588 PRCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
Forest FIRES. 
I now come to the consideration of the best means for 
the prevention or suppression of forest fires, and I do this 
more with the view of inviting discussion on this most 
important subject, rather than because I have any 
observations that are particularly novel or fresh to offer 
upon it. 
In a ‘‘ Report on the Forests of Canada,” the Honourable 
H. G. Joy says:— 
“We can cope with waste and pillage in our forests, they 
are but the work of man, but we are terribly ‘helpless against 
fire. It is in every country the greatest enemy of the 
forests, especially the pine forest, on account of its resinous 
and inflammable nature. It is ubiquitous; you find it 
exercising its ravages wherever nature has planted its 
grand virgin forests; in North America, destroying the 
beautiful white pine; and at the antipodes, in New Zealand, 
sweeping away the noble kawrie pine; through India, the 
Russian Empire, Sweden, and Norway, it throws around the 
globe a girdle of lurid flames, only broken by the great 
oceans. 
The foregoing paragraph points in eloquent terms to the 
terrible agent which is fast sweeping away the great 
forests of the earth, leaving to a by no means remote 
posterity the task of solving the problem of how a healthy 
or satisfactory existence can be maintained by the animal 
organism in a world deprived in such a large degree of the 
chief means, hitherto provided by nature for maintaining 
the normal purity of the atmosphere. This consideration, 
taken together with possible injurious climatic changes, 
and the great inconvenience and misery that must arise 
should a real scarcity of wood, for the purposes of com- 
bustion, or building, supervene, ought to cause an increased 
attention to be paid by those interested in the welfare of the 
community to the important subject of the prevention of 
forest fires. 
As it is, I believe, generally conceded that forest fires are, 
in the first place brought about by carelessness or design on 
the part of settlers and others, legal enactments made so 
effective as to be deterrent should produce much good. 
The difficulty, of course, is to obtain convictions on account 
of the reluctance of people to lay information against 
offenders, and also often from the difficulty experienced in 
finding out who the latter really are. Hough’s “Report on 
Forestry” for the United States contains many apparently 
