Forest Finance and Management 147 



be harvested at shorter intervals, which is an ad- 

 vantage, especially where your forest is a small one. 



The cash returns one may expect from his forest 

 are strongly affected by the facilities existing for 

 bringing one's product to market. The question 

 of transportation can, of course, like other ques- 

 tions of this sort, be treated in nothing more than 

 the faintest outline in a volume like this. It is 

 very closely bound up with the whole economic 

 life of the nation, and an exhaustive treatise on the 

 transportation of forest products would be in effect 

 a treatise on the whole transportation problem. 



The cost of transporting forestry products nat- 

 urally divides itself into two stages. The first 

 covers the way from the forest to the mill, the sec- 

 ond the farther journey of the finished product 

 into the hands of the consumer. Perhaps one 

 might say that only the first division properly falls 

 within the field of forestry, and we will direct our 

 attention principally to it. 



The business of sawing logs into lumber is very 

 often conducted by other parties than the owners 

 of the forest where the trees are felled. In most 

 foreign countries, I believe, this is the rule, while 

 in this country the opposite case is perhaps more 

 often to be found. But no matter how soon in 

 its progress to the consumer the forest product 

 changes ownership, the question of transporting it 

 is of the utmost importance to the forester. There 

 are to-day billions of feet of timber in this country 

 which, from a silvicultural standpoint, ought to be 



