114 TRANSACTIONS OK ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



exhibits in the car were brought together and arranged by 

 Mr Robson Black, of the Canadian Forestry Association. The 

 car is the property of the Canadian Government railways, and 

 was to be moved from point to point over the lines of the 

 several railway companies operating in the western Provinces, 

 under the supervision of an official of the Dominion Forestry 

 Branch. 



The exhibits were drawn from many different countries, 

 including Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, 

 France, Scandinavia, Egypt, and Japan. Lectures were given 

 by the men in charge of the car in the car itself, and also in 

 halls in the towns visited, where every phase of the timber 

 industry, from the planting of seedlings to the manufacture of 

 all manner of wood products, was explained and, as far as 

 possible, demonstrated. The car contained a miniature nursery 

 of spruce and Scots pine seedlings. 



Mr Robson Black, accompanied by a motion-picture operator, 

 also addressed thirty public meetings in the Prairie Provinces 

 between 14th October and 1st November. Mr Black found the 

 public interest in questions related to provincial forest manage- 

 ment strikingly intensified as compared with four or five years 

 ago. Western Canadian Clubs, Boards of Trade, Bankers and 

 Mortgage Loans Associations, and other representative bodies 

 held luncheons and dinners in nearly all large cities in order to 

 provide an opportunity to hear forest conservation addresses. 

 At some of the evening meetings, in places like Calgary, Prince 

 Albert, and Winnipeg, the attendance of men ran as high as 600. 



The chief point in the addresses was an outline of the extent 

 of the Prairie Province forests and their present wretched condi- 

 tion, owing mostly to unrestricted forest fires. Instead of an 

 increasing variety of wood-using industries, the larger mills were 

 giving up operations, and enormous areas^as, for example, 

 40,000,000 non-agricultural acres in Saskatchewan — were being 

 turned into permanent wildernesses. The effect of burned 

 forests upon irrigation was also discussed in detail and proved 

 one of the hardest hitting points in the whole conservation 

 argument. The industrial potentialities of spruce-growing lands, 

 the need of provincial and dominion co-operation in debarring 

 the annual fire plague, the value of tree-planting to crop 

 production were other points treated by Mr Black. The 

 Forestry Association is endeavouring to establish a resident 



