PAPERS OF GENERAL INTEREST 47 



into piling and mine props. This is not altogether the fault 

 of the people, although some are careless with fire, but be- 

 cause we have no means of enforcing fire laws. We need 

 a good system of county fire wardens and deputy wardens 

 to enforce the fire laws, along with an educational campaign 

 on the value of fire protection in the woods. 



Your coal mines need a large amount of timber for props, 

 legs and rip-rap lumber, and could not run long without it. 

 Some one has estimated that it takes three acres of timber 

 to mine one acre of coal. Prices of mine timber are gradu- 

 ally soaring, yet I know of but one company which has look- 

 ed ahead to a time when the supply may be exhausted. Care 

 is needed by these coal companies in their cutting opera- 

 tions, of keeping fire out of young timber and perhaps in 

 time of reforesting some of their waste lands. 



Preservative treatment of cheaper species may need also 

 to be taken up in the case of mine timbers, to save the slower 

 growing oaks which are needed for the larger timbers. 



Then there is the subject of idle and waste lands. You 

 have a lot of yellow silt loam soil in southern Illinois, some 

 counties, according to the Soil Survey of Illinois, having as 

 much as 55 9( of this kind of land. Its loose character makes 

 it very liable to erode and form gullies unless it is very care- 

 fully handled, to keep cover crops and improve its humus 

 content. As the result of considering the land simply a 

 mine, to take all out and put nothing back into the soil, 

 thousands of acres of this kind of land are being rendered 

 worthless by gullying. The Soil Survey says that some of 

 it should never have been cleared but left in timber, both 

 for the value of such a crop and to prevent the encroachment 

 of these gullies into the more valuable lands. The question 

 of what to do with this idle and waste land is a most press- 

 ing one but we believe that some way should be found of 

 getting it back into timber. It is the 81 million acres of this 

 kind of land in the United States, some of it burned over, 

 that is causing our present shortage of timber in the United 

 States. 



These are some of your problems, then, as I see them — the 

 need of better fire protection by the woodlot owner; the de- 



