io Forests and Trees 



large proportion of our buildings would disappear ; many 

 of those that did not would be shapeless masses of ruins ; 

 while those that still remained standing would lack all 

 inside furnishings. Not only would our dwellings and 

 places of business be either gone or made useless, but also 

 the furniture they contained. Much of our machinery 

 and most of our vehicles would be in the same condition. 

 All manufacture would be stopped for lack of buildings or 

 material; the railways would be shifting lines of steel, 

 and most of the cars but grinning skeletons. The picture 

 might be enlarged by the addition of endless details, which 

 would show all production and communication stopped, 

 and the race face to face with hardships that cannot be 

 imagined. In fact we should be threatened with death, 

 before arrangements could be made which would enable 

 us to live without wood. Even if such arrangements could 

 be made and man continued to exist, many of our accumu- 

 lated treasures of art and literature would have disappeared 

 with the books and paper made from pulpwood cut in our 

 northern forests. 



To some, this will appear a fanciful way of computing 

 value. Facts without figures do not appeal to everyone. 

 The following extract from the report of the Director of 

 Forestry for 1913 furnishes some convincing figures as to 

 the amount of timber ; the area referred to is in the vicinity 

 of Lesser Slave Lake . 



"The area examined was some 7330 square miles, and a 

 large proportion of this is rough, broken land at a con- 

 siderable elevation, forming the watershed between the 



