120 REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON FORESTRY. 
The first witness called was Mr Witt1am G. Pepper, head of the 
Revenue Department of the India Office, who, in his evidence, gave 
wn interesting account of the inception and development of the 
Forest Department of India to its present satisfactory and flourish- 
ing state. He quoted largely from official returns and statistics, 
showing the methods of working, and the prosperous condition of 
the Forest Department in India. He also gave many interesting 
details as to the training of forest officers, and pointed out the 
numerous benefits accruing to India since the establishment of the 
Forest Service. 
Colonel James Micwaet, C.S.1L., late of the India Forest Ser- 
vice, was the next witness examined, and to questions put by the 
Committee, replied as follows :— 
“You were, I believe, at the inception of the Forest Service in 
India?” ‘I was.”—“ Will you kindly tell the Committee what 
were the first steps taken in the Madras Presidency in regard to 
the promotion of forests?” “TI must premise that I can merely 
give information regarding the early stages of forestry in India, 
and simply of the Madras Presidency, because I had, after seven 
years’ pioneering, to leave the Forest Department, my health having 
suffered so much from jungle fever. But I have ever since taken 
the greatest interest in the subject, and have studied the progress 
of it, and have always kept myself well aw fait as to what was 
going on. As Mr Pedder has already told the Committee, in the 
first instance the Bombay Government began to feel the pinch (as 
Sir George Birdwood expressed it in one of his papers upon the 
matter) of not getting sufficient timber for the Bombay dockyard. 
Ships used to be built there for the Royal Navy ; and they estab- 
lished a Conservancy Department in Bombay, in 1846, mainly for 
the purchase of timber ; and in a year or two after that the first 
actual steps towards the Government taking forests into their own 
hands and working them and conserving them, and, in short, 
starting a Forest Conservancy Department, originated in Madras 
through General Frederick Cotton, of the Engineers, who suggested 
to the Madras Government that they should thus take the southern 
forests in hand. Upon his recommendation the Government 
appointed me to commence the first experimental scheme in 1848. 
I hardly like to talk much about myself, but I might hand in a 
letter which appeared in the “ Journal of the Society of Arts” in 
1882, written by Sir George Birdwood ; I think the honourable 
