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FORESTRY INVKSTIGATIONS V. 8. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



to that time, furnishing raw material mainly to our Michigan mills, wliose home supply is largely 

 gone. 



Regarding the importations of logs, it is interesting to observe that they increased in quantity, 

 without reference to the existence or absence of the export duty which the Canadian Government 

 imposed in 1886 and abolished in 1891, and the price per M feet also seems uninfluenced. The 

 necessity for these supplies to our mills, especially the mills of the Saginaw (Michigan) district, 

 began to assert itself iu 1886, the very year the export duty was imposed to prevent, if possible, 

 these exports of raw material, and has grown constantly, the decline in 1895 and 1896 simply 

 marking the general business depression. 



Logs imported from Canada. 



It will be evident from these statements that our virgin coniferous supplies must share the 

 fate which the buffalo has experienced, unless a practical application of rational forestry methods 

 and <i more economic use of supplies is presently inaugurated. Since coniferous wood represents 

 two-thirds to three fourths of our entire lumber-wood consumption, and its reproduction requires 

 more care and loftger time than that of hard woods, the urgency of changing methods in its use 

 and treatment will be apparent. 



No more striking statement of the decline in white-pine supplies could be made than to cite 

 the number of feet i;i logs which passed the nine leading booms in the lower peninsula in Michigan 

 in 1887, namely 2,217,104,985 as against 505,134,656 feet in 1893, a decrease of nearly 80 per cent, 

 chargeable no doubt in part to other modes of transportation, but nevertheless foreshadowing 

 unmistakably the practical exhaustion of supplies. 



Another indication of the waning of supplies may be found in the increase of prices paid for 

 stumpage. While, owing to improvement in means of transportion machinery and mill practice 

 and to the close competition of mills, the increase in the price of lumber has been comparatively 

 small except for the best grades, which are becoming scarcer with the reduction in the size of the 

 average log than the poorer grades, the prices paid for the trees in the woods, the stumpage has 

 more than doubled for each decade from 1866 to 1886, as appears from the table given above. At 

 present it would probably be difficult to find any stumpage desirably located at the highest price 

 prevailing in 1887, and this year (1898) stumpage even of the southern pine has gone up to $4.00 

 and $0.00 per M feet. 



Returning now to a consideration of the consumption of wood materials in general we can 

 summarize with the statement that our consumption at present of all kinds, sizes, and description, 

 including the enormous firewood supplies of a round 180,000,000 cords, can not fall short of 

 25,000,000,000 cubic feet of forest-grown material, counting in the waste in the woods and the 

 mills and loss by fire. That means a consumption of 50 cubic feet per acre of forest, or 350 cubic 

 feet per capita.* 



Considering that in the well-kept forests of Germany, where reproduction is secured by 



"The largest part of this consumption is for firewood. According to the census of 3880 the consumption of 

 firewood must then have been 280 cubic feet per capita (figuring 100 cubic feet solid to the cord), and this amount 

 has probably not been reduced during the last decade. This firewood is not, as in older countries, made np of 

 inferior material brush and small fagots but is, to a large extent, split body wood of the best class of trees. 



