260 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
4. What can the Government be reasonably asked to do in 
this direction by way of legislative amendments and 
administrative improvements, so as to provide efficient 
machinery for the acquisition and planting of waste 
land by the State, and the encouragement of planting 
by corporations and private landowners ? 
5. How should waste land be planted for profit ? 
6. What will be the probable cost of planting, and what are 
the prospective returns from the thinnings and the mature , 
timber-crops ? 
7. What would be the national-economic effect of such 
plantations ? 
1. What scope ts there for Planting with Profit on Waste Land 
in the United Kingdom ?—There is now, and there has always 
been for centuries back, a wide field for planting for profit, but 
want of funds has ever been the chief obstacle to this. In 
1810 Lord Melville urged upon the Prime Minister (Mr Percival) 
the desirability of planting waste land owing to the advance in 
the price of pine- and fir-wood, and in the demand for oak, 
and he estimated “that certainly not less than 20 millions of 
acres are still waste.” This estimate corresponds with that made 
by various persons from time to time, and accepted by the 
Departmental Committee, 1902—‘‘ There is in these islands a 
very large area of waste, heather, and rough pasture, or land 
out of cultivation, amounting in all to 21 million acres, on a 
large proportion of which afforestation could be profitably 
undertaken.” But the circumstances of landowners are much 
the same to-day as they were ninety years ago:—‘“ Such lands, 
it must be owned, are sufficiently abundant, but the great 
expense and slow returns of planting are inconvenient to the 
majority of land proprietors. . . . The expense of planting is 
immediate and certain, the profit distant and _ precarious” 
(Quarterly Review, 1813). 
That our waste lands and poor pasturages offer a wide field 
for planting is undoubted ; but until the Land Statistics Depart- 
ment has compiled and published a_ statement of areas 
presumably suitable for planting, it is only a matter of rough 
conjecture to hazard any opinion as to what proportion can 
be planted with any reasonable chance of profit. On the basis 
of an examination made over several adjoining counties in S.E. 
Ireland, I should estimate that at present only about one-fifth 
