132 North American Forests and Forestry 



consider their public forests in the first place as 

 protection to the waterflow of their rivers and the 

 fertility of their valleys. Such forests are usually 

 located in the most rugged and inaccessible parts of 

 mountain ranges, where forestry for revenue is gen- 

 erally unprofitable, either because the sterile soil 

 does not produce good timber or because the trans- 

 portation facilities are insufficient. Forestry oper- 

 ations in such localities are mostly confined to 

 measures protective against injuries from fire and 

 other causes. 



It cannot be the object of a book like this to set 

 forth in detail the various systems of forest manage- 

 ment in existence. A voluminous literature is ex- 

 tant on this subject, and in order to treat it at all 

 adequately, a mass of technical detail would be 

 necessary that can be of no interest except to the 

 professional forester. My aim is merely to give 

 intelligent men a clear idea of what forestry really 

 means, and I hope that by this time attentive read- 

 ers have learned that it is simply a matter of busi- 

 ness, usually a question of dollars and cents. It 

 remains to give to readers entirely ignorant of the 

 manner in which forests designed for continuous 

 wood crops are treated, an outline of the nature of 

 such operations. This is less for the purpose of 

 showing them how forests are cultivated, than in 

 order to clear their minds of some erroneous no- 

 tions. Such erroneous ideas are at the bottom of 

 much of the popular resistance to forestry reform. 



In the first place, not a few people imagine that 



