CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION 71 



years, unless particularly well situated, and it took some considerable time afterwards 

 to make it up. Therefore, I think the ten year limit is rather short. They have 

 adopted fifteen years, but I would like to have an expression of opinion here if it 

 would not be better to have the term twenty years. That would give the licensees 

 sufficient time to take off what they have really bought the merchantable timber. 

 They have not paid for the saplings, but only the merchantable pine, and I think if 

 the Commissioner of Crown Lands, who I am glad to see here this morning again, 

 would take it into his consideration, with his officers, and extend that time to say, 

 twenty years, I have no doubt whatever that if sufficient reasons could be shown the 

 term could be extended to twenty or twenty-five years, if necessary. As Mr. White 

 stated, we are really and absolutely in the hands of the Crown, but we have never 

 found the Crown taking advantage of us. I offer that only as a personal opinion of 

 my own. 



The onjy other point I wish to speak on, and to me is an exceedingly important 

 one, so important that I have applied for information from Germany and England to 

 see if it is possible to get a plant that we can take into a limit away from the rail- 

 ways, where we cannot draw hemlock bark to a railway. I think one of the things 

 that the government ought to take into consideration would be a new regulation about 

 cutting. In my paper yesterday I spoke of the pine timber being legislated, as it 

 were, out of existence, and the balsam and hemlock and other trees being left to grow. 

 I have in my mind considerable districts of country that are now covered with these 

 trees, and white pine will not germinate under shade of that kind. When you see a 

 white pine growing under another tree you find it stunted and looking like a young 

 fellow that did not get enough to live upon, and within perhaps a yard or so you will 

 see one of the most beautiful objects in nature, a white pine tree growing in per- 

 fectly luxurious magnificence, with an annual growth of from a foot and a half to two 

 feet. I almost feel like standing and worshipping a tree of that sort. 



The CHAIRMAN. Sometimes we do. (Laughter.) 



Mr. BERTRAM. Now I speak of that to show that the hemlock and spruce 

 balsam that have grown up in the shade will germinate in the shade and grow up 

 better than the pine. Some of you who have seen large pine trees a hundred and 

 fifty years old have noticed, after they were taken away and the sun had got down 

 into the forest, a whole brood of trees coming up right in that very spot. But if the 

 shade is kept up over them the seeds will not germinate. I take it it would be better 

 to see how these cheaper woods could be cut out and give the white pine a chance 

 to grow. That is one of the most important things the department can give con- 

 sideration to, and I have applied to the best scientific authorities in Germany and 

 England to see how small a plant we could get that would be capable of producing 

 the extract of hemlock in the forest where it is not possible to take the hemlock 

 bark and draw it a long distance, on account of its bulk. I think the department 

 would be really serving a good purpose if it could put us in the way of getting a plant 

 with which we could obtain the extract without much trouble. There is an enormous 

 quantity of wood so situated that there is no means of getting it down to the market, 

 there are no streams to float it down, and if we could also get a small plant to produce 



