RAISING OR KEEPING UP THE FOREST 63 



sawmills or any settlements where any of the material 

 may be used ; and the greater part of his wood travels 

 several hundred miles, some of it more than a thousand 

 miles, before it reaches the man who is to use it. 



To ship cord wood out of the woods a hundred miles 

 without a railway would, in most cases, cost much more 

 than the wood could be sold for. For this reason the 

 lumberman can often take only the best kinds of logs, 

 and of these only the lighter, which may be floated, like 

 pine in Wisconsin, and must leave hemlock and all hard- 

 woods where they are, to say nothing of dead material, 

 crippled and worthless trees, small poles from thinnings, 

 and the like. 



It seems, then, that the proper care of a small forest in 

 a settled country is quite easy, but that it is very diffi- 

 cult to bestow the proper care upon a large forest in 

 out-of-the-way districts, and that often only the simplest 

 improvements are possible. Of course there must be 

 intermediate cases, and so there are also different degrees 

 of care which can be given to the woods. 



This also teaches us another useful lesson; it is this: 

 Since cord wood and other cheap material cannot profit- 

 ably be shipped far, and since they cannot be used up to 

 good advantage in unsettled districts, such forests should 

 be made up chiefly of soft woods, pine, spruce, etc., which 

 furnish a small amount of tops and a large amount of 

 light, valuable log material, which pays for long-distance 



