PREFACE VII 



of days devoted to work of another character. Fortun- 

 ately in this other work there was frequent occasion to 

 realize how valuable would be a book in which a forester or a 

 lumberman could find quickly the elements of the law appli- 

 able to his profession or business and in which a lawyer 

 could find conveniently a more or less exhaustive citation 

 of the authorities supporting established views of the law. 

 Had the author foreseen at the start how completely the 

 undertaking was destined to absorb, for a period of four 

 years, the hours and minutes that should have been devoted 

 to rest and recreation, he would possibly have abandoned 

 his purpose; and had the material to be collected been less 

 extensive or the time available for selection and arrange- 

 ment greater, certain general features of the book could have 

 been improved and numerous imperfections eradicated. 



There being no similar work in English nor in any other 

 language so far as the knowledge of the writer extends 

 the selection of the headings under which the information 

 should be presented required considerable attention. To a 

 large extent the methods of the woodsman were employed. 

 Each line, first run and marked only by a few light blazes 

 and broken twigs, was later rerun one or more times and 

 checked up with other lines before it was definitely blazed 

 as constituting a part of the boundary of a chapter. At 

 times in this work, as in woods-work, the lines could not be 

 made to "close" as one would wish and occasionally upon the 

 completion of a chapter it became apparent, too late for 

 correction, that a different order of progression would have 

 proven more satisfactory. The author desires to acknowl- 

 edge his indebtedness to the Cyclopedia of Pleading and 

 Practice, published by the American Law Book Company 

 of New York, which has been relied upon largely both as to 

 the statement of the law and as to the references supporting 

 such statement. 



Previous to the time when the present volume began to 

 take shape chapter by chapter, the writer had comtem- 

 plated the production of a work in a single volume that 

 should trace the development of all forest and timber 

 statutory law in America and also present the existing law 

 as determined by the statutes and by court decisions. As 

 the work proceeded it, became evident that the whole field 



