174 ON DISPOSING OF THE PKODUCE OF WOODS, ETC. 



would be able to superintend the whole of the woodmen, and see 

 thai no damage was carelessly or wilfully committed. When wood- 

 men are employed by timber merchants, they require to be as 

 diligently supervised by the forester as if he employed them himself, 

 and he labours under the disadvantage of not having them so 

 thoroughly under control as if he were their paymaster. A staff of 

 negligent or inefficient workmen may soon do much damage to the 

 permanent crop, and when they are not engaged by the forester, it 

 has a tendency to make them more careless than they otherwise 

 would be. I have heard of careless woodmen cutting down every 

 tree they injured, in order to obliterate all traces of the damage they 

 had committed. If damaged trees are dealt with in this summary 

 manner, it would clearly be to the timber merchant's advantage to 

 employ as careless a staff of workmen as he could find. I have also 

 heard of unprincipled purchasers cutting large numbers of trees 

 which were not marked, and sometimes actually agreeing with their 

 workmen to pay so much per tree for all extras cut. When extras 

 are being cut, the clearing of the timber goes on as the work pro- 

 ceeds. This is done with the view of preventing the forester 

 detecting the fraud by counting the number of felled trees, which 

 would be in excess of the number stated in the catalogues. Another 

 way of detecting the fraud would be to count the number of stool?, 

 but the stolen trees are always cut very low, and the stools covered 

 with leaves and rubbish. These precautions may deceive an inex- 

 perienced forester, but a practical man can tell by the state of 

 the permanent crop if more trees than necessary have been cut in 

 the usual course of thinning. I must say, however, that I have 

 never had to deal with cases of this sort, and I believe very few 

 timber merchants would connive at anything so dishonourable. 

 The timber merchants that I have come in contact with are highly 

 respectable gentlemen, incapable of taking a single tree that was not 

 justly their own. But apart from the question of honesty, I advo- 

 cate the timber being cut and arranged in lots previous to sale, as 

 alike advantageous to buyer and seller, and more satisfactory in every 

 way than the present system of selling growing timber. 



