APPENDIX 327 



heavy, solid, and straight, and so excellent that it is used by 

 coach-builders as superior to Memel or the finest mahogany. I 

 have measured the butts of such trees in situ which girthed 20 

 feet. It is the age, method of growth, and proper position which How valuable 

 make the sound close-grained timber. In the Black Forest there timber can be 

 are some rocky hillsides specially planted with common fir, grown produced. 

 close together in a dense grove, very tall, and with no side 

 branches. These trees, from the rocky nature of the soil and the 

 northern aspect, have taken perhaps 150 years to grow a couple 

 of feet thick; but the grain is close and fine— like box-wood 

 almost — and the timber is worth nearly its weight in silver for 

 making sounding-boards for violins and pianos. 



The great industry of splitting spruce into thin sheets for 

 making band-boxes, which employs thousands of people in 

 Germany, is dependent entirely on the timber being suitably 

 grown, which is as easy as can be when you know how. 



It can be seen that forestry is not merely learning to handle 

 an axe and spade, or to plant trees by rule all alike. Amateur 

 planters of trees for ornament, and private owners of forests or 

 woods in England, where every man is free to do what he likes 

 with his own, can in the nature of things know or care very little 

 about the economical production of timber for the use of the 

 country in time to come. Growing wheat in a flower-pot in a green- 

 house is not the same thing as growing wheat for the market on the 



most approved agricultural principles. Yet this has been very like State forestry 



^^ ° . , . J J the proper 



the old-fashioned English system of timber-growmg recommended remedy. 



in Brown's book, and is not correct forestry. And it is certainly 



the function of the State to own and manage the forests of Great 



Britain, as done by every other Government in Europe. 



In travelling through Canada and the North-Western States, Destruction of 



° , r . t -c ^ forests on the 



where recently the country was one vast forest ot magniticent American Con- 

 trees, which had taken centuries to grow, one now sees nothing "nent. 

 but charred and blackened stumps; and the annual forest fires 

 destroy timber in a few days worth hundreds of millions, while 

 nothing is ever replanted. The very valuable so-called Spanish 

 mahogany, which used to be imported from the equatorial regions 

 of America, has almost ceased to exist, so much so that old 

 Chippendale furniture is considered, from the excellence of its 

 old dark timber, more solid and durable than modern-made 



