10 A NATURAL HISTORY SURVEY. 



poses, the purchase of similar lands abandoned by their owners 

 and the management and replanting of forests according to the 

 principles of scientific forestry. They are also to draw up a 

 plan by which the forestry department may be from the first 

 self-supporting and in time become a source of revenue to the 

 State. 



It was provided that the commission should receive no 

 compensation, but the services of a competent expert con- 

 nected with the Forestiy Division at Washington were secured, 

 and $500 towards his actual expenses were provided by the 

 State Geological and Natural History Survey. Mr. Filibert 

 Roth, who was detailed for this work, entered upon his task 

 with characteristic energy, and in a month's journey visited 

 27 counties with a total area of 18.5 million acres. His report * 

 is of special interest, giving, as it does, a remarkably clear 

 statement of the condition of things over an area embracing 

 fully half of the State of Wisconsin, including 8.5 million 

 acres of cut-over land, most of which is burned over and 

 largely waste, and on which some twenty billion feet of pine 

 has been destroyed by fire. The value of the timber product 

 of former years is suggested by the statement that "the for- 

 est industries have built every foot of railway and wagon road, 

 nearly every town, school and church, and cleared half of the 

 improved land in northern Wisconsin." 



The discussion of the future of this great area, once a 

 natural forest, now largely a wilderness, necessarily involves 

 great uncertainty. Mr. Roth proceeds to show that in Wiscon- 

 sin "the hardwoods, though perfectly able under normal con- 

 ditions to hold their own and continue as forests, have not done 

 so," and " that hemlock has failed to reproduce itself for a 

 longtime," while the white pine "is perfectly capable not 

 only to continue as a forest, but also to reclothe old burned- 

 over slashings on all kinds of soil. But it is equally certain 

 that the great mass of pine slashings have remained and will 



* Preliminary Report on Forest Conditions in Northern Wis- 

 consin. Washington, 1898. 



