TASMANIAN FORESTRY. 589 
useful suggestions, and I now venture to put forward some 
of these—— 
(1.) The appointment of men to act temporarily during 
the dangerous months as fire-police or inspectors. 
(2.) The appointment of a special fire-commissioner in 
each township with power to act under authority 
of the law; such person to be provided with maps 
of the district, and to be empowered to call out 
such assistance at any time as may be necessary 
for the putting out of any fire which may have 
been started. 
(3.) The taxation of a district in which a serious fire has 
occurred at a fixed sum per acre; the money 
realised to go towards the keeping up in the 
locality of the means for fire-prevention. This 
plan would make every one owning land in the 
district interested in suppressing fires. 
(4.) The entire exclusion from settlement of all timber 
land not well adapted for agricultural purposes. 
Alluding to the careless conduct of settlers with reference 
to fires Mr. Hough says :— 
‘There appears to be no mode of overcoming these vicious 
habits, but a proper public opinion, and it is suggested as 
a matter for serious consideration that some instruction be 
given in our normal schools, and from those going out 
from these as teachers in the public schools of the country, 
with reference to the great importance of the careful use 
of fire, and the great responsibility that may result from 
carelessness or accident therein. 
“This mode of inculcating ideas of the duty of the citizen 
to society is well understood and often practised in Europe, 
and in this we may do well to follow their example. It is 
only a few years since the Minister of Public Instruction 
in France issued a series of circulars tending to suppress 
the practice of wantonly destroying the birds, because 
great injuries were resulting to agriculture from the muiti- 
plication of noxious insects that had followed from this 
destruction to excess. We have in mind at least one 
instance in which the responsibility with regard to fires 
has thus been made a subject of instruction in the schools, 
and with excellent results.” 
The following regulations with regard to camp and 
other fires prevail in Ontario, Canada :— 
“Every person who shall between the first day of April 
and the first day of November (northern hemisphere) make 
