202 PrOCE:^DINGS O^ THE) 



prime, rather; and from this age up to 400 and 500 

 years is about the ages of trees that are usually con- 

 sumed in cooperage. You will readily see from this 

 that unless the present timber supply is very much 

 greater than most of us admit it to be, that the supply 

 in sight at the present time will be exhausted long 

 before any new supply could possibly come in. To 

 advocate trying to curtail the cutting, to my mind, 

 would be altogether futile, as there is hardly an acre of 

 virgin oak timber to be found in the county anywhere 

 to-day. True there are some considerable tracts which 

 are usually called virgin timber, but the fact of the 

 matter is that nearly every acre has been cut over to 

 some extent, and in some cases so long ago that the 

 signs of the original stumps have disappeared. 



"There is no doubt but what the cooperage manu- 

 facturers have been the worst timber butchers who 

 have ever visited the hardwood forests of any country. 

 In some places we find tracks of the destructive methods 

 that prevailed many years ago, of cutting only the 

 choicest trees to be found, and making them into very 

 large staves for export, using nothing but the very 

 choicest part of the tree, and only the choicest trees in 

 the forest at that time. This is still being carried on, 

 to some extent, and I have in hand a letter advising 

 me that the Louisiana Commission has ordered an 

 especially low rate on logs and heavy staves for export 

 (that is pipe and cask staves), overlooking the fact 

 that by so doing they are just contributing to the 

 denudition of the better parts of the forests, and 

 causing them to disappear much quicker than they 

 would otherwise, leaving a large portion, which the 

 average stave manufacturer of to-day would class as 

 first-class material, to decay in the woods. As to what 

 would be of benefit to the stave manufacturers: we 



