Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 29 



CULTIVATE THE FORESTS. 



This is a clipping from a fine article upon the Statesmanship of Forestry 

 by Arthur W. Page in the World's Work Magazine for January, 1908. 

 A number of the pictures in this volume are from the same source. 



Many people consider the approaching timber famine with the same- 

 feeling of regret and helplessness with which they listen to the story of 

 the extinction of the buffalo. They feel that both are wild things which 

 must inevitably perish before the advance of civilization. But the 

 forests, unlike the buffalo, thrive in captivity. A large proportion of 

 the trees in a wild forest are not best suited to our use. They are of 

 the wrong species like weeds in a garden are too old or crooked and 

 have a variety of other blemishes ; and, while doing us little good them- 

 selves, they prevent the growth of better timber. To destroy all the 

 original growth and then plant a new forest on the devastated area 

 seems illogical, but it is neither impracticable nor unprofitable, as the 

 experience of Germany and experiments in this country show. It is 

 much easier, however, and more profitable, gradually to turn the wild 

 forests into cultivated ones. 



The French began to do this in the fourteenth century. 

 France, as thickly settled as it is, has maintained its cultivated timber 

 for five hundred years, while the West with its scattered population is 

 about to make an end of its wild forests in seventy-five years. In con- 

 trast to the forestry conditions of France are those of southern Tunis. 

 It was once a very fertile country, but the Arab conquest destroyed 

 all the trees and now the ruins of its old capital, Suff etula, stand in an 

 uninhabitable desert. "Not long after the conquest," says M. Jusse- 

 raud, "an Arab chronicler recalled in his book the former times of 

 prosperity and added : ' But in those days, one could walk from Tripoli 

 to Tunis in the shade.' : 



CONFESSION TO NEXT GENERATION. 



Caustic clipping from a graduating address to the Fresno High School 

 by Dr. Frederic Burk. 



"We dislike to go on with these embarrassing confessions, but you 

 will learn the whole wretched story yourselves sometime, and we may 

 as well tell you. As for the coal and iron, our fathers left us enough 

 to last for two or three thousand years if it had been economically 

 mined according to some system established by law. We regret to tell 

 you, upon the authority of Andrew Carnegie and John Mitchell, that 

 we've wasted in getting out what we could use what should have lasted 

 eighteen hundred or two thousand years. The coal may hold out 



