122 Proceedings of the 



in the work which has already been done by the Bureau 

 of Forestry, and in other practical features of its work 

 which have been hardly more than initiated. They 

 appreciate the bureau's investigation of the results of 

 grazing in forest reserves, the prevention and extin- 

 guishment of forest fires, etc. They are, and will be, 

 quickly responsive to any practical appeals along 

 forestry lines. They particularly appreciate practical 

 work, as that, for instance, shown by the bureau at the 

 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in determining the rel- 

 ative values and costs of different methods of the 

 preservation of timber and ties ; its exhaustive and 

 reliable tests of the strengths of various commercial 

 woods, and especially its eminently practical studies of 

 timber diseases, and the causes of and remedies for 

 blue stain, one of the most prolific sources of trouble to 

 lumbermen during the past thirty years. The bulletin 

 which has been issued upon this subject, entitled ''The 

 Blue Diseases of Western Yellow Pine," is therefore 

 of eminently practical interest; and, indeed, all the 

 bulletins of the Bureau of Forestry have reached a 

 higher level of practical usefulness than ever before in 

 its history. Full many a publication bearing the stamp 

 of the Government Printing Office is sent out to gush 

 unread and waste its wisdom on the musty air of attic 

 or cellar, but the additional imprint of the Bureau of 

 Forestry is a most infallible prophecy of a welcome 

 from an interested reader. 



Perhaps in this connection better than elsewhere can 

 be illustrated a phase of the change in attitude of lum- 

 bermen and those in allied trades toward forestry 

 methods. Twenty years, even a decade ago, lumber- 

 men had a nebulous idea of governmental forestry 

 work. Most of them regarded it with careless toler- 

 ance as the labor of irnpractical experimentalists. The 

 reverse was the condition at the recent world's fair. 



