4 THE BOOK OF FORESTRY 



prevailing winds. In some parts of the -United States 

 the indirect influences may be more important to the 

 community than the supply of timber which the forest 

 provides. 



Original Forests. When the first settlers landed upon 

 the Atlantic Coast there stretched before them from the 

 ocean to the treeless prairie, over twelve hundred miles, 

 a vast forest, unbroken, except for occasional Indian 

 clearings, the like of which the world has never seen. 



Beyond the prairies the Rocky Mountains and Pacific 

 Coast forests were to be found in all their magnificence, 

 favored by a temperate climate and sufficient rainfall. 

 For density and quantity no region on the globe could 

 exceed this store of timber. 



The original forest area covered about 850,000,000 

 acres and contained 5,200,000,000,000 board feet of tim- 

 ber. As a result of clearing land for agriculture, lum- 

 bering and forest fires this forest has been reduced to 

 545,000,000 acres which contain about 2,500,000,000 

 board feet. In other words since the settlement of our 

 country over half the original timber supply has been cut 

 and burned, and today our nation is using twice as much 

 timber per capita as it did fifty years ago. 



Early Need of Forestry. In spite of the vast storehouse 

 of timber lying close to the colonial settlements, lack of 

 roads often made fuel and construction timber rather 

 difficult to procure and the pinch of timber poverty was 

 often felt. 



William Penn in 1682 stipulated that one acre should 

 be kept in the forest for every five acres cleared by those 

 who purchased lands from him. In 1795 the Society of 

 Agriculture of New York published a report on the best 

 mode of preserving and increasing the growth of timber 

 and a few years later the Federal Government appro- 



