434 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



scale sufficiently large to compensate for the stripping of great areas 

 of timbered country persisted long after the practical failure of the 

 timber-culture act had led to its repeal in 1891. The reservation 

 idea was illustrated in the State of New York by the constitutional 

 prohibition of any cutting on the State holding in the Adirondack 

 and Catskill preserves, and also in the popular understanding (or 

 rather misunderstanding) of what was intended when the western 

 forest reserves of the National Government were first set aside. 



The total area of these reserves in 1901 was less than 50,000,000 

 acres. Their custody was in the hands of the General Land Office 

 of the Department of the Interior. The administrative work of 

 caring for them was confined almost entirely to protecting them 

 against fire and trespass. At the request of the Secretary of the 

 Interior, the Division of Forestry of the Department of Agriculture 

 had begun to make technical studies with a view to showing how 

 forestry might be applied to the reserves; but the resources of the 

 Division of Forestry were hopelessly small, in comparison with the 

 magnitude of this task, and the foresters were without any authority 

 to insure the practice of forest conservation through use, even where 

 they might have known how the thing should be done. The regular 

 scientific staff of the division totaled only 20 persons, and its entire 

 appropriation was but $88,520. 



Although the principal effort of the Division of Forestry previous 

 to 1901 had been directed toward the private owner, less than 180,000 

 acres of private forests were reported in that year as actually under 

 forest management in the United States. Indeed, the vast field of 

 American forestry had at that time hardly begun to be explored. It 

 was almost as much of a terra incognita as was the American conti- 

 nent to the geographers three centuries ago. For except to a limited 

 degree in the eastern part of the country, no basis existed for fore- 

 casting what the forests of different regions would produce annually, 

 and therefore of prescribing what should be cut annually; of judg- 

 ing what would be the effect upon the forest of any specific opera- 

 tion ; or of insuring forest preservation through use. Whenever the 

 advice of the forester was sought it was necessary to begin by investi- 

 gating the underlying problems instead of applying knowledge 

 already gathered. In a word, the science on which intelligent use of 

 forest resources depends was only beginning to be developed. 



A legal basis for the application of the conservation principle to 

 the forest reserves, or national forests, as they became shortly after 

 the transfer of their administration to the Department of Agricul- 

 ture on February 1, 1905, had been created by the act of June 4, 

 1897. This act declared as the purpose of these reserves " to improve 

 and protect the forest or for the purpose of securing favorable con- 

 ditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber 



