11 



erable interest has developed in this respect. The need of such work is 

 so evident in the average city, that it scarcely merits comment. It has 

 resulted indirectly in much good to the Department, chiefly in securing 

 wider moral and financial support. 



(10) From the outset it has been the conviction that experimentation 

 and research was vitally necessary for the development of forestry under 

 Ohio conditions. We in fact have assumed the attitude that such work 

 is fundamental in the working out of a stable forest policy for Ohio. It 

 is hardly to be conceived how best results can be obtained without definite 

 knoweldge of many facts we do not have. We need to have these facts 

 before we can answer many questions now pending, and it is to be regretted 

 that it is going to take so long to learn them. It is to be our policy, how- 

 ever, to understand more work of this character than it has been possible 

 to do in the past. (Applause) 



MR. WOOLLEN: The meeting will now be addressed by Mr. R. B. 

 Miller, Forester of Illinois. (Applause) 



MR. R. B. MILLER : Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, it is the intention 

 in this paper to discuss very briefly those forest influences and problems 

 in Illinois which are vital to a forestry policy, which are also common 

 to Indiana and Ohio and which will furnish a committee from this con- 

 ference some definite basis upon which to work when they summarize its 

 findings. 



You have only to look at some of the topographic sheets which the 

 United States Geological Survey and the State Geological Survey are 

 making in Illinois to assure yourself that it is not entirely a prairie State. 

 According to Professor J. G. Mosier, of the Soil Survey of Illinois, in 

 the sixty-two counties covered by the survey prior to 1917 there are 3,434,- 

 625 acres of broken and hilly land which should be in timber. Going over 

 the remaining forty counties, for which reports have not been finished 

 and results compiled, and comparing the amount of rough land there with 

 adjacent counties surveyed, he believes we can add to this 2,321,000 acres 

 more, making a total for the state of about 5,750,000 acres, almost one- 

 eixth of its total area of thirty-six million acres. This area, whose out- 

 lines are almost identical with the limits of the yellow silt loam soil as 

 mapped by soil experts, varies in the different counties from .18 to eighty 

 per cent, and if cultivated is subject to serious and destructive erosion. 



What is being done to keep this land which is potential forest soil 

 permanently in timber? A few figures from some of the members of the 

 Illinois Academy of Sciences who have been working on some of these 

 counties for several years will help to answer the question. Dr. Pepoon 

 of Chicago says that Jo Daviess county, credited with sixty-two and four- 

 tenths per cent, of this class of land was originally a forest land. Now 

 there is only about five per cent, of merchantable timber in solid blocks 

 used mainly for posts and fuel, while about fifteen per cent, may be 

 classed as heavily culled. In LaSalle county, according to Dr. George D. 

 Fuller, of Chicago University, out of 35,220 acres examined only 6,530 

 acres, or two and three-tenths per cent, of the area covered by the survey 

 is forested, this being in ravines or along the larger rivers. 



