FORESTRY COMMISSIONER 21 



the address of all the camps, and as before stated the 

 figures do not include what was cut by farmers and settlers 

 for their own use. This is the first attempt that I know 

 of being made to collect statistics of this kind, and another 

 trial at some future season ought to result in more accurate 

 returns. These figures, however, show how important 

 the forests are as an industrial resource, employing as 

 they do many thousand men in the winter season, when 

 there would be no other occupation for them. The 

 original value of the forest products, even in a season like 

 the past, amounts to many million dollars. 



Plan of Reforestation. 



The pine forests of Minnesota have been logged sixty 

 years and most of the timber has been shipped out of the 

 State. In a few more years the original pine will be gone. 

 Already thirty thousand car loads of forest products are 

 brought into Minnesota annually from the Pacific coast. 



The population of the United States since its first 

 settlement has increased at the average rate of 18 per 

 cent every ten years, and in eighty years will reach the 

 amazing number of 320,000,000! Forest products will be 

 in much greater demand then than now. If we neglect 

 suitable measures of reforestation our posterity will be 

 ashamed of us. 



Forestry is not an expenditure. It is a savings bank 

 investment. The great thing in forestry is that it utilizes 

 third and fourth rate sandy, hilly and rocky land that 

 is unfit for agriculture. The yield tables of Germany 

 show that an acre of such land planted as part of a forest, 

 with pine, on forestry principles seedling trees two or 

 three years old, planted at an average distance apart of 

 four or five feet, it being necessary to have forest crowded 

 when young to promote height growth will in eighty 



