1906 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



409 



haps, half an acre of land, has at- 

 tracted a purchaser for a hundred acre 

 farm. I can recall a case where lum- 

 bering operations happened to expose 

 a delightful view, a man in a motor 

 car happened to come along, happened 

 to see the view and bought it on the 

 spot. Do not make chance your real 

 estate agent ; see that your view is 

 visible and that others know of it. 



PRACTICAL FORESTRY ON PUBLIC AND 

 PRIVATE PARKS. 



Now we come to land reserved 

 purely for recreation and beauty. 

 There are many such in the East, 

 either private grounds or state and 

 metropoliton reservations. If left to 

 themselves the trees have the usual 

 struggel for existence ; in youth an im- 

 penetrible tangle ; in maturity a good 

 forest, but strewn with dead and de- 

 caying timber uninviting and difficult, 

 and only in old age, after a century of 



struggle, a fine open forest such as we 

 most love, but passing soon to un- 

 lovely decay. If this were treated by 

 practical forestry the less attractive 

 period of youth would be shortened 

 by improvement thinnings, maturity 

 would have the open park-line quality 

 of old age, and old age itself be all the 

 heartier. When ripe the old trees 

 would be cut off after a crop of new 

 reproduction was established. Thus 

 the sad period of decay would be done 

 away with and considerable revenue 

 would be assured from the land. 



I have not tried to make a plea for 

 either the aesthetic or the practical side 

 of the "wise use of forests," for each 

 has plenty of ardent supporters, but 

 have endeavored to reconcile the two 

 which seem to me to have worked 

 rather at cross purposes, and have at- 

 tempted to suggest that neither can 

 reach full efficiency without the help 

 of the other. 



MEETING OF PHILIPPINE FORESTERS 



Annual Conference at Manila of the Insular Forest Service, 

 at which Many Matters of Importance were Discussed 



AS HAS BEEN THE CUSTOM 

 ** in the past, the Philippine For- 

 est Service held its annual meeting, or 

 conference, this year during the first 

 two weeks of July or just after the 

 beginning of the new fiscal year. The 

 objects of this conference are to bring 

 all the foresters together in the Manila 

 office to discuss Philippine forest mat- 

 ters, to propose new laws or to amend 

 old ones, to bring personally to the at- 

 tention of the Director of Forestry 

 any matters which are best presented 

 verbally, and, in short, to have a gen- 

 eral business session, at which every- 

 one will benefit by the discussions of 

 all others present. 



At the meeting this year all the for- 

 esters, who are also the chiefs of the 

 different forest districts, were present, 

 together with several botanists and 



representative lumbermen. The Di- 

 rector of Forestry, Major George P. 

 Ahern, presided, and the following 

 foresters made up the meetings : Mr. 

 W. M. Maule, Mr. William Klemme, 

 Mr. H. M. Curran, Mr. H. N. Whit- 

 ford, Mr. H. D. Everett, Mr. W. I. 

 Hutchinson, Mr. M. L. Merritt, Mr. 

 T. C. Zschokke, Mr. John H. Bridges 

 and Mr. Wm. H. Kobbe. 



Each forester read his annual re- 

 port, which contained a forest descrip- 

 tion of his district, the lumbering in 

 his jurisdiction, and, in fact, a com- 

 plete review of all forest matters oc- 

 curring during the year in his partic- 

 ular territory. These reports were 

 interesting, and the fact that the entire 

 Archipelago is now divided into dis- 

 tricts, made the reports all the more 

 valuable. The reports from the new 



