FOREST - ARBORETA 



By HON. CHAS. M. Dow 



GENTLEMEN. I am to have 

 the privilege of talking to you 

 about forest arboreta. But 

 with your permission, I shall extend 

 that privilege somewhat, and talk a 

 little about forests and forestry as well. 



A practical man would satisfy him- 

 self as to the reasons for doing a thing 

 before he considered the method for 

 doing it. Before we take up the ques- 

 tion of the method of establishing a 

 forest arboretum, let us first see 

 whether such an object lesson in forest 

 planting is necessary or desirable. 



A lecturer in the science of medicine 

 would not be likely to impress or prop- 

 erly instruct his students, did he talk 

 glowingly about the hospitals, but omit 

 all reference to the patients themselves. 

 And I think we would all be disap- 

 pointed, if we attended a lecture on 

 scientific farming and listened to a 

 lengthy dissertation on hoes and plows 

 and rakes and fertilizers and heard 

 not a single word about seeds and crop 

 yields and how to harvest them. 



It is the same with forestry. Before 

 a man talks about an arboretum or 

 about silviculture or forest manage- 

 ment, or forest utilization, or before he 

 advises others to practice them, he 

 wants to be wholly sure in his own mind 

 that all these things are wise and neces- 

 sary and wholly practicable. I want to 

 make this point very clear the need 

 for being sure about the justification 

 and the need for doing a thing before 

 we talk about the method of doing it. 



I am not a professional forester in 

 the technical sense, but a business man 

 who has dealt in private and some pub- 

 lic affairs, an American citizen, and 

 therefore deeply interested in the forest 

 and its welfare ; I did not become en- 

 thusiastic over forest arboreta in gen- 

 eral and over one forest arboretum in 

 particular until I came to realize that 



such object lessons were greatly needed 

 to help get this whole great principle of 

 practical forestry into effect. 



First, however, I had to convince my- 

 self that practical forestry was needed 

 in America. I looked about me and 1 

 traveled. I traveled somewhat widely. 

 And the more I looked the more I saw 

 apart from all matters of statistics, that 

 wherever trees are, men follow. And I 

 saw that these men, this army of log- 

 gers, which contains no fewer numbers 

 than the army of the United States, is 

 busy everywhere. For the loggers are 

 busy in the resinous, snow-laden north 

 woods and in the forests of the Lake 

 States. They are busy in the Rocky 

 mountains from Montana to Arizona, 

 among the lodgepole and the western 

 yellow pine. They are busy among the 

 great rock fir and cedar and sugat pine 

 of the Pacific forests. And the size of 

 this army of loggers grows steadily with 

 the years. It is a varied army, is this 

 army of loggers, facing many different 

 conditions in this great country of o-irs. 

 French-Canadians, Americans, Irish- 

 men, Scotchmen, Negroes, Indians, 

 mountaineers and plainsmen, go to 

 make it up ; and the army is fighting 

 forests quite effectively. And you will 

 readily realize, gentlemen, that the 

 lumber cut in one year in the United 

 States would make a row of wooden 

 houses more than 10,000 miles long, or 

 about the same distance as the mail 

 route from New York to Hong Kon^. 



But, while lumbering is interesting 

 and even picturesque to watch, while it 

 is varied in its methods, ranging from 

 steam skidders to the aerial tramways, 

 to the logging railroads, and to river 

 driving, and while each method has its 

 elements of interest, still, the thing 

 which counts most is not just how the 

 loggers do their work, but what results 

 they leave behind. 



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