INTRODUCTION 



FORESTS I THEIR DIRECT AND INDIRECT UTILITY 



TO A NATION 



THE utility of forests to a nation is one of the economic 

 factors to its well-being which has been brought 

 to an unforeseen and unexpected prominence during 

 the waging of the World War. And perhaps to no 

 other European nation has this unlooked-for develop- 

 ment proved so startling, because so totally un- 

 expected, as to ourselves. Forestry in its general 

 aspects as it affects our country both in peace and 

 war is a branch of economic industry of which the 

 British public has known very little in the past. 

 And it is perhaps not surprising that they should 

 have remained in ignorance of its importance. For 

 we have no forests in Britain in the sense in which 

 the forest is understood in Europe and elsewhere in 

 the world. We have woodlands, and exceedingly 

 pretty they are, as we all know. From the point of 

 view of the picturesque few things are more beautiful 

 than the British woodland, with its old gnarled trees 

 or tapering heavily branched firs and pines and 

 larches ; its open glades revealing stretches of green- 

 sward, of bracken, or a tangle of bramble, brier, 



