Pennsylvania Commission. 495 



proper forest policy, was the State of Pennsylvania. 

 As a result of a persistent propaganda by the Pennsyl- 

 vania Forestry Association, formed in 1886, and espe- 

 cially by its active secretary, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, a 

 commission of inquiry was instituted in 1893. Before 

 its report was established, the legislature of 1895 pro- 

 vided for an executive Department of Agriculture, 

 and included in its organization a provision for a Di- 

 vision of Forestry, the botanist member of the previ- 

 ous commission, Dr. Rothrock, being appointed 

 Commissioner of Forestry at the head of the Division. 

 Two years later, the final legislation, which firmly es- 

 tablished a forest policy for the State, was passed 

 namely for the purchase of State forest reservations. 

 All later legislation was simply an expansion of these 

 propositions. By 1910, the State had acquired by 

 purchase, wild, mostly culled lands to the extent of 

 over 900,000 acres, and the Commission had progressed 

 far towards providing for their management and re- 

 cuperation. 



The unusually disastrous conflagrations of 1894; the 

 growing conviction that the pleaders of the exhausti- 

 bility of timber supplies were right, accentuated by a 

 rapid decline in White Pine production and a rapid, 

 and, indeed, almost sudden, rise instumpage prices; 

 the example which the federal government had set 

 in withdrawing public timberlands from spoliation; 

 together with an increasing number, not only of advo- 

 cates of saner methods, but of technically educated 

 men, who came from the schools lately organized all 

 these influences had worked as a leaven in all parts of 

 the country so as to bring in the new century with a 



