126 TRANSACTIONS OF ROVAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ment have made a national park of 3,000,000 acres, with this 

 splendid cone in the middle, and no better or wiser thing has 

 the American administration ever done than to establish the great 

 timber reserves — and also the five National Parks, in the most 

 interesting localities : these are the " Yellowstone " of Wyoming, 

 the "Yosemite" and "Sequoia Forest" of California, the 

 Grand Cauon of Arizona, and this "Rainier National Park" 

 of Washington, to be inviolate for all time. I may here 

 digress for a moment to say a little on this subject. Until 

 recently, the timber, in the West at any rate, was regarded as 

 quite inexhaustible, and only in the last few years have the 

 people awakened to the fact that unless a great part of the 

 remaining forest were preserved, there would soon be no more. 

 The total lumber cut in the United States in 1906 was about 

 40 billion feet, board measurement. It is estimated that the West 

 has about sixty years of timber for itself — over 70 per cent, of 

 which is " Oregon pine," or rather Douglas — but the East, whose 

 own supply will probably last for not more than twenty years, is 

 drawing on the West for prodigious quantities of sawn timber. 

 Washington is now the State which supplies the greatest amount 

 of timber of any. From 1870 to 1890 Wisconsin, with its white 

 pine {F. strobus), had the predominance, then Louisiana, where 

 Finns pahistris is cut in enormous quantities (the Americans 

 call it "yellow pine" and we call it "pitch pine"^), but now 

 Douglas fir provides more lumber than any other tree on the 

 continent. The U.S. Government Timber Reserves now amount 

 to 126 million of acres, by far the larger part of which is in 

 the west. These are being well looked after when we consider 

 the magnitude of the task, the supineness of the State legis- 

 latures, the opposition of the lumber magnates, and the fact 

 that the whole organisation has only recently been started. 



A little light railway through the Douglas and Thuja takes one 

 to within a few miles of the boundary of the Mount Tacoma 

 Government Reserve, and a drive of a dozen miles or more of 



* The following extracts are taken from Bulletin No. lO, U.S. Department 

 of Agriculture, Division of Forestry, 1895: — "Yellow pine" is applied in the 

 trade to all the Southern lumber pines; in the North-east it is also applied to 

 the pitch pine (/*. rif;ida)\ in the West it refers mostly to bull pine (/'. 

 ponderosa). "Pitch pine" includes all Southern pines, and also the true 

 pitch pine {P. ri<;ida), but it is mostly applied, especially in foreign markets, 

 to the wood of the long-leaved pine (/'. paliistris). —Wos. Ed. 



