously acquired during over forty years, 

 because it is over forty years since I first inherited an estate 

 in Stirlingshire. One of the first things I had to do was to 

 see what trees should be sold and what planted, and I have 

 been steadily for many years attending to that matter both in 

 Stirlingshire and afterwards in Renfrewshire. It is only by 

 season-to-season, by almost monthly, attention to what you 

 are doing, either planting or cutting, that you can see your 

 results very slowly, and it is only by paying yourself out 

 of your own pocket for your mistakes, and by sometimes getting 

 a little money put on the right side of your account for your 

 occasional successes, that you really have anything more than 

 a bowing acquaintance with forestry. Of course such know- 

 ledge as I possess is very much below the knowledge of those 

 who passed forestry examinations and made a study of it in 

 early life, and I have never heard that Sir William Haldane 

 has done that. 



" Now about the Scottish Board of Agriculture — something 

 over 90 per cent, of the woodlands in Great Britain are in 

 private hands, and anything that we are told about forestry 

 must come from an authority which proprietors can respect as 

 regards their knowledge of what they are talking about. Now, 

 in saying what I am going to say about the Scottish Board of 

 Agriculture, I do not wish to attack their policy on agricultural 

 lines. I know, as convener of an Agricultural County Committee, 

 they have done many things wisely and well during the last 

 two years. I am not dealing with agriculture but with their 

 management and advice on forestry questions. I would just 

 mention one matter, which shows how very impossible it is for 

 proprietors or for anyone else to have confidence in their 

 policy as regards forestry advice. There is a lecturer sent 

 about the country by the Scottish Board of Agriculture, I 

 have never seen him, but I have read reports of his lectures 

 in the papers, and I understood that his activities had 

 been put an end to because they were so obviously astray, 

 but, to my astonishment, as lately as the end of February, 

 I was told that this gentleman was sent down by the Board of 

 Agriculture to lecture to an important Pensions Committee in 



