NATIONAL COUNCIL OF HORTICULTURE 59 



people do not know what seeds are. Our forest seeds drop off the 

 trees, quantities of them that are practically unused except in Nature's 

 way. One man at a lumbermen's association recently in New England, 

 a man who had been a State Senator and a very prominent man in the 

 state, interrupted me when giving a talk before the association. I was 

 explaining what we were endeavoring to teach in the Agricultural 

 College, with which I was connected, and started out to say, that we 

 teach the young men to collect pine cones, extract and plant the seeds, 

 etc. "Now, hold on, right here," he said, "I have been a lumberman for 

 the last thirty-two years, and during that time I have picked up hun- 

 dreds of cones in my meanderings through the forest and I have yet to 

 find a pine seed, after breaking open cones upon cones ; how can you 

 explain that?" To his great astonishment, I explained that the seeds 

 dropped out before the cones fell off the trees and that the cones he 

 had picked up probably had lost their seed before they reached the 

 ground. 



Now, I have letters upon letters from these men and their friends 

 wanting to know where they can get seeds and seedlings and this year 

 we have been trying in Massachusetts to get boys and other people to 

 collect the tree seeds. Some of this work simply leads right along to 

 later results. 



The subject of forestry is so large and the opportunity so great 

 that we cannot begin to deal with its commercial aspect and do it 

 justice in this short talk. I have just returned from the Pacific Coast. 

 I have read a great deal of what the government is doing and I had. 

 a good opportunity to look into it, to see a number of the men that are 

 superintendents of reserves and talk with them and see how they are 

 systematizing and carrying out the work. Now, it is certainly encour- 

 aging to see what our government is doing there. I think, however, 

 we people in the East ought to awaken to an equal degree of interest 

 in our forestry interests in the East. The same is true with the eastern 

 lumbermen as in the West and in the Northwest. I visited some very 

 large mills in the State of Washington that were interesting. I was 

 told they were shipping into the States largely until of late; this year 

 they have not been dependent on the United States alone, as ships come 

 in and load up and their lumber goes to South America, Africa and 

 Australia. They do not depend upon our country, but on the markets 

 of the world; that shows that our export trade is increasing and that 

 our lumber tracts from many sections which we are expecting to look 

 to in the future are getting smaller. It is a world-wide problem, not 

 just a national one. 



Now, the next question is, What are we doing? We are endeavor- 

 ing to do a great deal. I think the time is ripe, people are ready to 

 act, but the main difficulty is to get at the central principle of how to 

 establish fundamentals and build up the idea of a definite forest. The 

 lumbering end of forestry, as the digging of potatoes, is after the crop 

 is planted. It seems to me that the point is to get these lands back 

 into forests. Let Nature seed them where she will, and let us assist her 

 artificially when it can be done in a practical manner. There is no 



