REVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS. II7 



on forestry at all. Many of the reasons he advances against 

 afforestation will not stand examination. For example, he says 

 that whereas in foreign countries there are no rabbits, here it is 

 nearly always necessary to fence against them, and that 30s. 

 an acre spent on this fencing, will, at the rate of 4 per cent, 

 interest, represent a debt of ;^5o an acre at the end of a 90 

 years' rotation. This, no doubt, is quite true, but economic 

 forestry has nothing to do with game preserving, and where 

 rabbits become a nuisance, the obvious remedy is to exterminate 

 them. Notwithstanding the possibility of a timber famine, he 

 is opposed to extensive schemes of afforestation in Great 

 Britain. His alternative proposal is that the British Government 

 should buy up extensive timber " limits " near the coast in 

 Canada, from which to draw future supplies. Many objections 

 might be raised to this proposal, and such an investment would 

 not be entirely without its risks. Large tracts of forest are 

 often destroyed by fire. The Canadians are already restricting 

 the output of pulp timber to the United States, and it seems 

 fairly certain that the amount which will be available for export 

 to this country will steadily become smaller. Their own needs 

 are increasing, and they may in the course of time come to 

 require much of the best forest land for agriculture. Further, 

 one of the chief reasons usually urged in favour of the extensive 

 afforestation of poor land at home, is that new industries would 

 be created just as they have been on the Continent, with the 

 result that more people would be kept on the land, and the 

 formation and cultivation of small holdings would often be 

 rendered possible. It is difficult to see how the acquisition of 

 forest land in other countries, such as Canada, would help 

 forward such objects, and the Canadian product would, of 

 course, compete in the market with that grown by private 

 owners quite as much as any State-owned forest material would 

 do at home, with the additional disadvantage that there would 

 be less probability of new industries being started — paper-pulp 

 factories for example. 



The other chapters in the book contain a large amount of 

 useful information of both a scientific and a practical nature, 

 on such matters as nursery management, planting, tending of 

 woods, different silvicultural systems, average yields to be 

 expected from forest land, timber measuring, marketing, etc. 

 There is a good chapter on the silvicultural characteristics of 



