Letter from Mr. Louis Miller. 77 



fire sweeps up everything remaining; the damage by fire there 

 is something enormous and a system of replanting the burnt 

 ground should be immediately adopted all over Canada. 



My experience of Nova Scotia is that an average or fairly 

 good forest will give a growth of about 5% per annum — in other 

 words, I reckon our property at Ingramport, Nova Scotia, to 

 contain about 6,000 feet per acre of growing trees on an average 

 over the whole ground. I don't mean 6,000 feet of big trees 

 ready for cutting, but of all sizes of trees from perhaps the thick- 

 ness of your arm upwards. On 100,000 acres this means 600 

 million feet, 5% growth on which would be something like 

 30 million feet per annum. Of course, the small trees are growing 

 even more rapidly than the big ones. If any one were to cut 

 down the big trees on this ground, there would not probably be 

 more than half this quantity available of big timber suitable for 

 deals, but the small growing timber is, in my opinion, quite as 

 valuable as the big timber, because it is growing rapidly every 

 year, and it takes the place of the big timber. Of course, lumber- 

 men ignore the future , and look only to where they can get sufficient 

 big trees every year as big as possible to feed their mills, and in a 

 matter of five to ten years Nova Scotia will be practically ex- 

 hausted, except a very few properties. The same remarks apply 

 to Eastern Canada. Of course, there are large forests away 

 north from Lake St. John and north in the direction of Hudson's 

 Bay, but they are inaccessible, and the cost of getting them out 

 is far too great at present, and what we have to deal with are the 

 Eastern Canadian forests already opened up, and which, in my 

 opinion, will be exhausted in ten to fifteen years unless some 

 system is adopted by the Government of replanting on an exten- 

 sive scale, and the only way to do that properly is to send men 

 to Germany to study the German methods and also to study the 

 system of planting adopted in Sweden and to have a system in- 

 troduced into Canada which will benefit a future generation as 

 well as the country. 



On the 10,000 acres of burnt ground on my property, I have 

 cut down all the trees, large and small, and have made the burnt 

 trees into lumber to get the ground properly cleared up so that 

 I can replant it immediately, and during the past two years I 

 have been occupied at that. By the end of next year I hope to be 

 finished with it, and then I propose to thin out the forest syste- 

 matically year by year, as we do in Sweden, that is, to take a certain 

 section of the forest each year and cut out the big trees carefullv 

 and to branch out these big trees to three or four inches at the 

 small end, so that the branches may fall down on the ground and 

 disappear quickly, and to log out these trees to about five or six 

 inches at the top end and clear up the forest properlv, instead of 

 the system at present in vogue of cutting down a big tree and only 

 taking off a root log and allowing 30 or 40 or 50 feet of the top 



