386 FOREST CULTURE AND 
we like, whole forests of them on sub-alpine heights, 
never yet thus utilized. 
Suppose we reckon that one hundred forest - trees 
would be required to be planted on an acre, allowing 
for periodic thinning out ; and assuming that for cli- 
matic and hygienic considerations, as well as for the 
maintenance of wood supply, we should require finally 
one fourth of our Victorian territory kept as a forest- 
area, we would expect to possess one billion five hun- 
dred and sixty-eight million trees, and to provide for 
their timely restoration in proportion to their removal 
or natural loss. 
Most of us are lulled into security by seeing that 
we receive, as yet, our foreign woods in the course of 
ordinary traffic, and we are not easily inclined to think 
that the supply may cease suddenly, or be obtainable 
only at an exorbitant expense. Even in the United 
States of America there are places where the price of 
fuel and timber has already risen fourfold. We are 
told that recently, in the States of Wisconsin and 
Michigan alone, during one single year, two million 
of Pine-trees were cut for lumber ; and it is estimated 
that at the present rate of destruction no timber-trees 
will be left in those States after fifty years, while it 
will take a century to replace them, if even this be 
possible. Quebec exported, in 1860, not less than sev- 
enty million cubic feet of squared or sawn timber, 
equal to about a million tons of wood —a large share 
yielded by the Weymouth Pine (Pinus strobus)—not 
taking into account the current local consumption. 
This tree, yielding the white American Pine-wood, 
requires fully sixty years of growth before it can be 
sawn into timber of any good size, During the first 
