GOLD COAST BEPOllT ON FORESTS. 107 



"II. It provides for separating the rights of the State from 

 those of private persons : for defining the rights, for regulating 

 their exercise (when left in the forest), for buying them out in 

 certain cases, and for preventing the growth of new rights or 

 burdens to the forest in the future. 



" III. It protects (in various degrees) the different classes of 

 forest or other lands which it has made subject to its provisions 

 by: 



*' 1. Preventing offences and adopting measures to fore- 

 stall or put a stop to accidents by fire, &c. 



" 2. Punishing offences, i.e., acts which it specially pro- 

 vides to be offences against the forest. 



" IV. It extends a similar protection to the 'produce of the 

 forest and to all timber (whether forest timber or not) while in 

 transit to the market or other destination. 



" Y. It constitutes a staff of forest officers giving them legal 

 powers and imposing certain duties and liabilities." 



I believe that the provisions for the creation of village forests 

 have now been expunged from the Burma Forest Act as it was 

 found that such estates were not required, the ordinary wants of 

 the people being supplied from the State reserves and the un- 

 reserved areas. 



The difficulty of giving a legal definition of " a forest " has 

 been overcome by demarcating certain areas and constituting 

 them forest estates; in which case, <of course, the areas become 

 subject to the law. In all other cases the word " forest " is 

 employed in its ordinary accepted sense. The above is a brief 

 summary of the main lines on which the various Indian Forest 

 Acts were framed. 



In that portion of the Empire the bulk of the land belongs by 

 conquest, escheat, and otherwise, to the British Government, so 

 that no difficulty has been experienced by the 'State in having 

 only limited areas from which to choose a sufficient quantity of 

 land for the purposes of creating forest estates of the required 

 extent. In our West African possessions, on the other hand, the 

 Crown owns, comparatively speaking, little laud and certainly 

 nothing like the quantity of wooded area that is necessary for 

 ensuring a continual supply of forest produce sufficient to meet 

 all probable demands in the future, to 'say nothing of the extent 

 of forests required for protective purposes in connection with 

 the preservation and improvement of climatic factors. In fact 

 the greater portion of the wooded areas belongs to native com- 

 munities and chiefs, and the problem thus arises as to the 'best 

 manner in which to ensure the conservancy of a sufficient extent 

 of forests on land the ownership of which does not rest with the 

 supreme Government. 



Provided this conservancy is absolutely ensured, in accordance 

 with the spirit of the protective legal measures laid down in the 

 Indian Forest Acts, the exact authority, manner, and agency by 

 which it is established and enforced is a matter of but little im- 

 portance and chiefly depends on administrative convenience. 



