1 66 



THE FORESTER. 



July, 



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PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY 



The American Forestry Association, 



Devoted to Arboriculture and Forestry, the 



Care and Use of Forests and Forest 



Trees, and Related Subjects. 



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202 14th Street, S. W., Washmgton, && 



Vol. VI. 



JULY, 1900. 



No. 7. 





One of the greatest lumber- 

 men in the country, Mr. Fred. 

 \\Xverhauser, says that the dirt'h of logs at 

 the mills is not the only trouble in the White 

 Pine region. "The grief of the lumber- 

 men is not wholly because it is evident to 

 most of them that very soon they must 

 cease to cut logs, for the very good and 

 sufficient reason that soon they will have 

 no logs to cut. There is worse trouble 

 than this. There is the gravest danger 

 that the whole Pine producing region, cut 

 and uncut, green, growing and all, will 

 take fire and burn up. If the dry weather 

 in the north is the usual thing, that part of 

 the country is going to have the worst 

 summer for fires, and the heaviest losses it 

 has ever had." Consider the state of 

 things in which a danger of this sort is 

 foreseen simply to be feared, not to be 

 guarded against with extra care and every 

 due precaution ; in which its prediction 

 means, not that the vigilance of an efficient 

 fire patrol is increased, but that the timid 



who are able to leave set about packing up 

 .ind moving away. 



Rothrock, the Forest 



Commissioner of Pennsyl- 



t that the act of July 



not remain a mere expres- 



intentions on the statute 



state, and in doing so he is 



educating a class in the community as im- 

 portant as it is unthinking in the only way 

 in which it can be educated. To this 



class b f lon f the otherwise harmless citi- 



zens who start fires without meaning to, 

 and a good specimen of them is a teamster, 

 who, as a result of Dr. Rothrock's request 

 that the act be enforced, was arrested on 

 June i 2th. According to the Philadelphia 

 Record, which reported the case, this man 

 was charged with being responsible for 

 the fire which ran over thousands of acres 

 in Lycoming and Sullivan counties some 

 six weeks ago, and which did inestimable 



Himao-P rn timhpr anrl QIW Ino-c Hie nnKr 

 timDei and saw logs. riis only 



intention, he stated, was to burn the under- 

 brush from a ^ of dearing? u byt the 



fire g ot beyond his control." This is the 

 story of many of the worst disasters of the 

 past, and will continue to be of those of 

 the future until arrests and prosecutions 

 have made even the most thoughtless see 

 possibilities of trouble in any fire, however 

 humble and good of purpose. For the 

 trouble is not that people are not told, but 

 tnat telling cannot make those who ought 

 to i comprehend. The serene carelessness 

 of men wno bum their brush just when 

 conditions make it easiest for the fire to 

 S et away from them is beyond the power 

 f statistics or of exhortations to ruffle. 

 For people of this sort to order their doings 

 by sucn an abstraction as a sense of the 

 " ^ga\ and moral responsibility" incurred 

 m the setting " of any fire "is impossible. 

 Nothing short of enforcing the law can 

 1'ouse them to caution. 



But in the past it has often been just in 

 the enforcement of the law that the diffi- 

 culty lay, or more strictly speaking, in 

 bringing the law to bear. For though it 

 might be easy to see that a fire was started 

 m some particular settler's clearing, the 

 neighbors who knew it were unwilling 

 to inform, and usually had slight pro- 

 vocation to. The one person who did 

 have provocation was too apt to be the 

 non-resident owner of a large timber tract 

 into which the fire escaped, and in which 

 there were no farms or fields to interrupt 

 its progress; and for him to bring about a 

 prosecution would be merely adding ex- 

 pense to loss. So for lack of somebody 



