40 



Empire Forestry Association : Proposed Affiliation. 



Viscount NovAR moved that the Society affiliate with the 

 Empire Forestry Association. He said their Society had 

 grown in the last thirty years, and its influence had been 

 extended throughout the United Kingdom, and had been felt 

 overseas also. He asked them now to take a hand in the 

 work of Imperial forestry, so that all the experience they 

 had gathered, and the influence they had exerted, might' be 

 felt over the whole range of the Empire. At the Conference 

 last year, presided over by Lord Lovat, it was proposed by 

 perhaps the most distinguished forestry officer in Australia 

 that a central voluntary Association, such as had now been 

 established, should be inaugurated. The general scheme for 

 forestry in this country and for the Empire was a Forestry 

 Commission, a bureau of forestry, a scientific department 

 which would have a forestry sub-department as well as corre- 

 sponding organisations in the diff'erent Dominions and Depend- 

 encies overseas. It was felt at the Conference, where the 

 proposal was unanimously adopted, that there should be a great 

 central voluntary Association with which all the voluntary 

 Associations of the Empire should affiliate. The Association 

 would act as a clearing house for forestry information in the 

 Empire ; it would be a centre for officers of the diff'erent 

 forestry services, and for all foresters and others interested 

 in forestry within the Empire. It would be an agency to 

 promote exchange of the timber products of the Empire : it 

 would work with the Government Departments and co-operate 

 with the new Science Department. He did not need to remind 

 them of the magnitude of British forestry resources, of the 

 fact that on the management of British forests depended their 

 supplies in the future, nor of the risk of the exhaustion of those 

 supplies. All the parts of the Empire were represented on the 

 Council by His Majesty's representatives, by the Government 

 representatives, and by representatives of the voluntary 

 societies. The terms of the charter had been agreed upon 

 with the Colonial and Indian Offices, and His Majesty had 

 been graciously pleased to give them Royal patronage. It 

 was not so much a question of what they could get out of 

 the organisation but what they could do for the cause of 

 forestry, that was the basis of a society like theirs, and as 



